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The Dispossessed

By Ursula LeGuin

Published 1974

Read July 2019

Although this book won two prestigious awards focused on science fiction and fantasy (Hugo and Nebula), this book is not a typical science fiction or fantasy.  Rather it is an example of LeGuin’s  literature in which she creates a new setting for a story to explore significant universal themes, this time about the ability to create and sustain an anarchist society.  In this book, the setting is focused on Urras, an earth-like planet and its moon Anarres.  Anarres became populated by approximately 1 million self-exiled persons over the course of 20 years (it took that long for everyone to make the journey by spaceship) who chose to leave Urras and set up a new society on Anarres following the Settlement of an uprising on Urras.  The self-exiles are known as Odonians, taking their descriptor from the name of the Urrastian woman, Odo, whose writings provoked the uprising on Urras even while she was jailed for nine years.  The Settlement agreed by the Urrastises and the Odonians specified that Urras would continue to obtain raw mineral materials from Anarres but does not otherwise interfere with Anarres.  If addition, no Urrasti can pass into Anarres beyond a space port wall during the trips to Anarres to pick up the minerals it obtains from the planet.   The story starts approximately 160 years after Anarres has been isolated from Urras.  The main character is Shevek, a theoretical physicist who was born on Anarres. 

LeGuin starts the book on Anarres as a passenger (whom we later learn to be Shevek) boards the spaceship at the space port which is about to take a shipment of minerals to Urras.  This initiates the story, told in the Urras chapters, about Shevek’s stay on Urras .  Chapter two is set on Anarres and starts the story, told in the Anarres chapters, of Shevek from infancy to his decision to leave Anarres and visit Urras.  LeGuin alternates the Urras and Anarres chapters.  In some editions, the chapter titles indicate the name of the planet which greatly accelerates the reader’s ability to understand the book’s structure and move between time and space settings. 

Through the Anarres chapters Shevek’s story provides the reader an insight into the Odonian culture including how children are raised, how people address their sexual needs and sometime form partnerships when they choose to have children, how communities are physically structured, how people obtain work assignments, where they live, eat, work, and socialize.  The reader comes to understand Anarres and Odo’s teaching as Anarres inhabitants born there understand them as well as how these inhabitants understand Urras.  Using Shevek’s story, LeGuin allows the reader to see how an Anarres inhabitant’s perspectives about the societies on this pair of planets evolves as he matures from infanthood to adulthood. 

Odo’s writings provided a blueprint for establishing the society, although she never participated in it as she died on Urras before the self-exiles begin to leave.  The reader is invited to consider how well she did in the design that was meant to enable a world in which the community’s shared goals of sharing, giving to the community what you can give, taking from it only what you need, and owning nothing personally, allows a society with no government, no laws, and no motivation for, and thus no incidents of, crime. Life is very austere:  people sleep in small, bare, shared rooms in dormitories, eat in communal refractories which also have sitting room areas, and contribute a day of manual labor each doced (10 days) so that the least desirable but necessary work can be shared.    In addition to the drive for avoiding possessions, austerity is also a somewhat natural outcome of living on a primarily arid planet on which the native life is a few types of plants on the land (no land-based animals) and some fish species in the seas. 

The reader will not reveal how it comes about that Shevek leaves Arranes and goes to Urras, nor what happens when he is there, but will indicate that Shevek’s experiences on Urras inform the reader about Urras.  The reader follows Shevek’s evolution in understanding of the “properitarian” societies on Urras and what this means to Shevek’s intentions for being on the planet.

This remarkable book gives the reader substantial concepts to consider on nearly every page.  Just a few examples include:  what drives us to have possessions; what does it mean “to need to work”; what does it mean “to be worked”; how the tension between “the drive self-improvement” (in various forms) and the “drive to do good for society” are played out in various social and economic structures.  Some extracts from Odo’s works that are quoted include:   “free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think” and “excess is excrement”.   An ongoing concept that Shevek and his colleagues struggle with regards when customs become laws as evidenced by the ways those not followed those customs are treated.  A phrase used in marketing the book, and that appears as a subtitle in some editions, is “An Ambiguous Utopia”.  There are ample examples revealing Anarres to be less than a “true Utopia”.  But the reader is immediately forced to consider the similarities and differences between Arranes and his own country.  So although LeGuin creates a foreign setting to consider these and other ideas, the reader is acutely aware that she is addressing universal concepts that surround our own current (and past) society, country, and world. 

