Cait's Reviews > Always Coming Home

THE HAMMER MENSTRUATES TO ME
THEY PLEAT THE COURAGE TO HER

the introduction made me sooo worried that I wasn't going to like this, that I was going to find it slow and interminable and boring and plotless and so on, but thankfully, my fears were unfounded: this shit is IDEAL lmao.

since I had little happiness, I wanted pleasure, and took it as often as I could.

le guin is always an anthropologist–sociologist–ethnographer, but this is the pinnacle, the peak, those impulses in their most concentrated and distilled form. I can't even say, "the beep really let loose here," because it's never uncontrolled; it's always clear that we're in the hands of a masterful driver, even as the book makes us forget that those driving forces are anything other than 'time,' 'space,' and 'reality.' I hope that our descendants one day live in the valley of the na.

the solution dissolves itself, leaving the problem behind, a skeleton, the mystery before, around, above, below, within. oh, clarity! don't break your hand bones trying to break mystery: pick it up. eat it. use it. wear it. throw it at coyotes.

I was a long time reading this book, not for lack of enjoyment. if you're daunted by the length, I do think my experience was eased by my having audiobooked it, even in spite of my not always having loved the two narrators. in some ways, this is like a very long short story collection (and in other ways, of course, it is profoundly unlike that lol), and 23 hours of listening felt more doable than 500-1000 pages of reading (depending on edition); I have actually owned a physical copy of this for years that I've never cracked open, so shoutout, as ever, to the lapl and their digital media catalog.

"but what about valley men?" I said.

she said, "soft."

"soft like jellied eels," I said, "or soft like pumas walking?"

in the span of time that I was reading this, I felt fully immersed in the world. I told people about it. I quoted it. I found a million points at which its wisdom became suddenly salient. I dreamed kesh songs. I would love to make all the recipes in the "what they ate" section of "the back of the book." :') my friend ursie k. really killed it with the title, because that's what this book does to you. I went around writing phrases from the book on anything I could get my hands on. the main character (for as much as this book has a main character) has a kesh mother and a "condor" father (the kesh are the primary society we follow in the book, and "condor" is an exonym for a patriarchal, extractive, exploitative, and warlike society encroaching onto the lands inhabited by the kesh and other societies), and at one point, her father, flummoxed by kesh notions family ties and personhood and their lack of a conceptualization of ownership that would make sense to me, attempts to protest, "but she belongs to me! the child belongs to me!" only to be met with a mocking string of "blood clown" "reversal words"—"the hammer menstruates to me! they pleat the courage to her!"—through which the spaker seeks to expose a declaration that, like those colorless green ideas sleeping furiously, is grammatical but meaningless, semantically nonsensical.

phew. I tell ya haha. who else is on this fucking level?? also prescient in a way that, similar to parable of the sower, makes u go, hm, maybe 'prescient' is not the right word at all and I have in fact been lied to my whole life about what we knew and when! (definitely that; butler and le guin alike were clearly paying attention to warning drums since long before I was born.)

oh, and then to reach the end of the book and have her hit you with a "btw they weren't thin :)" is soooo funny. ~~~iconic~~~, even. thanks for the gift of this book, ursula; I won't apologize for taking so long to get around to it, because it was always waiting for me, and we come, sometimes, to things in just the right time.

a song is its singing.