Customer Reviews

The Dispossessed: A Novel (Perennial Classics)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Whether or not THE DISPOSSESED passes as good sci-fi, I know not. I am not very knowledgeable of what SF fans look for in a book. As a novel, and as a philosophical exploration of authoritarianism, anarchism, capitalism, communism, revolution and utopianism -- this book is first-rate. The questions Le Guin grapples with here are by no means simple. Even great philosophers, like Marx and Bakunin, had difficultly imagining what an ACTUAL society would look like without bosses and owners. But through the gripping tale of an anarchist caught between two fundamentally different worlds, Le Guin seeks answers to many of the questions these philosophers left untouched. How would an anarchist society function? What would it take as its fundamental principles? What problems would that society have? What would a "propertarian" capitalist society appear from the perspective of an anarchist? Without offering any quick or final answers, Le Guin sheds light on these issues and beckons the reader to imagine the possibility of another world. After all, the evolution of culture here on planet earth was why Le Guin wrote this book in the first place. Inspiring, moving and transformative, this book was a pleasure. Thank you, Ursula. You have successfully removed another brick from the wall.

Ursula LeGuin is one of my favorite writers and I just re-read this novel (in my early 40s, around the age of Shevek, the protagonist) after having read it the first time about 20 years before. The Dispossessed is a startlingly ambitious and perfect novel. On its face, the novel is about a physicist from a world of self-exiled anarchists (Anarres) who decides to travel to the "propertarian" (capitalistic) mother planet (Urras), both to complete his life's work of reconciling two contradictory theories of physics (Sequency and Simultaneity) and to tear down the walls between his society and the Urrasti world left behind.

One of LeGuin's remarkable achievements is her conception of an anarchistic society, something that has never existed in history. LeGuin fleshes out a world of 20 million anarchists, explaining how the people of such a society might live and love, how such a large community could function without a government. But this novel is so much more than a writer's imagining of functional anarchism. This novel is not really about politics, it is about love and the nature of human interaction.

The life work of the protagonist is to reconcile Sequency -- time as linear, history as progress -- with Simultaneity -- time as instaneous, history as cyclical. Similarly, Shevek tries to reconcile his society of Anarres, where there is no government oppression or inequality but also where individuality is stifled and creativity devalued, with Urras, where there is unjust distribution of power and wealth but also great beauty and achievement. LeGuin tells Shevek's tale in two different time arcs, a linear progression through Shevek's journey to Urras and the events there, and a looping back through Shevek's life from infancy to reach the beginning of Shevek's journey at the end of the novel. LeGuin writes the novel in two chronologies as if to highlight Shevek's struggle with reconciling the two theories of Time. This literary device works brilliantly, as the reader rushes through the novel not only to find out what happens to Shevek while in Urras but also to find out why Shevek chose to leave Anarres for the journey.

Underneath it all, LeGuin is not just trying to reconcile competing conceptualizations of time, or to decide what is the best way for people to govern themselves, but rather to harmonize the contradictions that exist within human nature. We are all "propertarians," as LeGuin demonstrates simply and beautifully early in the novel with a heartbreaking passage in which Shevek as a toddler is enjoying warmth and sunlight flowing through an open window, trying to "possess" the sunlight, only to have a larger boy shove him aside. We are all anarchists as well, disregarding government mandates for the sake of personal choices. Humans are both greedy and altruistic, inclined both to take and to help, to hate and to love. LeGuin settles on love as the human constant, the key variable in the equation of human interaction, but does not presume to define love, only describe aspects of it. LeGuin shows us that trying to understand human nature, and reconcile its contradictions, is easily as difficult as trying to construct fundamental principles of the physical Universe and reconciling the conflicts in our perceptions of reality. Following Shevek as he finds his own answers to both is a rewarding journey. This is a great novel.

The Dispossessed is one of my favourite books - one that almost always gets re-read when I pick it up just by accident. Ursula K. Leguin does construct a world for utopians; but this world is not really a conventional utopia. Our united suffering is one of the key themes, and while the book is often explaned in terms of its idealology, it shines in its personal relationships. I love Shevek, I love Shevek and Takver together, I love Dap with Shevek's younger daughter. Ursula K. Leguin can explore difficult ideas with a flowing style that never makes you think you are being preached or pandered to.