Shevek’s research regards developing the concept of and equations defining a unifying theory of the universe.  This is a goal that has been pursued by physicists throughout time and that currently remains unanswered.  While the concepts of “Sequency” and “Simultaneity” as they are discussed in this book were interesting to this reader, it isn’t necessary to become distracted by the specifics.  However the concepts of research to expand scientific knowledge and engineering that use that knowledge to some end(s) is very relevant to assimilate.   Shevek wants to author the work.  He doesn’t want anyone person or group or country to own it.  So a question LeGuin challenges us with is to understanding what it is required in order to have a world in which valuable knowledge isn’t in some way owned so that the benefits it enables can provide profit to only some (and in which knowledge that isn’t owned is actually utilized). 

As in most great literature, the end of this book does not provide a closed ending to the story.  Rather the reader is invited to continue to consider the questions posed by LeGuin for her characters and for us. 

PS–this book will earn the designation “classic” in 5 years as this reader anticipates it will continue to be read and discussed 50 years after its publication.

Jaybar Crow

By Wendall Berry

Published 2000

Read Aug 2019

Jaybar Crow is born in 1914 near Port William, KY (the setting for many of Berry’s books).  He’s orphaned at age 7 and goes to live with his aunt and uncle who pass within about three years.  At that point Jaybar  is sent to an out of town orphanage.  He briefly attends a small college on scholarship to become a minister but leaves when he realizes he doesn’t have some answers to important questions his congregation members will likely have.  He arrives in Port William in 1937 just as the town barber has left town with his family as the trade couldn’t support a family, but maybe could a single fellow.  As he had learned to barber while at the orphanage, an occupation has is found.  The local banker becomes convinced Jaybar can make the payments on the small building housing the barber shop—one room on the first floor for the shop; one room above for living quarters; outhouse in the back; no running water.  Jaybar settles into his trade and the barber shop becomes a fixture in the community.  He falls in love (from afar) with Matty who marries her high school sweetheart and Big Man on Campus, Troy Chatham.  Troy wants to be a big farmer too and jumps on the mechanization band wagon, buying tractors, and other equipment and  going into debt to pay for it.  This is contrary to Matty’s parents (and other neighbors’) ways.  In 1969 when Jaybar is 54, the health inspector gives Jaybar an ultimatum:  get running water in his barbershop or close down.  Jaybar chooses the latter and moves to a friend’s cabin on a nearby river.  He takes his barber chair with him and some of his customers follow him, but only providing him “donations” so he stays on the right side of regulations.   Thus Jaybar continues his life, just barely “on the grid”.  Between discussions of the goings on in the town, there are stretches of Jaybar’s thinking about faith including the questions that prompted him to leave college.

Berry beautiful language and pace forces the reader to slow down and savor the spinning of his tale of a past time when things were simpler and slower and a person’s interaction with “the grid” could be very slight.  This reader lives part of the year in a rural area populated by Amish farmers.  All have some source of revenue to pay taxes and buy the goods they don’t make themselves (cloth, shoes, books, etc).  But their interaction with “the grid” seems limited to what’s required to live the disconnected lifestyle they’ve chosen.  Berry’s subtle message asks us to consider “who has it right”? 

