The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
I thought that she couldn't blow me more away than in The Telling and Left Hand of Darkness, I was wrong.
The Dispossessed?
Awesome, just awesome.
Here's the beginning:
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
(…)
It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
She uses the symbolism of the wall throughout the book and it's just glorious.
Subtitled as An Ambiguous Utopia, the novel starts off with a physicist leaving his anarchist society. He travels to another world, a completely different social structure, on a self-imposed exile in the belief that his society had become too sterilized due to its isolation and with the desire for communication and change.
Le Guin illustrates social constructs created by language by opposing the anarchist society, Anarres, and its constructed language with its neighboring planet, Urras, a patriarchal and authoritarian society with a natural language.
Not only do I get to indulge in the exploration of how the way we talk influences the way we perceive the world, but the book is rich in themes such as feminism, child rearing, traditional nuclear family, ecology, waste, and powerplay.
*is all happy*
*is greedy and wants more*
I LOVE MY BOOKS.
The Dispossessed?
Awesome, just awesome.
Here's the beginning:
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
(…)
It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
She uses the symbolism of the wall throughout the book and it's just glorious.
Subtitled as An Ambiguous Utopia, the novel starts off with a physicist leaving his anarchist society. He travels to another world, a completely different social structure, on a self-imposed exile in the belief that his society had become too sterilized due to its isolation and with the desire for communication and change.
Le Guin illustrates social constructs created by language by opposing the anarchist society, Anarres, and its constructed language with its neighboring planet, Urras, a patriarchal and authoritarian society with a natural language.
Not only do I get to indulge in the exploration of how the way we talk influences the way we perceive the world, but the book is rich in themes such as feminism, child rearing, traditional nuclear family, ecology, waste, and powerplay.
*is all happy*
*is greedy and wants more*
I LOVE MY BOOKS.