There is no better work of fiction that describes what a society based on true anarchy might be like. You soon see that it certainly would not be chaos. That is because a society without leaders and laws is not a society without order- it is just that the order comes from within. That is true order. People work and sacrifice because they recognize that it is in everybody's best interest. Society should be brotherhood of equals, a big family. In a sense, the world of Anarres reminded me of one great farm where family members realize from an early age that they are needed for work that must be done. Either that, or I would describe it as an old-style kibbutz on a planetary scale. It isn't a perfect system. Vigilance is needed to make sure that unofficial tyranny from peer pressure and individual corruption do not set in, but it comes across as workable and believable.

As for her sister world, Urras, it is a place of both the plutocratic-oligarchic state, as well as, the centralized communist dictatorship, locked in perpetual struggle. It is a world where men are forced and coerced to obey their leaders. It is our world. Urras is archism, Anarres is anarchism. You are forced to examine first hand the fundamental differences. It is the difference between a society of true individuals and a society of slaves.

The hero, Shevek, is both a physicist and a philosopher. His was a mind capable of reconciling not only the seeming incompatibility of the simultaneous and sequential nature of time, but also of the conflicting drives of human nature. Both required the freedom of mind of a true revolutionary.

I first read this novel over 25 years ago. It came as a shock to me to realize how much I must have internalized the character of Shevek.

My review seeks to add nothing to the positive evaluations that other readers have already offered. This story is simply excellent. I only want to point out for anyone thinking of buying the Harper Perennial Classics edition that the text is riddled with very annoying typos. For example, I was seriously confused when I read a scene about the protagonist, Shevek, when he was a child, and the text said he was EIGHTY-years-old. Since I was unfamiliar with the story, and since just about anything goes in science fiction, I thought that Le Guin had created a society in which eighty-year-old people were still somehow childlike. It took me a few minutes to figure out that this was not a part of the plot, but one of many simple typos (Shevek was eight, not eighty). Perhaps these typos are in all editions, but it's something to consider.

Like her Left Hand Of Darkness, Le Guin's Dispossessed is a sharp commentary on the insanities of human society. Yet what has stayed with me over the years since I first met Shevek is the integrity of this truly good man who stands firm in what he believes. While Le Guin pulls no punches when it comes to deprivation and human pain, I finished the book with a sense of hope for a hopeless world.

"The Dispossessed" was not an "easy" read, as I personally find much SF to be. And it is not quite typical for all SF (less about the technology and more about the politics.) The writing is extremely detailed and, frankly, a bit dry. In some ways for much of the book, it seemed like very little was happening and I didn't quite enjoy it. But then once I'd put it down for the night, I'd think about the characters and the plot and ideas and liked them...And I *really* enjoyed the story once I was done reading it, and have found that it has helped inform my thinking about other texts and subjects. In short - worth the read if you're into politics, relationships, life, questioning, etc.

It's long been known that since the advent of science fiction, man kind's greatest inventions were foretold in books and stories. In recent decades the focus of this genre has shifted from technology to sociology and psychology. This book, though published more than 30 years ago, is a prime example of how relevant this kind of writing is to our lives today. Even more importantly, with corporation-led globalization, and the protest and antagonism that it breeds, the lessons of this book are becoming more important by the day. The boundary between Utopia and Distopia is never clear (especially in LeGuin's writings), and this story serves to emphasize the differences between a couple of tracks we as a race may choose to follow. Never unbiased, LeGuin takes a strong moral stand, and brings some convincing arguments toward her case. Still, this is a very enjoyable read, but take care- it will make you think more than you might want to.

One man's initiative combined with his abstract intellectual brilliance disturbs the political stasis in two planets and may be a seed of change even beyond. The book sensitively explores the social organisation and personal experience of the anarcho-communist world in which Shevek lives. He gradually realises that the price of freedom is eternal "initiative" - opposing the 'vigilance' of those who protect the status quo. His power to influence events comes from the value of his work in theoretical science. All worlds share a quasi-religious belief that theory is the first step to technology and thus to power.
The strength of the book is the complex and convincing shades of grey in which both characters and social systems are portrayed. There are no easy solutions and even the motivation of villains is complex.
A enthralling and satisfying philosophy text presented through fiction.

The first science fiction I ever read was this. I was impressed enough by it to subsequently read all her others. Two worlds are contrasted--Anarres, on which an anarchist system prevails and resources are shared, and Urras, a violent, hierarchical world. Le Guin is a subtle writer and her story consists of far more than a contrast between utopia and dystopia. Her landscapes are compelling and her spare prose memorable and haunting.