A Woman is No Man

By Etaf Rum

Published 2019

Read Sept 2019

In 1990, in Palestine, Isra’s family receives a suitor, Adam and his mother, Fareeda.  Adam’s family had migrated from a refugee camp in Palestine to Brooklyn, NY in 1976.  Fareeda brought her son, Adam, to their homeland in 1990 to find a good Arab wife for him.  Within a few weeks Isra (17) has been married to Adam (30) and moved into to his parents’ home in Brooklyn.  Seven years later, Fareeda and her husband are left to raise Deya and her three sisters after their parent were killed in a car accident.  In 2008, Fareeda is focused on finding a suitor for Deya who is torn between loyalty to her family and Arab culture and her desire to have a life beyond being an obedient wife and mother.

Rum tells this story through Deya chapters in 2008-9, Isra chapters progressing through the 1990’s, and Fareeda chapters in both time periods as well as some flashbacks to her earlier years.   Through these three perspectives we learn about how three women have struggled with the culture Fareeda is so committed to maintaining even though they now live in America:  1) the only path for a woman is marriage; 2) a wife’s role is to have children, preferably sons, clean, cook and obey her husband and her husband’s parents; 3)  the role of the man is to provide for his family and keep his wife and daughters safe, pure, and obedient, beating them if necessary; 4) the role of sons is to support his father in providing for the family while supporting his own and to obey his parents.  This lead to the situation that a girl must be married off quickly to both to relieve the father’s financial burden and to ensure she is considered pure and desirable for marriage.  Fareeda’s marriage was fully arranged—she met her husband the day they were married.  By Isra’s time, the suitor and potential bride did meet before they were married but both sets of parents had authority over the decision.  For Deya and Fareeda’s own daughter, Sarah, the mothers sought out potential arrangements but the suitor and potential bride had some involvement in the decision.  However, both suitor and potential bride knew they had no choice but to marry someone suitable to their parents so their say was still limited. 

Deya she is anxious to go to college before marrying and to marry for love, not by arrangement.  She was only seven when her parents died but she knows her mother was very sad and was regularly beaten by her husband.  She wants to avoid that fate and wants to know more about her mother to understand the whys behind the situation.  Her grandmother wants her to forget the past and agree to a suitor as quickly as possible—most of Deya’s Islamic girls-only school classmates have already made contracts with suitors or are even already married.  She even tells Deya that Isra’s problem was that she was possessed by jinn.

I leave the rest of the story for you to discover but will indicate aspects Rum asks us to consider.  What barriers must be overcome by an individual, family, or a community to enable their culture to change and allow new roles and responsibilities for both women and men and how to accomplish this?  While the story of Isra is clearly heart-breaking, Rum gives us some view of Adam’s situation as well—a man who wants to be an imam but is forced by his family (through the requirement of obedience to his parents) to tend his father’s business, set up his own business, set up a business for his brother, pay for his other brother’s college education and father sons and not the four daughters he and Isra have.  Neither Isra nor Adam appears to have much choice in their individual or collective life path nor has either been given any tools which they can use to make their lives or the lives of their children satisfying.  Role modelling of their parents hasn’t been helpful but loyalty to family and their culture has been thoroughly taught and learned.

Throughout history, nearly regardless of location in the world, women and men have been initially rooted in a role and responsibility system that makes unmarried daughters a burden to the father and sons an asset to the family both as sources of financial support and a path for keeping wealth in the family.  Slowly this system has been cracked in many places and the roles and responsibilities of partners within families is much less rigid and choices are can be made by the partners, not solely dictated by past practices and customs.  This reader proposes this trend has allowed for a general lifting of well being for all parties.  Unfortunately some cultures retain the oppressive gender roles and responsibilities system, the members of which are literally moving to new locations through immigration as a result of oppression created by man (war waged at the country or “tribe” level) or climate change (i.e. drought).    America and other countries receiving immigrants are faced with the dilemma of wanting immigrants to assimilate into their society (whether or not they will allow them to become citizens (!)) and recognizing, to some extent, that immigrants shouldn’t be completely stripped of their culture as a result.  How then to handle the situation of Fareeda’s family whose culture includes wife beating as acceptable?  How then to challenge the value of loyalty to family when that family’s culture teaches and advocates practices unacceptable to other parts of society.

