Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats

Ursula K. Le Guin died  in 2018, with many highly distinguished books under her belt, plus a few real clunkers. Now comes Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats, from the Library of America, a slim hardcover with poems, some prose, and a whole lot of cat doodles by Le Guin, plus a lot of white space. No editor is listed, but one hears someone else's voice in the essay "The Lives of Ursula's Cats."  Overall it seems either a harmless ditty, or crass commercialism. This is one of her clunkers. For ailurophiles only. 

Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

Powers is the third and final volume of the series "Annals of the Western Shore." It is a longer and more substantial book than the previous two, telling the story of Gavir, a Marshland boy taken as a slave when very young, on to his adulthood. While a slave, he is privileged to learn to read, and his special gifts include a remarkable ability to recall what he has read, and a power to dream of the future. He escapes from slavery after his sister is murdered, and wanders the country, first among various bands of men, and later among his own people, leading him towards his own destiny. A powerful capstone to Le Guin's series. (Reading Le Guin directly after reading Maggie Stiefvater only makes Le Guin's stature as a writer seem more towering.) 

Cheek by Jowl, by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a slim collection of eight talks and essays, as the cover notes, "on how & why fantasy matters."  But the book is dominated by the title essay, "Cheek by Jowl," which takes up almost half the volume and is a thoughtful and critical study of the roles of animals in children's literature. As with most of Le Guin's essays, there are many insightful and quotable observations. I'll cite just one here, "To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizable error."  The collection came out in 2009.

Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the second of three volumes of the "Annals of the Western Shore" series.  It begins several years after the end of Gifts, and starts with a new main character, Memer, a young nine-year old girl growing up in a town that was defeated by religious zealots some ten years earlier, now a place where books are banned and burned, and freedoms (especially for women) are unknown. After Memer turns seventeen, Orrec and his wife Gry (of Gifts) come to town to tell stories and perform. The town is rife for rebellion, and Memer helps to bring it about. Like Gifts, this volume is an extended meditation on power and responsibility.  Voices is a more substantial book than Gifts, and both are fine achievements even if they fall short of the majesty Le Guin created in her Earthsea volumes.

Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the first volume of a young adult trilogy that has the overall title "Annals of the Western Shore." It is a coming of age novel, about a young boy Orrec and his best friend Gry, a girl of the same age, who are both learning about their inherited "gifts"--certain magical powers that manifest along family lines. The book is also a meditation on power and its uses and abuses. It's a much softer work than Le Guin's deservedly acclaimed Wizard of Earthsea, but it's well-done and engaging. I look forward to the two remaining volumes.

Buffalo Gals, etc.

Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987) is a mixed collection of stories and poems by Ursula K. Le Guin, including reprints together with one new story ("Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight"). All concern some aspects, usually mythic, of animals  or other sentient presences, and their interaction with humanity.  In the new story, a young girl spends time with an older woman who is the trickster Coyote.  The best story in the book is science fiction, part of Le Guin's Hainish tales, "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow," from 1971.  Some stories read like writing-class exercises, like the extracts from the purported Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics, which includes a discussion of the poetry written by ants, and how to approach the sea-literature of the penguin. Another story, "May's Lion" tells the same story twice, from a realist perspective, and from a fabulist one. The volume as a whole is not Le Guin at her very best, but even middle-of-the-road Le Guin is rewarding and well worth reading.

Le Guin's Last Words

Ursula K. Le Guin corrected the proofs of this small book just one week before her death in January 2018 at the age of 88.  It is called Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing.  It began as conversations with David Naimon at a small community radio station in Portland, Oregon, where Le Guin lived.  The book version of these conversations is divided into three main sections:  "On Fiction," "On Poetry," and "On Nonfiction."

All three parts are interesting, though the one on poetry is on a foreign ground for me.  Nothing seems out of place if you have read Le Guin's nonfiction, particularly her recent collection Words Are My Matter (2016), which is referenced often in section three. 

All in all this is a pleasant coda to a long and distinguished career. 

