Ursula K. LeGuin: Orsinian Tales

 "Mr. Eray, let me speak to you."

"What about?"

"About anything," . . . (The Road East)

It is hard to say what this collection of stories is about.  It is good, fun, and I remember having difficulty putting it down as I read it.  But what was the author trying to accomplish with it?  Sometimes books are just entertainment, of course, but the works of LeGuin are not usually considered such.  Famously activist and political, she isn't what one would call a fluffy writer.  So where is all of that in this book?  

The world is, of course, a dark mirror of our own, and with that comes certain tacit criticisms.  The dark, lonely grind of existing in such a world is all too relatable, and even prescient.  Left at that level, however, the implication is that there is nothing for one to do but despair of existence, to muddle through in a broken, cruel system, and then die alone.  It is the very dread of this that seems to drive modern discourse, both at the literary and the personal level.

But there is a joy to be had here.  The characters find it, not in overthrowing or resisting a corrupt and heartless system.  Such a thought doesn't even seem to cross their minds.  Maler's response to the suggestion above is understandable in such a world: "What does it matter if any of us talks or doesn't talk  What is there to say?"

Equally revealing is Provin's answer: "It does matter.  there''s nothing left to us, now, but one another."  Even beneath the millstone of existence, the one true joy that is possible in life remains unscathed.  Simply speaking to each other is not sufficient to remove that kernel of joy from its husk, though.  The act of discourse, and of writing these stories, is merely a means to the end mentioned over and over again in them.  "She looked at him, seeing him again, and the future be damned, since all possible futures ever envisaged are . . . endlessly sordidly dreary . . ." (A Week in the Country).  The stories we write, and the conversations we have, are all in service of the goal of seeing and being seen.  The one joy left to us, and honestly the only one that ever existed in the first place, is to be able to say, as Isabella does, "She simply saw him.  She saw him clearly.  It was exhilirating" (The Lady of Moge).