Rum’s story suggests that the individual plays the critical role.  Individuals can muster their strength to challenge.  Individuals can mentor, help, support other individuals in their fight to challenge and break ground for themselves or their children.  This too is a universal truth—individuals helped individual slaves find a path to free states, individuals help other battered women find safety, individuals help other alcoholics break free of their disease.  Individuals have responsibility to find strength for themselves and then have a responsibility to help others.  Then individuals can become a movement. 

Read this book to become aware of a culture that remains present in our own country and in other places.  Become aware of the challenges these individuals face.  Become an individual open to “the other story”.   Grow. 

The Devil’s Cave

By Martin Walker

Published 2012

Read Sept 2019

This reader received this book from her travel companion when we were about to embark on a biking trip in France.  What a delightful present!  This is a fun to read book for someone who enjoys criminal investigation stories.  I fully agree with the Washingtonian’s praise published in the edition read by this reader:  “An affordable way to have an adventure in the French countryside this summer…Strikes a captivating balance between suspense and delight.” 

This reader looks forward to more enjoyable reads from this author.

The Female Persuasion

By Meg  Wolitzer

Published 2018

Read Sept 2019

This reader has mixed feelings about this book. 

We meet Greer during the first weekend of her college career.  She is disappointed and angry with her parents that she had to accept a full scholarship at a lower tier liberal arts college instead of attending Yale. She couldn’t attend Yale, although she was accepted there, because Greer didn’t get any financial support from Yale due to incomplete a financial aid application provided them by her parents.   At a party that first Friday night, she is inappropriately touched by a young man at a frat party.  Eventually there is a hearing at the college about this and other similar incidents and the young man is given essentially a soft slap on the wrist.  Greer is angry but feels impotent.  Fortunately her new activist friend, Zee, takes her to a campus lecture by Faith Frank, a 60-something editor of a feminist magazine, Bloomer.  Greer and Zee run into Faith in the women’s room after the lecture and Greer leaves with her business card and substantial enthusiasm for the feminist concepts she heard at the lecture. 

After graduation, Greer lands an interview for a job at Bloomer.  Unfortunately Bloomer closes the day of her interview, but she is later contacted by Faith Frank for a job with her new foundation that is being financially backed by a venture capitalist (with whom Faith had a one-night stand some 40 years previously).  Greer joins with enthusiasm and Faith Frank becomes a mentor.  Over time the foundation’s work directly impacting women decreases and its work producing slick conferences with high ticket prices increases.  Eventually Greer learns of a controversy associated with a recent conference, confronts Faith, and quits the foundation.  In that encounter, Faith reminds Greer that Greer also had an ethical lapse when she first joined the foundation—Greer told Faith about, but never passed onto Faith, a letter from her friend, Zee, requesting consideration for a position. 

In the meantime, boyfriend Cory, following graduation from Princeton, where he had a full-ride scholarship, has joined a high-end consulting firm and is living somewhat decadently with other similarly aged consultants at the company’s Malaysian site.  His plans to make a lot of money fast to fund a start-up with some friends are interrupted when his family suffers a significant tragedy.  He returns home to care for his mother.  Greer initially shares his pain but becomes confused as he continues stays to help his mom and seems to have given up on his career aspirations. 

After graduation, college friend Zee joins a program that provides a few weeks of training to become a teacher in charter schools that have contracted with them to supply teacher.  She quickly becomes overwhelmed by the challenges she faces as an underqualified teacher in the charter school with high aspirations but little capabilities.  She leaves this position and gets training for and becomes a crisis counselor.  During this period, Zee comes out as gay and finds a life partner.  She learns that Greer did not pass on her letter to Faith but the friends eventually reconcile.

Greer is the only one of the three that seems to have a fairly easy path to success.  Despite the poor financial aid application, she still gets a full-ride scholarship to the second (third?) tier school.  Faith Frank takes her into a nice paying foundation job and provides her mentorship and sponsorship.  After quitting the foundation, she manages to write a feminist book, Outdoor Voices  that provides her with enough money to buy a brownstone home in Brooklyn and renovate it (if she hadn’t decided to divert the renovation money to her parents and Cory’s mom).  She reconnects with Cory and has a baby by the time she’s touring to promote the book.   

