Reviews with content warning for Grief - The Left Hand of Darkness

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Reviews tagging 'Grief'

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

33 reviews

blazingquill's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This is an older book written in a classical science fiction style - which is to say, sometimes a slog to get through. In addition, while it takes several meaningful steps to deconstruct the gender binary, it does so in a way which is very accessible, and therefore doesn’t push as far at it perhaps could, as Le Guin herself commented on several times.

That being said, it’s a very profound look into the difference between things that are societally decided and things that are innately human, in a way that thoughtfully offers solutions to the world we currently live in rather than just pointing out the bad. (From what I understand, this is often a core tenant of Le Guin’s work, and makes me excited to read more.) At it’s core, despite the way it sometimes reads, it’s a story about friendship and love. The line, “I do not know if we were right,” inflicted psychic damage upon me, and just barely manages to push the heavy queer coding into explicitly queer.

If you have experience reading dense science fiction, and don’t mind it, I would highly recommend.

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loki's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

The way this book explores gender means so much to me. While I knew the premise of the book, I didn't expect it to be quite as revolutionary as it is, especially given when it was written. The two perspectives of Gently Ai and Estraven work beautifully to illustrate both the strangeness of the androgyny of the inhabitants of Gethen, and the strangeness of our own gender norms. The dual perspective allows us to see how each system of gender is working, and how crucial those systems are in understanding each other. It is painful to watch the two main characters so deeply misunderstand each other to begin with, and then to find mutual understanding as the story goes on. I was surprised that the book managed to convince me not to hate Gently Ai, as I did after just the first chapter. In a wider context, this is the first of Le Guin's books that I have read so far that so beautifully marries social commentary and an incredible story.

As a final note that i will not specify as a positive or a negative, this is essentially omegaverse before omegaverse even existed.

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smolren's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I didn't expect this. I started reading it and thought it was going to be a lot of hard work for little reward, but I was wrong. I'm so grateful to have read about the beautiful friendship at the core of this book.

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erebus53's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The premise of this book is that a man comes from outer-space, to a world different to ours, on a peaceful mission of communication; as is often the case when worlds collide, it's more about the journey than the destination.

As is often the case with hard science fiction, we break into this story feeling like and Alice (in Wonderland). We don't know what half the words mean and we are a little out of our depth, but through the ignorance of the protagonist, we learn our way around by their experiences. Despite having a world with some different names for things, and a slightly different calendar and clock, the new world is fairly easy to understand once you get over the initial shock, and I think that's pretty much the point of it. Our protagonist comes at this new place with curiosity, but with his own preconceptions, some of which slowly grow and change over the course of the book.

The core of this book explores a premise whereby there can be no "battle of the sexes" if there are no distinctly different sexes. This story tells of a people who go through a monthly fertile time, during which they become either male or female depending on the conditions. They have no sexual need outside of that fertile time, and their society is arranged to accommodate it. In coupling either of the partners could be the child-bearer so there is no division of labour as we have in out "bi-sexual" society. I can see how this would be a popular read today, as our society's friction over accepting non-binary gender identities becomes even more prominent.

As an aside, I find it amusing that the people in the new world can't pronounce the protagonist's name properly, and the Audiobook narrator has a tiny lisp. It's barely noticable but, when he has to say a soft "th" sound he uses an "ff" sound.. so death becomes deff, breath becomes breff. Typically this sort of thing annoys me, but I just think it's quite charming in such an alien story. ... aaaanyway.

There is an incisive foreword from the author at the start of the audiobook, where Ursula Le Guin says some valuable things about the roles and lying ways of speculative fiction writers, and how they are not to be trusted, or treated as though they are experts, profits or sages.

Without the relationship building in this story, it might have been quite a dry affair. After helping to introduce the protagonist to those in charge of the land, his main contact is exiled as a traitor, and the two of them are caught in the wheels and machinations of the politics of the place. They undertake a journey to find friends, and need to work together to survive the hostile climate. I was reminded of the film Enemy Mine (1985 w. Louis Gosset Jnr, Dennis Quaid) and I find it hard to imagine that a film like that (based on a 1979 novella by Barry B. Longyear) was made without the influence of this 1969 book.

The story is quite an adventurous tale, one of exploration and survival and understanding. I think the style in which it is written may be an acquired taste, but it's a must-read Classic for any fans of science fiction.

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bl4m3s's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I have a very complicated relationship with this book. We are thrown straight into the world of Gethen, with it's own language and terms and weather that is only explained as you read. This made the first half of the story difficult to get through and I had to Google the meaning of several words multiple times in order to understand what was actually happening. However, once I became familiar with the language the second half of the novel was much smoother sailing. It's definitely a read that requires your full attention and focus.

Other reviews have mentioned that this is much more of a speculative fiction novel than a science fiction one, and while this is true I don't believe it is a bad thing. The weather, politics and species being something we can relate back to earth and the human race allows greater focus to be placed on what does differentiate humans from gethenians. The societies on Winter are very similar to that on earth: with Orgoreyn having a communist government similar to that of the USSR in the 60s, and Karhide having a government closely resembling a monarchy. The benefits and drawbacks of both nations are discussed throughout the novel, which in term is a criticism of earthly governments.

