Left Hand by Le Guin

Title: The Left Hand of Darkness

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin (American, 1929-2018)
Originally published: 1969
Page count: 300


Dates read: 1/3/2020-1/12/2020
2020 book goal progress: 1 out of 20
Month category: January - Winter (Cold / Dark)
Back to the Classics category: 
Classic by a Women Author


Read my other book reviews for my 2020 goal HERE.

Description on back of book:
Left Hand tells the story of a lone human emissary's mission to Winter, an unknown alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters.

First sentence(s):
"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling."

Favorite quotes:
"You're not a traitor, you've merely been the tool of one. I don't punish tools. They do harm only the hands of bad workmen."

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information;
when information grows unprofitable, sleep."

"You don't see yet why we perfected and practice Foretelling? To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."

"It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."

CAWPILE Rating: Overall - 7.6 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Characters      - 8
Atmosphere   - 10
Writing Style - 7
Plot                - 7
Intrigue          - 8
Logic             - 6
Enjoyment     - 9
What is a CAWPILE Rating?

Review:

I have mixed feelings about this book. I had heard great things about it and really liked the first 3 books in the series (Worlds of Exile and Illusion). I put this book in the winter category because I discovered it was set on a cold and snowy planet - I didn't know the planet was actually called Winter! I had initially planned to read this for LGBT Pride Month because the natives' gender and sexuality are very different from ours (more on that soon). I was expecting to be challenged in my views of sexuality and to have a 'hurrah' moment regarding gender equality - but it never happened.

I found a website about the book and it sums up the Gethenian sexuality more succinct than I probably could, so here's a section:

"The Gethenians have an interesting sexual cycle in which they are nonsexual for 22 days of the (26-day) month and only develop a sexual drive during kemmer, a period of heat. A Gethenian in kemmer must find a partner who is also in kemmer in order to have sex. To actually engage in intercourse, one of the two must develop a hormonal dominance, either toward male or female, after which the other assumes the opposite gender. Then the two can copulate. Unless the female of the pair becomes pregnant, after kemmer is over, the Gethenians return to their latent androgynous state. If the female does become pregnant she remains female through the gestation (and lactation) period, but returns to normal soon after the baby is born."

If you are interested in knowing more about it, the full article is linked here. The book has a whole chapter devoted to gender/sex(verb)/sexuality, but overall the topic is much more of an undertone of the book and not really expanded upon as I had expected and hoped. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:

(Human observation about Gethenians)
"There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. Any (Gethenian) can turn his(/her) hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be 'tied down to childbearing,' implies that no one is quite so thoroughly 'tied down' here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be - psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. Therefore nobody here is quite so free as a male anywhere else."

(Gethenian asks a human)
"'Tell me, how does the other sex of your race differ from yours? Do they differ much from your sex in mind behavior? Are they like a different species?'
'No. Yes. No, of course not, not really. But the difference is very important. I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies, it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Even food. It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in society, they still, after all, do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.'
'Equality is not the general rule, then?'"
(The human basically says, "I don't know" and the subject is dropped.)

What the book seemed to be more about was the potential of war, various government types (a sort of monarchy vs. a sort of communism), and patriotism. Here are some of my favorite quotes on those topics:

"One of the most dangerous fallacies is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness. Of course, progress is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both."

"Now (the nation) Karhide was to pull herself together and build up a unified and efficient centralized state; and the way to make her do it was not by sparking her pride, or building up her trade, or improving her roads, farms, colleges, and so on; none of that. They were after something surer, the sure, quick, and lasting way to make people into a nation: war."

"How does one hate a country, or love one? I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession. Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate."

"I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?"

OK... sorry about all the quotes, but the book will always say it better than I could in a review. The book also had a more mystical aspect to it with Mindspeech (telepathy), Foretelling (prophecy), and Dothe (a trance-like state that gives a person prolonged super-strength). There's also a psychosocial aspect that has to do with the importance of personal pride and how it (almost literally) grows and shrinks - which I never fully understood.

I couldn't get lost in the book because I kept trying to apply the different topics to today. Which is fine - I like it when books do that - but it was too much. She tried to cover too much ground in this book and everything felt very shallow. I wish she had picked just 1 topic and really delved deep into it. There was so much potential. It was so close to being incredible - it just fell short for me. I also was not a huge fan of the main character. I wish we could have gotten the whole story from Estraven (the secondary character) instead. He was better developed and we were left with A LOT of questions regarding him.

(Not a spoiler) One last thing - for those who are curious about what the left hand of darkness is (and haven't guessed it): Light is the Left Hand of Darkness.

Now I'm off to read another book... but since a review should be more about the author of the book than about the writer of the blog, I will let Ursula K. Le Guin have the last words:

"In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little."