So why does this reader have mixed feelings about this book? 

On the one hand, Wolitzer describes well, and with great detail, the experiences of the three young people as they deal with the challenges of their college days.  She does similarly well with the post-graduation stories for Cory and Zee and raises the question of what constitutes an acceptable career trajectory.  Is Cory wasting his intelligence by caring for his mother, cleaning houses, and working at a local computer store or are family needs more important? On the other hand, this reader didn’t feels Greer’s path had the same credibility.

While the omnipotent narrator presents substantial detail about the feelings of Greer, Cory, and Zee, that narrator is fairly quiet when it comes to Faith Frank.  There is a section devoted to providing Faith Frank’s history, but it’s fairly brief compared to words devoted to the younger characters but does give us some unnecessary (to this reader) details of her short affair with the man who will eventually fund her foundation.   We see Faith’s actions at the foundation through Greer’s eyes but little from Faith’s view.   She’s been a rock star in the feminist world based on her book Female Persuassion.  She’s been the head of a magazine, Bloomer, that, while now closed, existed for 20+ years.  She continued to be a successful speaker, charging up new women to speak up.  But how does she feel about her new role and platform?  It’s not clear.

The most confusing aspect of the book for this reader was the lack of clarity about what feminism means now-its objectives, for whom, and who should be working for it.  Faith Frank’s conferences are priced such that their participants have substantial bank accounts who like to hear about power from movie stars while eating fancy food.  We don’t know how she really feels about her current work.  Why?  We know all the others’ characters feelings about many things.   Greer’s book Outside Voices seems to sending the message that it’s all about speaking up.  This message is being sent by a woman who wrote speeches for other women based on stories she obtained from them, even when it wasn’t true.   Certainly mentoring and supporting younger women is important as is gaining your voice to be able to speak up.  But what else?  This reader is not sure that either Faith or Greer know the answer to this question either. 

In This House of Brede

By Rummer Godden

Published 1969

Read July 2019

Godden gives us a loving look at about twenty years in the life of an English Benedictine Abbey.  A primary character is Philippa Talbot who in her 40’s leaves a successful career to join the Abbey in about 1954.  Fairly shortly after her arrival Abbess Dame Hester Cunningham Proctor dies which provides Godden a useful device to introduce both the process of naming a new Abbess and to introduce us to a number of characters that are fully developed over the course of the book.  Elspeth Scallon enters the Novitiate and becomes Sister Cecilia just as Abbess Proctor dies providing Godden the opportunity to follow her journey on the path to becoming a fully vowed nun and contrasting her path, Phillipa’s and the path of other Noviatates. 

Overall Godden progresses the story of the characters and the overall community from Philippa’s arrival forward, but she takes many opportunities to discuss various aspects of the Benedictine contemplative community including structure of the day, organization of the community, various specific feasts and special events, and challenges facing the community.  In most cases she gives perspectives on the topic from many of the characters which allows her to develop the specific characters, to provide an in-depth view of the topic, and to give a look at the changes potentially or actually introduced as new Noviate arrive and as Pope John initiates the Vatican II Council. 

Godden provides us an in-depth view of the workings of the Abbey and helps the reader understand what draws one to join, what the path to full vows entails, and what keeps the nuns actively engaged in their chosen life for decades.  Fortunately Godden provides as well stories of novices that don’t remain part of the community and the numerous challenges that individual members of the community face across their lives in the Abbey.  Godden provides a short glimpse of the community’s reaction to the Vatican II Council and its impact without passing any sort of judgement about it. 

While not a book this reader might have selected for herself (again the value of being in a book discussion group that provides such opportunities!), this reader does feel enriched having read this thoughtful, lovely and loving, but not at all saccharine, look at this type of religious life and the way it was conducted during this period.