Earthsea

[altariel]

I went hunting for Earthsea fanfiction at the start of the year, after I reread the series (before reading the new ones). Found some today by daegaer here.



It's interesting that Tehanu is often seen as an attempt to re-engineer the earlier books, but I have a sneaking admiration for Le Guin in having the courage to revisit a set of books that made her name - and say where she got it wrong.

I also love the beauty that she finds in very small, intimate moments. There's a sentence in Tehanu that I just adore: "They made and ate their supper and cleared it away."

Comments

[ithilwen.livejournal.com]

The problem I had with Tehanu is that it's Ged (and to a lesser extent, Tenar) I'm interested in - not Therru. And so I found myself resenting it every time Therru made an appearance on the page; I wanted to shove her out of the way so we could get back to the important story, of Ged's adaptation to a 'lesser' (i.e. normal) life.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

I actually quite like Tehanu. I'd loved the Earthsea books for so long that I drove myself into a frenzy waiting for it, and was lucky enough to have someone going over to the USA just after it was published. I think it is an attempt to backwards engineer the series, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Much of the criticism I saw at the time on Usenet seemed to be based in anti-feminism. Le Guin has done this before - she has revisited her essay on gender and The Left Hand of Darkness to describe what kind of book she would have written if she'd been paying attention. However, I'm not convinced that Tehanu works as a piece of backwards-engineering. The bad men are quite simply too bad - I think it would have worked better if they had been more clearly "normal" men who acted as they did because they were the product of an intensely patriarchal and androcentric society, rather than being Bad Guys. This is more of less the same problem I have with her short story set in a kemmer-house on Gethen. She tries too hard, and the effort becoems so visible that it overwhelms the story (her short story about the Gethenien king who abdicates I found much more narratively attractive, and makes most of the same points in a far more subtle manner).

small moments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

>>I also love the beauty that she finds in very small, intimate moments. There's a sentence in Tehanu that I just adore: "They made and ate their supper and cleared it away"<<

This is what I like most about Tehanu, and about Le Guin's later work in general. I don't have a copy with me, but the way of treating daily activity (such as housework) as a transcendent praxis. I have Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching, and read it quite a lot. The TTC has a lot about humble participation in the stuff of consciousness. 'Mingle yourself with the dust of the world' - almost a description of housework, at least the way I do it.

I do believe it is real as well: the spritual validity of simply passing through the world, instead of straining after transcendence.