The Left Hand of Darkness
I have, of course, heard about this book by Ursula Le Guin – it’s up there as a seminal work, really, of early scifi especially. I think it counts as spec fic more than scifi per se, but that’s a bit beside the point. I bought it last weekend and read it over the week.
I have a friend who is a big scifi fan who read the Wizard of Earthsea series and was incredibly disappointed – actually, I think he only read the first one and didn’t bother with the others. I may have mentioned this before; to me, Le Guin and some of those other early writers are doing line sketches, whereas a lot of the stuff coming out these days is oil colours – whether they’re consciously thinking about it or not, I think they’re heavily movie-influenced, and writing for a grander and more detailed vision than the earlier writers. Now, I’m perfectly ready to be wrong about that, but it sounds good.
The Left Hand of Darkness is named for a poem of the planet Gethen, where it’s set – light is the left hand of darkness, darkness the right hand of light. Very yin and yang, which is what the whole thing is about, really: the natives of Gethen are ambisexual, that is they are neither man nor woman, or perhaps both, for most of the month, and then come into ‘kemmer’ for a few days – their sex is then decided by the others around them who are also coming into kemmer.
This way of looking at gender was really interesting, but I’ve got to say I wasn’t entirely sure what Le Guin was aiming to do. Her narrator for most of the book was male (from off-world), and he referred to all of the Gethenians as ‘he’. The only times they were described as female were almost derogatory or insulting, which I was really surprised and disappointed by. Now, maybe this is because they were a fairly non-aggressive race, so this was a male reaction to pacificism, but still, it was a bit uncomfortable to read.
Nonetheless, I actually did like the story. It was a poignant story, and she certainly doesn’t spare her characters. It hints at a much grander story – of the Ekumen, the not-governing body bringing 83 worlds together… the Hain, who seeded all of those world with humans… but the story itself, on Gethen, is also very personal and immediate. I think I liked it.
Fly by Night
I finally finished this today – it’s one of the books VATE sent me to review. It’s by Frances Hardinge; I think it may be a debut. It was brilliant! Highly original and interesting. The writing was very entertaining – the descriptions were original and evocative; the characters were fascinating and believable; and the world as a whole is one I would love to read more about. I’m really looking forward to writing the review, and I think I will probably donate the book to school – I can’t in good conscience have it sitting on my bookcase and not being read by other people who might enjoy it.
Faking Literature
It’s been ages since I wrote about any of the books I’ve read, so I’m going back just a little way in time to comment on some of them.
This book, Faking Literature, I picked up at Readings from the cheapo academic table, partly because hoaxes/fakes fascinate me, but also because the author, Ken Ruthven, was the lecturer of a couple of subjects I did at uni. He was pretty hard to handle in first year – I really didn’t get it – but in second year I thought he was fantastic. I guess I’d grown up enough to understand him and his humour, not to mention lit crit.
This book is, of course, all about fakes and hoaxes in the literary world, and I learnt an awful lot about Great Scams in Literature. It was good to see that he included those few great Aussie ones, too – Helen “Demidenko” and Ern Malley; as well as Milli Vanilli, which was pretty funny. But given that he included that last, I was a bit surprised that he did not include Elizabeth Durack, a white female artist, and her great scam posing as Eddie Burrup, an Aboriginal male artist. The only reason I know about it, of course, is that it’s one of the family’s great stories. Anyway.
Aside from the historical pointof view, the book is also about the reactions of the ‘legit’ literary community to the deception – particularly when they have at first embraced the hoax/fake as itself being legit. His contention, I think, is that the legit vilifies the so-called illegit to stop people from questioning the legitimacy of the legit itself, and also becuase it is only legit by defining itself against the illegit. I love it… dichotomies only exist by defining what each side isn’t, which can only be done with reference to their opposite.
It was a great book. Quite easy to read, which was refreshing, and with some quite witty parts as well. And I’m sure Ken would be gratified to hear that I think so.
