Always Coming Home

Reading a novel by Ursula K LeGuin is rarely as simple as reading a novel. When I first started reading her work, it always felt like an argument. She is someone who has thought deeply about what she believes and her work considers a lot of different points of view. I never agreed with her fully, but she was so knowledgeable and sharp that her writing forced me to become more knowledgeable and sharp. Her work never let me be complacent in my beliefs. I always found myself having to defend my own point of view against the one she presented, because she made me consider things I hadn't before. Reading LeGuin is work, but good work, work worth doing. Her books have always made me a smarter, better person.

Always Coming Home is a departure in that it felt like a conversation but not an argument. I'm not sure if that's because I've come around to LeGuin's way of seeing things as I've aged or if it's just that this book is so gentle. It's incredibly radical, but that aspect sneaks up on you. Maybe I've become more radical. Maybe LeGuin grew and changed over her career. Maybe it's some combination of the two. And certainly both my grief and the pandemic have played a part in my reaction to this book.

This book isn't a novel so much as what would happen if a novel and an anthropology textbook had a baby. There's some narrative flow - a novella broken up into three parts. It's interspersed with other short stories, poems, songs, descriptions of ceremonies and belief systems. Nearly a quarter of the book is devoted to appendices that further explain language or concepts.

I read it (mostly) in order, which may have been a mistake. This book practically begs you to dip in here or there. Read a poem then an explanation of the poem. Read a story then flip to the map to understand the geography. The text explicitly refers to other sections that provide more information, but it's also easy to open to a random page and just start reading.

The book is a masterpiece, and the more I think about it's construction, the more I marvel at it. LeGuin uses the format to introduce us to a "utopian" culture. One that has moved past greed and ownership, violence and war. Not that those things don't exist. But these people are calmer, gentler, more in tune with nature. They have enough and are content with it. Even outcasts are given their own place in society, or formalized ways of leaving.

Of course life isn't perfect, otherwise there wouldn't be a story. But this society, as a whole, condemns a lot of what we take for granted, which helps to preserve their way of life.

The section that touched me the most was the section on how to die. It describes the various funeral rituals. But it also talks about the lead-up to death. In one part of the book, one half of a couple falls ill, and they both go to learn - him how to care for his wife, her how to be sick. The idea of learning how to be sick really struck me, and it fit with my experience of my husband's illness. He spent over a year learning how to be sick, and then how to die (which is basically what hospice is for). I spent that time learning how to care for him, but also learning how to live without him, as his support of me and our children slowly faded.

There was a lot of wisdom in this book, a lot of passages that touched me in various ways. I'll definitely be returning to it again in the future. Though I doubt I'll ever try to read it cover to cover again.