A review by capyval
City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

5.0

A man with very unusual eyes is found by a small community of people. He looks human, other than the eyes, but his mind seems to be empty, sort of like a newborn. He learns how to talk, and all other basic skills plus more, from this small community; and after some time he goes travelling to find out about his origin, which is thought to be alien. His destination is the city where the people in power on the Earth live, which are seen as the enemy by this community and many others. Once again, Le Guin writes about travelling − so far, I think, all the books that I read written by her had some travelling, and very often, a lot of it. She’s of course, very good at that, but sometimes it can get a bit hard for me to follow all that much travelling and descriptions, and some moments can feel too slow. That said, I enjoyed this book a lot, but I started to like it even more when the protagonist ended his travelling, at that point the book gets quite psychological and goes a lot about mindspeech (which is something developed in other books from the Hainish Cycle as well).

Perhaps the only thing that I didn’t enjoy so much is that veganism or vegetarianism is depicted as something slightly negative; and the fear of death apparently was something that Le Guin hints as wrong, or as an inferior feeling, which doesn’t make me very comfortable to be honest. I tried learning more about Le Guin’s ideas on vegetarianism/veganism, and all I could find let me with more questions than answer. But it’s alright; I don’t need to agree with Le Guin about everything in order to really enjoy her books ;)