Final thoughts on The Left Hand of Darkness

I've been on a bad streak with book club choices. Winesburg, Ohio was just ok, even though I had read it and really liked it as a teen. It felt like that, as a book a teen would find profound. I again feel I must be missing something as it influenced everyone including Faulkner and my beloved Steinbeck. Then came White Noise and the less said the better.

But, streak broken because by the end I really liked The Left Hand of Darkness, to the point that when the Envoy travels to Estre Hearth to meet Estravan's kinsmen, I was a blubbering mess. Also funny as a book that up until about halfway through I would have said was interesting intellectually but lacked an emotional connection, I was in fact very emotional invested by the end. The travel over the ice did it. Frozen landscape contrasts with strong emotions. If I could only string a sentence together in an artful way, this would come across so much better.

I really liked the little touches LeGuin threw in: the detail she knew about travelling on ice which I know a little of from reading so many books about Everest, her observation that the electric cars travelling over the mountains were silent (this book was written in 1969-I didn't know electric cars didn't make noise until post-Prius), her contrast of Karhide and Orgoreyn (are there some Soviet parallels in this novel? There must be), the state-sanctioned religion in Orgoreyn which is a watered down greatly manipulated version of the much older Handdara religion of Karhide (this reminds me of the Chinese government's official Christian church.) And so much thought LeGuin put into what a sexless society would look like. The Sarf agent attempts to get the upper hand on Estraven by taking drugs that bring on kemmer and trying to-what?-seduce him? (this is how you know a world-building novel has worked when you take up the language naturally.)

And all the details about Gethen having very few animals, no communal insects and no species suitable for domesticating as a pet. And the Investigators speculation about why the Hainish founders would have tinkered to create a unisex human species and what the evolutionary advantage was (no rape is pretty cool. ) Le Guin is able to take something like never having seen a woman and make you really think what WOULD that be like? And how would you explain it to a Gethenian? And to live among people who think you are a pervert because you are a man (or a woman) all the time? Genly Ai-or Genry to the Karhidians-spent so many years on Gethen that he found male and female voices either too deep or too shrill when he finally encounters them again and thought of them as "great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer." I accidentally discovered that was the ending before I had read it when I was looking at the Wiki article for the book and expected to find it off-putting but it was just right.

I ended up really liking how Estraven became a co-narrator of the story. I didn't immediately see that coming. And I liked that about midway through I had to flip back and re-read some passages to see them with new eyes. And like the narrator, I loved Estraven.

I liked the contrast between the hot-tempered, lively people of Karhide that live in a disorganized monarchy versus the orderly, incurious people of Orgoreyn (the Orgorata) who live in a highly structured and regimented bureaucracy.  Everyone needs papers to travel anywhere or get a job. They have no reaction when raiders from Karhide burn their homes or when they are arrested and shipped off to voluntary farms for re-education. And you can tell they are passionless because their cuisine sucks. 

I think I want to read more Le Guin. There's a lot to think about here. It'll take me a few days to parse it all out.