Ursula K. Le Guin: Always Coming Home (Loa #315): Author's Expanded Edition: 4 (Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition)

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Joseph Olander and Martin Greenberg, eds. , Ursula K. Le Guin, Taplinger Publishing, 1979, 239 pps. The tribes of Kesh, a country in what is now California, live a fairly rustic existence, but they have access to a variety of technological apparatuses. One apparatus, an interplanetary computer called The Exchange, provides information to anyone who knows its programming language, TOK. Additionally, the tribes have battery-powered flashlights and motorized boats, and tribal supplies are carried by train from town to town.

Ursula K. Le Guin has done what any good novelist does; she has created a new world for the reader to become a part of, a rich context of sight, sound, daily life, surroundings, colors. All of these are carefully described by the narrator of the main portion, Stone Telling. Le Guin, however, has interspersed this “novella” with so much more—poems, drawings, kinship diagrams, stories, maps, dances, music, recipes, clothing, alphabet, even a dictionary of the Kesh language—and so, the reader is surrounded by the Kesh culture, and his senses are taken over by the Weltanschauung of these people. It is almost as if Le Guin were controlling the reader’s vision and imagination in ways that writers have never done before. Your Favorite Book: Always Coming Home with Shruti Swamy” by Malavika Praseed, Chicago Review of Books (9 September 2021) The book is mostly centered around the Kesh People who live in nine towns in the Valley of River Na, what we nowadays know as the Napa County, California, near Mount Saint Helena (a sacred location to them). They are a simple, utopian society with low population, technology limited to the level they can maintain comfortably, and no government in the sense we know it. Like much of Le Guin's work, Always Coming Home follows Native American themes. According to Richard Erlich, [8] " Always Coming Home is a fictional retelling of much in A. L. Kroeber's [Ursula's father] monumental Handbook of the Indians of California." There are also some elements retrieved from her mother's The Inland Whale ( Traditional narratives of Native California), such as the importance of the number nine, and the map of the Na Valley which looks like the Ancient Yurok World. [9] There are also Taoist themes: the heyiya-if looks like the taijitu, and its hollow center (the "hinge") is like the hub of the wheel as described in the Tao Te Ching. Le Guin had described herself "as an unconsistent Taoist and a consistent un-Christian". [10]I Will Find You: One of the Kesh stories in is about a young woman who goes missing. Her boyfriend is desperate to find her again, but it's only a fragment (in the extended edition, it is more, but still misses the ending), so we never learn if he does. Sarah Jo Webb, "Culture as Spiritual Metaphor in Le Guin's Always Coming Home," in Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Joe Sanders, Greenwood, 1995, pp. 155-60.

Adam and Eve Plot: Subverted in one of the creation myths told. One world did rise from a brother and sister who were the only ones left from the previous one, but since it was incest, the new people were mad and destroyed themselves eventually. Mistaken for Pregnant: In "Dangerous People", Shamsha considers some action by Hwette to be a sign she is pregnant, but Hwette denies any such thing. Never Learned to Read: The Dayao consider the acts of reading and writing to be sacred, parts of the act of Creation, so any commoner attempting to engage in either is punished severely. This causes a lot of confusion for Night Owl: among the Kesh, the only ones illiterate are those physically or mentally incapable of reading. So these things human beings had done to the world must have been deliberate and conscious acts of evil, serving the purposes of wrong understanding, fear, and greed. The people who had done these things had done wrong mindfully. They had had their heads on wrong." Stone Telling recounts how she spent her childhood with her mother's people in the Valley, as a very young woman lived several years with her father's people in The City, and escaped from it with her daughter, who was born there. The two societies are contrasted through her narrative: the Kesh are peaceable and self-organized, whereas the Condor people of The City are rigid, patriarchal, hierarchical, militaristic, and expansionist.

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In some ways, this book seems to represent a major departure in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, whose many works of science fiction and fantasy have established her as one of the major contemporary writers in those genres. Unlike most of her earlier works, ALWAYS COMING HOME is not set on a distant planet or in an enchanted land, nor are there exotic aliens or wizards featured in her cast of characters. Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas: Played with a lot. The Kesh have very different conceptual divisions and metaphors than both the readers and the other cultures in the setting; which gives abundant opportunities for extreme misunderstandings — such as Terter Abhao, with Kesh as his second language, saying something that gets heard as both "you and I should go on a short walk" and "I need to depart with the army for years" depending on who is listening. Explores how postmodern authors deal with issues of individuality, self-representation, and relationships with machinery and technology. Linton sees humanity losing a war against technology.

Littlest Cancer Patient: "The Visionary" has the narrator marrying a man who has two sons, the younger one being vedet (a terminal illness akin to Alzheimer in symptoms but much more painful). Rape as Drama: The Miller raping a woman (a case of incest) is treated as one. Not so much in other cases described: both Stone Telling and Shamsha fell pregnant from a rape, and Shamsha didn't even see it as something serious enough to tell others, nor saw a reason to abort the child. The Rape, Pillage, and Burn actions of the Dayao, on the other hand, aren't taken lightly. Arc Number: The Kesh divide everything into Nine Houses. The Five Houses of Earth represent corporeal things like the Earth itself, living human beings, and domesticated plants and animals. The Four Houses of the Sky include things like generic groups, the dead, the unborn, and the fictional. All three numbers are therefore frequent in the book. Reading Always Coming Home for the first time was when my imagination started to grow up. I got lost in it just as I always did with books, but this time there was something different. Here was a weaving — something deeply prophetic, powerful and poetic. Here was a vision that spoke to a part of me — lets call it my ecological self — that had been dormant for so long (the young child is always alive to the ecological self — but that is another story). And here was a grown up, strange and difficult book that expects a lot of its readers, but gives gift upon gift each time it is opened.She got to know the landscape of the Napa valley as if it were a character, learning all the names of its plants and trees but also by listening to it, in a present and active engagement with her environment. She listened to the voices of those who had been violently silenced—Native American Indians such as the Wappo, Yurok or Tolowa—not to imitate or exploit them but to gain validation and strength from them, in her pursuit to discover and map the culture of the Kesh. Though Native American literature is an inspiration for Always Coming Home, Le Guin was conscious of the moral implications of using real people’s stories, especially when these have been forcefully written out of Western history. The silence around Native American histories, the inaccessibility of their songs and words, the fact that she was “much better at making things up than at remembering them” influenced the creation and development of Kesh civilization in this fictional ethnography of her native yet future Northern California. The novel’s title reveals how in this simultaneous act of getting close whilst distancing herself, Le Guin was able to metaphorically “come home”. Dirty Old Man: Pandora describes old Kesh men showing off for one another by dancing the Moon (an annual orgy festival). One poem has a story of a man whose penis was tired of constantly being forced to work, so it cut itself off and ran away.