A review by rhizomehaunt
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

4.75

A brutal read. This was perhaps the most difficult book for me emotionally this year. Perhaps because I started it while severely depressed and inside the fugue nature that accompanies chronic illness, my reading was informed by pain. I felt near hope and despair in equal parts through the pages and both felt unbearable. I'm glad that I read this book but it was not easy for me. I'd like to sit with it in a more critical light but I'm suffused first with the feelings I had while reading. It was painful to read; painful not because a perfect utopia does not exist—neither in the novel nor our world—but because hell is here and perpetuated by our hands. In reading Shevek's story, I read our own past and present and wonder with what grasping, fumbling tenacity will we glimpse any future that is the fulfillment of promises made to each other in this kith (to borrow Sophie Lewis' writing regarding what will replace kin) that is Odo's hope. The novel is patient and exacting. Hope is not easy but complicated by cruelty, misunderstanding, possession, violence. In the same breath, loss is not merely tempered—which would be a disservice to a type of wholeness promised of true freedom—but understood temporally as the fulfillment of love and fidelity. I finished with the sentiment that I will return again and again to this book, though I think it has to live in me longer before I can.

"To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past. Therefore, it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we’re creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."