Always Coming Home (California Fiction) [Paperback]

Ursula K. Le Guin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2001 | Series: California Fiction

Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home is a major work of the imagination from one of America's most respected writers of science fiction. More than five years in the making, it is a novel unlike any other. A rich and complex interweaving of story and fable, poem, artwork, and music, it totally immerses the reader in the culture of the Kesh, a peaceful people of the far future who inhabit a place called the Valley on the Northern Pacific Coast.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Envisioning a possible future (and attacking present folly), Le Guin reinvents a ``primitive'' past. The autobiography of a woman of the Kesh, living in the Napa Valley in a distant post-Industrial age, occupies 100 pages. The rest of the book (and a cassette) provide documentation of Kesh spiritual and material culture, from kinship and language to arts and philosophy. Dancing their oneness with nature, valuing cooperation over competition, the Kesh survive contact with the hieratic, war-making, death-dealing Condors, who are a lot like us. If it's hard to believe in a people who use computers and electricity but plow with oxen and see wealth as giving, that's part of the point. The narrative is interrupted by poems, tales, and ``data,'' which demand patient pondering--something Le Guin's many admirers are certain to provide. However, the considerable pleasures of this book are not the pleasures of the novel. Patrica Dooley, formerly with English Dept., Drexel Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Adds up to a gorgeously complex portrayal of a yet-to-exist society." -- Globe and Mail

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Product Details

• Paperback: 525 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (February 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520227352
• ISBN-13: 978-0520227354
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #538,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars So pleased it's back in print! April 7, 2001

By dampscribbler VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is a marvelous collection of "an anthropology of the future." LeGuin excavates stories, songs, beliefs, myths, traditions, and more of the people who "will be might have been" someday living in what is now Northern California. At once Utopian and Dystopian, the culture that LeGuin shares with us is beautiful and complex.

I read this book when it was first published in paperback in the mid-80's. It planted and nurtured in me a seed of hope that humans are capable of someday living in community in different ways than we do now. It opened in my imagination doors that I had never before noticed. Here is an example of a new narrative structure, or anti-structure. Here, too, is an example of a new-old social structure, a post-modern tribalism that has returned to "traditional" values such as living in harmony with oneself and one's environment, and recognizing the strength and beauty in ritual and tradition.

Though others (including she) may disagree, I personally have always considered this work Mrs. LeGuin's crowning achievement. As Tolkien did in his Middle Earth stories, LeGuin in "Always Coming Home" creates a new-old world that is unfamiliar yet recognizable, someplace we want to go back to again and again. We are lucky indeed that this book is now back in print!

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Predicting, or observing? January 24, 2005

By Catherine Carter

Format:Paperback

Ursula Le Guin is my favorite living author, and this is my favorite of her novels. If you don't want a review that comes from that position, which has developed over thirty years and uncountable books and is not (quite) as facile as it sounds, stop now.

This book, though, received a lot of criticism, some of it, perhaps, just. It was criticized for appropriating Native American culture, and although Le Guin is explicit in denying that as her intent, it's an issue worth discussing. Because Le Guin is the daughter of anthropologists specializing in deep study of native cultures, it might be truer to say that those visions of the world have appropriated and influenced her. Nonetheless, this is something to discuss if you teach the book, or recommend it to a friend.

Le Guin's also been variously accused of predicting the future with that least forgivable sin, earnestness, and of creating a prescriptive utopia in which no reasonable reader can believe. These charges, though, I find less worthy of discussion. Those who say it's unbelievable cite

a) the Kesh's success in dealing with the military-industrial Condor through nonviolent resistance (nonviolent resistance actually work? Ridiculous! Oh, wait a minute...),

b) the improbability of the Condor getting so caught up in their exploding toys that they don't make good use of them (also ridiculous! no one would build more and more bombers while failing to provide body armor for their troops, and the Afghanis never drove out the techno-heavy USSR with flintlock rifles), and

c) the belief that the culture of the Kesh "really" wouldn't be anything like this.

If we're talking of earnestness and prescriptive prediction, though, I think such critics undermine their own position. It doesn't get much more earnest, or much more prescriptive, than saying that someone else's imaginary culture "would" "really" have done thus-and-such. One of Le Guin's points is that the world doesn't *have* to go the way that some military-industrial-consumer Americans are prone to believe it must; there are other choices, though perhaps only after some very regrettable ecological catastrophes. She's also mildly famous for pointing out that SF authors don't predict the future; they observe the present. By that standard, ACH doesn't say that people will live in Kesh-like valleys, or that they should live in Kesh-like valleys, but that some people, right now, do in some sort live this way. And that, in my experience, is the literal truth. Those people are silenced and ignored and sneered at and mocked, but they exist, and not just in straw-bale solar houses.

