Reviews

Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

cesullivan's review against another edition

Saw the author at Norwescon.

mdevlin923's review against another edition

3.0

It's the 23rd century, and Earth's economy relies on inter-planetary trade agreements. All of these negotiations require a translator...a job filled by a member of one of the 13 linguist families. These families train their children to be fluent in many languages (both Terran and Alien)...but like non-linguist families, women are treated as second class citizens. Women of linguist families must not only deal with misogyny from their male family members, but they must also deal with public scorn because of their status as a linguist. But these women are working tirelessly to make a difference: and they start with language.

An immensely interesting concept (the idea that language can change the world), but some of the execution felt lacking. It was difficult getting into the writing style, and it was hard to relate to the characters in the first few chapters. By the middle of the book, though, I was eager to find out what happened! Be warned, the ending is slightly anti-climactic, and you will need to read the rest of the trilogy to get a true ending. I do love that the main characters are older women, since they are not always giving the spotlight (and the few stories that do have older female characters are stereotypical portrayals: witches, spinsters, etc).

venushaze's review against another edition

challenging dark tense slow-paced

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

3.5

ketreads's review

dark emotional

4.5

I hate it. I love it.

I initially struggled with this book. It felt as though the pages dragged by but not for the reason you're probably thinking. It was because I found myself TOO emotionally connected certain characters or events in this that it hurt me to read. By the time I got into the story (around the 40-50% mark) the rest of the book flew by.

To say I "enjoy"d this book doesn't feel like quite the right word to describe how I feel about my reading experience. This book is sold as a feminist sci-fi novel set in a future distopian society where women are reduced to having rights less than children. We follow the story of a set of women linguists bred to become perfect interstellar translators. To say this was a frustrating read would be an understatement. The author does such a fantastic job of linking the obserdity of this setting to real-world misogynist rhetoric. This did the fantastic (and horrible) job of making these otherwise over the top examples FEEL feasible in the universe we are presented with. We watch these women, who we see are as human as we see ourselfs, be repeatedly treated as anything but. So, yes. I felt VERY strongly throughout this novel and probably wouldn't ever read it or anything like it again. In the nicest way!

I loved the characters of Michaela and Nazareth. They both worked perfectly in showing us very different ways in which women navigate this sci-fi landscape, and yet are both still exploited by men. 

Overall, I can see exactly why this is a classic and well worth your time. For the short page count, this book goes into a surprising amount of well thoughtout detail and consequences to these details.

outcolder's review against another edition

4.0

The dystopia is brutal, the thought experiment is substantial, and the feminism has a sense of humor -- or as the back cover calls it, "wry wit." I was going to write, "it's kind of eighties," but unfortunately 2017 so far is also kind of '80s. Happily, the characters, plot and style are all superior to Elgin's 1970s [b:Communipath Worlds: The Communipaths, Furthest, and At The Seventh Level|2037133|Communipath Worlds The Communipaths, Furthest, and At The Seventh Level|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387725885s/2037133.jpg|2041929].

This edition has a nice afterword that examines the book in the context of Elgin's non-fiction, the state of academic feminism at the time it was written, and within the genre of science fiction. I appreciated that and am thankful to the Feminist Press at City University of New York for bringing this back in print.

burritapal_1's review against another edition

challenging dark informative reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

The whole review contains spoilers.

This book feels like rage bait to me. It's something the United States could turn into in the future. 

This book was written by a professor of linguistics at San Diego State University and director of the Ozark Center for language studies in Arkansas. She is now passed away.

It helps if you know a lot about language, to read this book. The book is about a group of humans who are gifted in language acquisition. As anyone who's studied child development knows, babies have the best chance to learn languages. They are wired for picking up tongues. As time goes on, though, they lose this ability. What this family does, is to put infants at an Interface with an Alien. They leave the baby there, and after about a year, the baby can speak the Alien's language. Then the baby, as time goes on, can Aid the government in making contracts and agreements with the Aliens, for humans to move to the Alien's world.

Try learning a second language as an adult. This is what I did. You can learn it well enough, with the will, but you will never speak it like a native speaker. 

Now I would like to see a woman write a book about men being put in their place in the United States.

This book takes place in the United States sometime in the future. We're already heading towards this scenario. I can only fear for my daughters' safety and sanity. 

