Always Coming Home: Author's Expanded Edition

Hardcover, 832 pages

Published Feb. 18, 2019 by Library of America.

ISBN:
978-1-59853-603-4
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OCLC Number:
1035459503

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4 stars (1 review)

Midway through her career, Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley.

Having survived ecological catastrophe brought on by relentless industrialization, the Kesh are a peaceful people who reject governance and the constriction of genders, limit population growth to prevent overcrowding and preserve resources, and maintain a healthy community in which everyone works to contribute to its well-being. This richly imagined story unfolds through a series of narrated “translations” that illuminate individual lives, including a woman named Stone Telling, who travels beyond the Valley and comes to reside with another tribe, the patriarchal Condor people. With sharp poignancy, Le Guin explores the complexities of …

1 edition

Ursula Le Guin's grand utopia

4 stars

(em português, com links → sol2070.in/2024/10/utopia-ursula-le-guin-always-coming-home/ )

"Always Coming Home" (1985, 640 pgs.) is Ursula K. Le Guin's most ambitious novel, which took her five years to complete. The format is a collection of documents, illustrations and anthropological studies on the Kesh people, inhabitants of valleys in northern America thousands of years in the future. The complete edition was even accompanied by a cassette tape, as if they were recordings of Kesh songs and ceremonies.

In this future, the current civilisation was lost so long ago that it has been almost completely forgotten -- all that remains are sparse myths and legends about environmental catastrophes (the effects of which are still being felt) and self-annihilation.

The Kesh people are presented both through the reproduction of their own literature (biographies, novels, poetry...), art and religion (a kind of natural pantheism), and in the description of the elements of their culture by …