In terms of Utopia, Le Guin explicitly rejects it(in the passage "Pandora Converses with the Archivist.") Now maybe she needs more than a single rejection to prove that this doesn't function as an improbable utopia; but it doesn't hurt to actually read the thing before dismissing it, and see what she does say.

I tend to think that it avoids utopianism by what IS included: for instance, people in the Valley routinely and slowly die of mercury poisoning (or something very like it, "sevai".) Not so Utopian, really. Again, rather than having machines which make all manual labor obsolete, we see two women digging a garden in soil that's "like wet concrete when it's wet, and like dry concrete when it's dry." They do this by digging a shovelful and then handing it to the other woman to clean off the concrete-like mud while digging a second shovelful with a second spade, and so on. If that's your idea of utopia, I can only say it's not mine: people suffer, people die, people work, sometimes, very hard. The fact that they aren't doing it in Wal-Mart, or in a cubicle, doesn't mean that hard work isn't, well, hard work. Thirdly, living "in harmony" in this valley (or anywhere else) isn't just a matter of the warm fuzzies: it requires some knowledge of ecology, and some brutal adjustments to it. These people can have two children per person, no exceptions. If you marry someone who's got two, you won't have any children of your body. If you want six, you're out of luck, that's all, and it's not such an easy proposition. "Living in balance" is a term easy to scoff at; but balance, as those know who've tried it, requires work and thought, both routinely thought to be unnecessary in a well-maintained utopia. And, finally, this "utopia" spans one valley in one mountain range: the Kesh's "goodness" hasn't convinced the rest of the world to change its ways, not even the Pig People next door. If picturing a world in which one insular society is allowed to live sustainably and peacefully is Utopian, then, yes, it's Utopian; but viewing this as so improbable as to be not worth contemplating says more about the reader than about the author.

Still with me? needless to say, I recommend it very highly indeed. Maybe it's not fair in its use of indigenous elements; I don't feel qualified to say. Maybe it is a Utopia, if people can die and suffer and sweat and fart in Utopia. But whether or no, it's a beautiful and entertaining and thought-provoking book.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Slow, Quiet, Rich Read May 8, 2002

By Ian Elliott

Format:Paperback

"Always Coming Home" is a unique book by a unique author. It is a slow, quiet, rich read. Those (including the author of the 'With Apologies to Ursula LeGuin' review) who read passively and, consequently, cannot hold onto a book that does not compel their attention will be disappointed. To them I would like to reveal the astonishing information that sometimes the best books require more than one attempt. I first essayed this highly-detailed and multi-faceted creation of a future culture embodying native American values in 1998. I found it both fascinating and slow-going, and the library copy was due before I'd covered half the text. Wishing to own the full edition (which comes with a supplementary audiocassette, "Poetry and Music of the Kesh"), I scouted around but, being ignorant of amazon.com at the time, could not find the full 'set' of book + cassette. Then for some reason it slipped my mind. I ran across a used copy the other Sunday in a magnificent bookstore in Stanton, California, and it was like catching sight of an old love again. Now I would like to sing her praises to you.

Very few books involve the reader as deeply in the sensibility of a different culture as this one. The descriptions of villages and nature are shot through with the symbolism of a deeply religious way of experiencing the world, a way which is at the same time simple and natural. The central symbol of the gyre or double spiral manifests in the town-planning, artifacts, dancing and education of the Kesh, as well as providing a template for understanding one's passage through life. The complex family and social organization is presented both in schematic form and in the narration of day-to-day customs and interactions. The reading of omens emerging at the heart of the plainest everyday events lends dramatic richness to the course of the narrative portions of the book.

However, this is no static account of an insulated society; the Kesh are still in history, and must contend with outside forces that threaten to undermine their peaceful existence, a contention manifested in the intimate relations between Willow, the main narrator's mother, and her husband from outside, the Condor captain of 300 warriors.

Nor is this future period presented in isolation from our own present. Here and there the reader is given tantalizing hints of the very different culture of the remote past that built the Straight Road, hints that accelerate and culminate in the haunting section "Of Time and the City," where the Kesh come into contact with the accursed descendants of our own more imbalanced civilization.

And here I will stop. The attempt to present a finished presentation of a multi-faceted work comprising narrative, poetry, music, language, and anthropological analysis within 1,000 words must founder. The wonder is that Ms. Le Guin was able to accomplish all of this in less than 600 pages. The only parallel achievement that comes to mind is JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," and while he achieved more scope in thrice the number of pages, in her invented culture of the Kesh she has achieved considerably more depth. The book entices the reader to immerse him or herself in its depth again and again, ever returning to the surface of this world with fresh vision.