"if anything could have tempted Aaron William Adiness Chornyak to such black blasphemy as the concept of a Creatress, it was the seemingly irrational creation of females. Surely the almighty could have had the simple gentlemanly courtesy to make women mute? Or to see to it that they had some biological equivalent of an off/on switch for the use of the men obliged to deal with them? If he hadn't had the Ingenuity to do without them all together? 

'count your blessings,' his own father would have said. 'you could have been born before the Whissler Amendments, you know. You could have lived in a time when females were allowed to vote, when females sat in the Congress of the United States and a female was allowed to call herself a Supreme Court justice. You think about that, boy, and you be grateful.' "

Nazareth Chornyak is a gifted linguist. She not only speaks an alien language but many Earth languages as well. She keeps a notebook where she jots down ideas about new language that can describe something that's never been named. For example: 

"to refrain from asking, with evil intentions; especially when it's clear that someone badly wants you to ask - for example, when someone wants to be asked about their state of mind or health and clearly wants to talk about it."

Think about this. It's one of the evil things that humans commonly do. But is there a word for this?

I like the character Michaela. Michaela was educated in the Marriage Institute, where they teach women how to be the perfect wife. She was the perfect wife to an asshole character named Ned. 

Michaela had a baby with Ned, but Ned didn't like this baby: it cried to much and took Michaelaaway from him. so while Michaela was out, he gave it up for Government Work, where the government is trying to imitate the language families, and have infants in front of an interface with an alien. But the government doesn't know how to do this and they always kill the babies. 

I Love the Way Michaela back at Ned. 

" 'Ned, darling,' sHe said, 'you know my ears aren't sharp like yours are.. I don't hear a thing. It's a good thing you're around to take care of me.'

Damn right it was. Ned stubbed out the cigarette and took a swig of the coffee she'd brought him right after the pills, laced with Scotch the way he liked it. 'I'll go check it out,' he said." 

'You could just tell me where to look, Ned,' she suggested, but he shook his head and threw back the covers.

'Naah. I'd better go see for myself. Probably a monitor that's gone bad. I'll be right back.' 

It wasn't until he was inside his dressing room and had closed the door behind them that he saw the wasps. Four of them, God damn it, angry ones, Furious bastards, buzzing and buzzing in there! He reached behind him for the door, he had to get out of there fast.. shit, they were as big as effing hummingbirds! He'd seen them before outside, meant to mention them to Michaela and have her see to them, but how the fuck did they get in here! And it was not until he knew they were going to get to him no matter how carefully he moved that he realized something was wrong with the door, oh jeezus there was something wrong with the door, the plate that you pushed to open it from the inside wasn't there, there was oh jeezus just an empty fucking space there where it was supposed to be! 

He started yelling for Michaela then, thanking God reverently and sincerely that she had never, not once, kept him waiting for anything!"

Lol

michaela, like the rest of the world, hated the language families. Michaela goes to work as a nurse for the old women in the Barren House, with the idea of killing them one by one. But what happens is that Michaela finds out what the women are really like. And she begins to love them.

The Encodings that Nazareth has written in her notebook are found by one of the girls in Barren House house, and shared with the other women. When Nazareth finds out, she is furious. They try to explain to her that these encodings are extremely important, and must be shared.

" '... you have given us seven Major Encodings; they were all valid. You now know that. SPare us you're drivel, please...'

 'oh,' moaned the cornered girl, 'May God curse you all... ' 

'dear me,' said Susannah. 'how you talk.'

'such manners, missy,' added Thyrsis. 'mercy.'

Tears had begun to pour down Nazareth's face, and the women were delighted to see them; it was when a woman ought to weep and could not that there was cause for alarm. But they hurt for her all the same, as she tongue-lashed them. 

'it wasn't enough that you lied to me,' Cried Nazareth, 'and stole my things, and sneaked my notebook, and used my work without even asking me, and pretended all the time to be my friends! That wasn't enough was, was it? No, you hadn't done enough, with just those things! That didn't satisfy you, did it? It's like the men say, you've got nothing to do, so you think up wicked plots... and now you are trying to Blackmail me! And you laugh! You blackmail me, and you laugh! Oh, God curse you... God curse you... '

that was very good, they thought. It showed that she did understand. She had a scrap of knowledge here, a scrapped there... enough to know that Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother's knees, when their mothers had time to tell them, and from the women of the Barren Houses otherwise. How women, in the long ago time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships -- a fantasy world for those girl children, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and dragons - how women, even then, had begun the first slow groping toward a language of their own. The Tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail; and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings. A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before. Major Encodings, the most precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse. Minor Encodings, which always came in the wake of a Major one, because it would bring to mind related Concepts that could be lexicalized on the same pattern, still valuable. 'a woman who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women are in her debt forever more.' "

There was a part towards the end that really touched my heart. Michaela is overseeing the care of the old women in Barren House. She sees the little girls come every day and sit with the old women. The oldest is 97 years old. 