What I find most interesting is the discussion of gender. Gethenians are androgynous people and only present with male or female genitals for 6 days each month. Anyone can become pregnant and anyone can impregnate - the father of one child can be the mother of another. This then means that all Gethenian societies are not influenced by gender. No one is expected to be the stay at home house wife, and no one is expected to be the breadwinner. Connotations such as "strength, courage, assertiveness = masculinity" and "sensitivity, gentleness, fragility = femininity" simply do not exist on Gethen. Most intriguingly, this has led to a world that has never once experienced war, as there is no pride or greed that is associated with male dominance. Gethenians are also very in touch with their emotions and experience no shame in outwardly expressing grief, anger and joy. It's very entertaining to watch Gently Ai, our male human protagonist, come to terms with and understand Gethenian biology and how he desperately tries to relate each person back to what is traditionally masculine and femine throughout the story.

"My efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own"

These notions are gradually broken down as the story progresses and eventually Ai reaches a point where seeing men and women of his own race is more alien and off-putting than the gethenians - the real aliens to him.

While the writing is strange and the pacing somewhat hard to make sense of, the messages and topics discussed in this novel are compelling and reflective. While there are some parts that have perhaps not aged so well, to say this novel was written in the 60s it is relatively progressive and innovative for its age, and the ideas put forward within it are topics still widely discussed and relevant to this day. I'd absolutely recommend reading this novel, especially as a queer person. Incredibly insightful and has left me with much to think about.

Content Warnings

madamenovelist's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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idajoh's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

At some point I thought it contained somewhat of an internalised mysoginistic tone, however, I think it was mostly the voice of the main character, rather than the authors opinion

Overall, a very good read where you are taken to a vast world in outer space

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deedireads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

All my reviews live at https://deedispeaking.com/reads/.

TL;DR REVIEW:

I’m really glad I read The Left Hand of Darkness. It wasn’t as accessible as I’d (naively) assumed it would be, but it was certainly thought-provoking and resonant.

For you if: You want to read foundational works of SFF (especially by women) and like books that are or read like “classics.”

FULL REVIEW:

“Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.”

I’ve been meaning to dive deeper into Ursula Le Guin for years now, but I’d only ever read A Wizard of Earthsea (which I loved). And now I’ve finally, *finally* read The Left Hand of Darkness. Those two together are probably the two most famous of her 40ish books, and TLHOD, published in 1969, was one of the first books considered “feminist” sci-fi and is known as THE classic sci-fi novel that explored androgyny and nonbinary characters. It’s a standalone story, but also the fourth book set in her Hainish Cycle universe.

The story is about a man named Ai, who has come to the planet of Gethen as an envoy to try to get them to join a loose non-political association of worlds that facilitates shared knowledge and culture. On Gethen, people have no fixed gender or sex; they’re non-sexual for most of the month, and then enter “kemmer,” assuming either male or female body parts and pairing up until their period of kemmer ends. (Hence one of the book’s most famous lines, “The king was pregnant.”) The book explores themes of duality, gender roles and what the absence of them might look like, the necessity of differences, and the challenges of cultural misunderstandings.

While I liked this book and am really glad I read it, I think because I read Earthsea (which was written for a younger audience) first, I had expected it to be a bit more accessible. It very much reads like a classic, and so I found it helpful to read through a sparknotes-style summary and interpretation after each chapter, just to make sure I grasped the subtext and didn’t miss anything famously important.

That said, there’s no doubt that I’ll think about this book throughout the rest of my life. She raises so many good questions about the possibilities outside our own assumptions, especially as it relates to gender roles. I’m looking forward to reading the other Hainish Cycle novels and beyond.

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pastelkerstin's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense

Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book took a while to get interesting, but once it did, I found it hard to put down.

At its core there are some pretty good radical ideas in here about favouring community over patriotism. Genly speaks of a world based on cooperation and without law enforcement out among the stars. What a vision.

Gender and sex is also obviously a big topic in this book. I think it shows the arbitrariness of gender roles well, even though Genly and the other Envoys struggle with understanding this, as they come from a binarist society. Genly often makes sexist comments about manly or womanly qualities he sees in the Gethenians, people who are neither men nor women (or who are both, depending how you want to see it). But I don't think that means that the reader is supposed to agree with Genly. Seeing whatever a main character says as correct is a misguided way of reading fiction, in my opinion.
That's also why when Genly's interior monologue says that sexual desire/attraction is people's driving force (a very Freudian idea) and a requirement for being human, and therefore the Gethenians with their sexual cycle seem strange and inhuman to him, I think we're not supposed to think he's right. After all,

Genly learns to see Therem fully, as not fitting into Genly's ideas of sexuality and gender, but as a full human being, despite these differences.

There is the implication here that asexuality either doesn't exist on the other planets or that Genly isn't aware of it. So I would put an aphobia warning on this just in case, because reading "no sexual attraction = inhuman" stings even if you know that Genly struggles to see past his own experience of the world.

I think Genly and Therem's relationship is the most interesting part of this book. And it feels very queer to me, even though

they are never officially together

and Gethen doesn't seem to have a concept of queerness (unlike Genly's homeworld).

Overall, I liked this book, even though it has some elements that are a bit squicky or hard to read for me, like the way incest is tolerated on Gethen under certain circumstances and how this is part of one the main characters' backstories, or the aforementioned sexism and (almost certainly unintentional) asexual erasure from Genly.

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troisha's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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