Customer Reviews

Unlocking the Air and Other Stories

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

 

 

No one can claim more breadth of talent that Ursula K. Le Guin. She's known to science fiction for her brilliant social-science fiction and to the fantasy world for her world of Earthsea, making her one of the few truly original writers in each of those fields. But here she proves that she is not limited by the stereotypes and discriminations of genre writing. They might call this "mainstream" compared to her other writing: it generally doesn't involve other worlds; but Le Guin is entirely incapable of doing anything "mainstream;" it's still her, and she's still the best. These stories are beautiful to read. They are never too light, never too serious: always playful, always pointed. She flirts with ideas of reality, throwing the traditional existential questions out the window. "Ether, OR" tells the story of a town in Oregon that moves from place to place from multiple perspectives. "Unlocking the Air" is about wars and rumors of wars in a small, nonexistent European country (the same Orsinia from "Orsinian Tales" and "Malafrena"). "Sunday in Summer in Seatown" is a simple prose poem. She's always pushing the edge, pushing herself. It seems that she's succeeded again.

Ursula K. Le Guin proves with Unlocking the Air that she's talented across multiple genres. While this collection may not be composed of Speculative Fiction, the stories are surreal, filled with magical realism, and fantastical events that border, and sometimes cross into, the supernatural.

There's a total of 18 previously published stories that, for the most part, left me feeling like I couldn't interpret them even if I tried, but were beautifully expressive in ways only Le Guin can manage. She plays with themes of location and place, belonging, relationships, family, perspective, and socially conscientious issues (homosexuality, abortion). Her writing is always delicate and insightful. There wasn't a single story I didn't like, only stories I like better than the others. And the fact that she veers willingly into the mysticism of dream-like situations reminds me her strengths are in toying with our sense of reality. Being a fan of her writing, I don't think I'll ever mind that.

I did have some favorites that I wanted to share my thoughts on. It's always hard for me to write about a collection without going into some detail on the stories themselves--the following stuck out in my mind the most:

"Half Past Four" is a story of perspective; the same characters play different roles with each other, revisiting the same time of day from other planes of existence in which a daughter can be a mother in one dimension and a sister in another.

"The Professor's Houses" is an exercise in the illusions created to separate the stresses of our daily lives from the escape of daydreams; "Limberlost" tells of a novelist who finally discovers what she's been looking for on a writer's retreat as she's leaving; "The Creatures On My Mind" projects the narrator's guilt as literal and metaphoric in the poor, wounded animals and insects she/he finds in the everyday of life; "Ether, OR" (a dedication "For Native Americans") is told from the voices and different perspectives of the townsfolk who live in a city constantly on the move; "Unlocking the Air", the title story, seems to be about an Eastern European Civil War or protest that is touching despite not knowing the real politics; "A Child Bride" is a Persephone tale from the confused perspective of a daughter unsure whose decision her marriage was; in "Olders" a husband begins an arboreal transformation--issues of nature vs. humanity are brought up, trees are given emotions (jealousy, anger), and made sympathetic in this way; and "The Poacher" is a re-telling of Sleeping Beauty that vilifies the fairy tale as an exercise in belief of the dream that happy endings can only exist as such: dreams.

Unlocking the Air is a cohesive collection of stories ranging from the experimentally poetic ("Sundays in Summer in Seatown") to the jarringly real ("Standing Ground"); all are lyrical. I think in particular, what all the stories share is a warning to remember those who we might least think of, or think the least of. Together, they are a plea to always consider another perspective, to make the effort to understand one another, lest we, and others, fall victim to memories, dreams, and intentions.

Le Guin's recent collection of stories take place in a wide range of her personal territories, from fantasy worlds to the Pacific Northwest to her fictional country of Orsinia.

The title story is in my opinion among the most powerful and moving of all of Le Guin's short stories. I read it five times and each time it brought tears to my eyes. It draws on real events from the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, to bring up to date the vital interactions within the family of Stefan Fabre, who with his ancestors was one of the chief protagonists in her earlier Orsinian Tales. In doing so she reminds us of the difficulty and ambiguity of the continuing struggle for a just society, a struggle in which stones take on power as they are thrown as weapons, rutted by tanks, and sometimes run red with blood.

In the real Prague of 1989, protesters and their leaders (Vaclav Havel among them) jingled their keys as a sign of protest and to symbolize the opening of hitherto locked doors. Le Guin's story ends:

This is the truth. They stood on the stones in the lightly falling snow and listened to the silvery, trembling sound of thousands of keys being shaken, unlocking the air, once upon a time.

I have never read any of Ursula Le Guin's other writing; I understand she is a gifted fantasy writer. Her short stories, however, were hit and miss. My favorite was "Standing Ground" about a teenage daughter and her pregnant, retarded mother. Reading this collection of stories was not enough to drive me to look for more from her, gifted or not.

Unlocking the Air is an interesting collection of stories that crosses over genres in LeGuin's style of bridging the misty realm of dreams with the sun-bright daytime world of movement and activity. To me she is an absolutely amazing artist.