Wisdom for All Ages

Ursula K. Le Guin turned 88 a few weeks before her latest book was published. Her new book is No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters.  It is basically a collection of some of her blog posts since she started blogging in 2010. That makes the book sound less interesting than it actually is. Le Guin has accumulated much wisdom in her nearly nine decades on the planet.  And her viewpoint is always worth reading and reflecting upon. (Well, almost.  When authors write about their own pets the result is often dire.  With Le Guin, it's cats. And there are seven entries on her cat. I'm sure some people will find them charming.  I didn't.) 

Much of Le Guin's thoughts on fantasy, escapism, imagination, fundamentalism should be read by everyone (especially those people who don't sympathize with these subjects).  Her views on Darwin and belief are quite clearly thought out and reasonable. She writes: "I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.  I accept it.  It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence. The whole undertaking of science us to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis,  to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief."  Amen to that.

Le Guin is a national treasure.  May she ruminate and continue to write for years to come.  (But hold back on too many cat posts.) 

More catching up . . .

Annihilation (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer is the first of three short novels called the Southern Reach Trilogy. It tells the history of the 12th expedition into the mysterious Area X.  This expedition consists of four women, referred to by their positions—the biologist, the anthropologist, the surveyor, and the psychologist. Previous expeditions into Area X all ended in various types of disasters.  Annihilation is basically the journal of the biologist. VanderMeer uses this format to play a game with readers—none of the characters are given names, the context of the story as provided by the biologist is only selectively revealed, and the narrator is unreliable. The book is well written, but it is a really a chump’s game. There is no readerly interest in the characters, and only a small curiosity about the setting and plot. VanderMeer withholds too much from the reader, while teasing them along. It is no surprise that nothing is explained at the end, and I’m certain that nothing will be revealed in the two subsequent books. And I have no interest in reading them. 

The New Atlantis (1989) by Ursula K. Le Guin.  This novelette was originally published in 1975, and in 1989 it was issued as a mass market Tor Double (with Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer as the main other story).  It was pure coincidence that I read this immediately after VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and found that it almost seems to take place in the future of our world that leads to the future in VanderMeer’s novel. Yet Le Guin is a much greater artist, and she evokes more humanity in this slim story than VanderMeer can muster in an entire novel. 

Song of Kali (1985) by Dan Simmons is an odd book. Set in 1977, it concerns an American magazine writer sent to Calcutta to locate some recent poetry supposedly written by a dead Indian poet. Robert Luzcak travels with his Indian wife and their young daughter. Mystery and intrigue follows. Luzcak is not always sympathetic character (his attitudes towards the Indian natives are rude), and his daughter seems only to be a plot-device to be kidnapped. The tenor of the book changes towards the end, and Simmons broaches some philosophical ideas as suggested by the title (the song of Kali referring to human hatred and violence), but these are not expanded upon, and the novel remains merely an engaging thriller. 

Bimbos of the Death Sun (1988) by Sharyn McCrumb takes place at a small regional science fiction convention. One of the two author guests is the famous, temperamental and arrogant writer of the Tratyn Runewind books, Appin Dungannon. The other guest is a local engineering professor, James Owen Mega, who wrote a hard science fiction novel that a cheap paperback firm published with a cheezy cover and retitled (to the author’s disgust) Bimbos of the Death Sun. As a mystery novel, this is an oddity. Appin Dungannon doesn’t even get murdered until the second half of the book, and the murder is solved in the last two chapters by acting out a D&D game. But what makes it interesting and readable is the spot-on depiction of the science fiction fans at the convention—critical but also compassionate.  Anyone who has attended a science fiction convention will have encountered many people similar to the characters found in this amusing novel. 

 

Friends of the Dead (2015) by James Doig.  This limited edition (only 200 copies) collects ten short stories, most of which are in the medievalist antiquarian mode, and thus in the tradition of M.R. James. The medieval historical aspects are particularly well-done here—an area often given short shrift by modern Jamesian writers who lack the expertise in the medieval (Doig mentions in his short introduction of having studied for a PhD. in medieval history).  One story (“Malware,” which opens the book), however, is completely modern: a tale of computer systems and hackers.  It is as well-done as the rest of the tales in this handsome volume.