"and she had gone so far as to select Deborah as her first victim. Deborah was 97 years old; she had to be fed an enriched gruel and pureed fruit and vegetables with a soft tube. And no little girl went to talk to Deborah, although to Michaela's consternation almost every little girl went to sit on the old lady's bed to stroke her forehead and Pat her hands for a few minutes during the day.

'She doesn't know you're there, sweetheart,' Michaela had told the child the first time she saw that happen. 'it's very kind of you, but it's useless - Deborah hasn't been aware of anything for a very long time.' 

the child had turned clear eyes up to her, disturbingly adult eyes: she could not have been more than 6 years old. And she had said: 'how do we know that, Mrs Landry?'

Michaela had admitted that she could not be absolutely sure, of course - but there was no reason to believe anything else, and the doctors would tell her exactly the same thing.

'And that means,' said the little girl reprovingly, 'that while we do not know for sure, Aunt Deborah might very well lie there everyday unable to speak or move, and wish and wish and wish that someone would come sit with her and pet her a little. Isn't that so?' "

The women in Barren House, where women go when they can no longer reproduce, are working on a language for only the women. They need this because their lives are absolutely controlled by men. When they begin to use this language, it changes their reality, and they no longer show any sign at all to the men how ignorant the men are. This infuriates the men. This causes the men to have the women live separately and this is what the women have wanted all along.

 

sarahsg's review against another edition

adventurous challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

therevallison's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Walking into this book all I knew was that it was "angry feminist sci-fi from the 1980s" and honestly, that's exactly what it is. And, I loved it. I was surprised at how complex the characters (especially the women, slightly less on the men) and how complex the world was. I was drawn-in in a way I wasn't expecting. The ending seemed a little abrupt - although I guess that's why there are sequels. 

morgob's review against another edition

5.0

This was a phenomenal book. It took me a little while to get into, but once I was in I was hooked. Elgin explores the idea that women have the majority of their human rights taken away in the near future (at the time she wrote it, it was the near future). By the time the book's story begins, women have been reduced to being treated like children, second-class citizens to the t. The book made me irrationally angry at a future that doesn't exist (yet). I know this book is fiction, it's just that the present is getting kind of scary for women's rights, and I don't want this to be one of those books that ends up accidentally predicting the future. I'd like to have more faith in my fellow man than that.
When I first finished reading, I thought to myself that if this is not the most exciting book I've read this year, it is probably the most important. A lot of women at this time had some of the same ideas, this fear of getting our rights taken away. And now again. It made me buy some books similar to this, like The Red Clocks, which I am anxious to get to. My heart ached for Nazareth (badass name, by the way) through this whole book, and I wanted the women to "win" so badly. Feminist that I am, I had to catch myself when, towards the end of the book, I was rooting for the women to try to take over the world and put the men down below them. Obviously, I realized that that would be further perpetuating the problem.
Anyway, I loved this book and the ideas it explores (I so wanted to learn more of the language, though!!), and I really really enjoyed reading it. I'm not sure if I'll read the sequel because I'm afraid of sullying this first one, but I may change my mind someday.

mkrsksms's review

3.0

I found the premise of this book to be incredibly fascinating. Conlangs are already interesting by themselves, and here was one that was created by women FOR women, in order to free them from the men's control.

I enjoyed reading about the descriptions of language and its development and acquisition. I rooted for the women to outsmart the men. I was frustrated at the ridiculousness of the men. However, I felt that the book was lacking in its world-building. There was so much potential, but the gaps in the world-building, the holes in the plot, the hand-wavy explanations that were glossed over and were meant to be accepted as they were, no questions asked - these made it too difficult for me to fully immerse myself in the book.

Nevertheless, I thought it was quite thought-provoking (although understandably dated in its concepts), and I appreciate what it was trying to do.