bhrgunatha kleinbl00 Dala zebra2 ilex kingmudsy
Just finished the book! Sorry ilex, but I didn't really like it much. What I perhaps liked most about the book, I think, is her prose - she has a poet's way of describing certain feelings. There were more than a few passages I found quotable. I wouldn't call it consistent though; sometimes she seems to hit the mark perfectly, sometimes she decides to ramble on for half a page for no good reason than poor editing, probably. She has an intimate and great scene between Shevek and his wife, but also has a scene with him getting drunk, ejaculating on a woman's dress and puking himself. (She is also very fond of the word 'decad'.) It annoyed me that Shevek was often painted as stupidly ignorant just so Le Guin could expand on more of her world, but that can be forgiven. The Sci-Fi-Science(TM) she has Shevek babble read like someone mocking physics instead of adoring it in all its complexity.
Other than Shevek, her characters are believable, although they do not do much beyond fit a stereotype and deliver some neat lines of prose. Something else that can be forgiven is her social/moral/political commentary. Viewed from 2019 I'd say they are well-trodden at best and annoying at worst. Backintheday it was probably much more groundbreaking and it probably resonated with the counterculture, so it's hard to judge her for that. But since 80% of the book is exposition on these two opposing worlds of social anarchy and capitalism, it really stifled my enjoyment of the book.
My biggest beef, though, is her devotion to exposition by telling, not showing, combined with the lack of a good plot. There is a truckload of exposition that isn't woven into the story beyond her characters uttering or thinking about the exposition. Usually, there's more than enough opportunity to weave that into the plot, but since her plot is also utterly thin, there's not much to play with. Guy goes to planet, bumps into another culture for, has a revelation or two and comes back. Instead of putting in the effort to actually have tension within those steps, she prefers to pingpong the reader from consequence-free situation to consequence-free situation. Instead of making the geopolitical pressure a central part of the book, she has a meeting in one of the last chapters that resolves with a disappointing fizzle.
I feel like this could have been a short story a fifth its length and that would've been much better.
Finished it within two weeks and have mostly forgotten the plot, so we'll go with an eh. I will agree with veen that it could have been improved by being a shorter story. What stuck out for me is that it is hailed as being feminist (LeGuin might not consider it as such) but where men and women are supposed to be equal in Annaresti society there are a few points where they are shown not to be in the story. (Please don't ask for specifics, they have fled my brain, and I borrowed the book in digital format.)
I didn't finish it. I might have finished it if I hadn't had a really shitty summer where reading books that didn't suck was absolutely vital. I might also have finished it if I hadn't read Days of Rage within six months of trying to read The Dispossessed. As it is, Dispossessed came out the same year as Prairie Fire and two years before Underground: Which makes The Dispossessed of a piece with the prevailing milieu of spoiled, entitled white brats blowing shit up and quoting Abbie Hoffman while black and Puerto Rican activists were slaughtered wholesale. I don't have a lot of patience with anarchists. They're either hoodlums who parrot an ideology convenient to their hijinks or academics triangulating around an ideology that invalidates everyone's leadership but their own. The Dispossessed was very much the latter for me, whereby a whole bunch of smart people have a much better idea about how the world should run than those lousy proletariat sonofabitches ever will. I think I have a nostalgic view of the capitalism she was protesting, too - anti-trust was a thing back then and shareholder value had yet to be invented. It's like Le Guin wrote a manifesto about the horrors of capitalism on the hope that some neo-anarchist utopia would spring out of her protests when in fact we were left with shittier capitalism and shittier socialism. So really, I guess I view the whole thing as an indulgent overextension of Baader-Meinhoff bullshit exactly when everyone should have been consolidating their gains. 'cuz we got Reagan, we got Thatcher and we got Deng Xiaoping as a direct response to the ideas in it.
I knew you didn't mean Amway but it took some searching to know what you did mean. I know they weren't anarchists - I don't know of any active anarchist groups. By Baader-Meinhoff bullshit I mean the self-indulgent idea that the world would work perfectly if only everyone did literally everything different which means literally everything is wrong.
I haven't really finished it yet, but I guess I'm more pleased with it than most people here. I thought it posed a decent thought experiment about a truly anarchist society. That, for me, was enough to distance it from being too much of a parallel to existing political movements and structures. Yes, the Cold War powers are there, but they're on Urras. The Dispossessed takes the political movements a lot farther than you could get from any real anarchist movement on earth; Shevek came from an anarchist society of the type that could only really exist if you build a whole new society on an isolated planet from the ground up. At points, it gets to be an interesting exploration of what kind of person that society makes. Le Guin is thoughtful enough with the exploration that it doesn't really come across as an endorsement. You see the questionable undersides of Anarres, the points where Odonism seems to clash with human nature, it's shortcomings compared to Urras... I can see what Dala is talking about (though I don't recall encountering the feminist issue specifically, but Le Guin doesn't come across as committed to a flawlessly flattering portrait of Anarres). Of course, it could be that the book goes suddenly Ayn Rand in the last few chapters to become a wholly unbiased polemic piece that was only pretending to be socially thoughtful (I've read books like that before).