Words Are My Matter (WAMM) is a book about writing, with a wide variety of pieces included. At first it resembles one of those 'how to write' books, but it's not.
WAMM is a story told in stories. That story WAMM tells is 'about' a life in writing, but also about a woman around whom many myths and stories have grown.
Le Guin has a certain reputation to defend "[w]hen critics treat me -- even with praise -- as a methodical ax-grinder..." but I would say she has a didactic intention in all of her fiction.
Her essays and talks even more so. But thankfully, for the most part, I'm very sympathetic to Le Guin's politics, her takes, her stances.
For example, in a long review of the novels of Saramago the latter's moral backbone forms the basis of her praise. She stops very early in her reading of Blindness because of a very real concern around the representations of violence that recur in that story.
After reading a few other books, and here The Cave is singled out for praise, Saramago's ability to convey the appropriate message is confirmed, and she returns to Blindness. It subsequently receives only her highest praise.
This is in very direct contrast to her comment, on page 244 about "Cormac McCarthy, and others, [who use] essential elements of a serious genre irresponsibly, superficially." While this comment does not address violence directly, it is implicit, and telling the McCarthy is mentioned in this text.
Le Guin reviews an edited collection with sole focus on The Dispossessed, and objects to its portrayal of the latter as a political tract with an ax to grind. This prompts much soul-searching, a digging back into her past, the architectures of her thinking. We get a lot about her reading habits growing up.
It is a strength of the whole volume, and it is why this book is the starting point for my 'year of reading Le Guin.' It's not just how she approaches Saramago.
The introductions to Wells are illuminating, as with the whole lot, and shine light upon the place of Wells early novels taken as a whole, as a turning point, as the starting point for what was to become science fiction.
Throughout, we have a defence of genre writing against those who would disown it: Wells downplaying, diminishing, the importance of The Time Machine in relation to the later, realistic, fiction, lest the latter be contaminated by the former's less serious intent, its infection as 'scientific romance.'
Or Margaret Atwood's insistence that she doesn't write science fiction, which Le Guin points out makes it a lot harder to apply the right critical tools and thus repay the justice deserved in return. Jeanette Winterson does the same thing.
Le Guin presents her hesitations about other writers: those she adores, admires, likes. I adore Le Guin and apply her logic to the work at hand: what are my hesitations about Le Guin as I head into the bulk of her work?
That she might have an ax to grind, for sure, especially in The Dispossessed. But her writing overcomes any didacticism; and besides her politics tend to agree, even if (or perhaps because) they occasionally tend towards the libertarian/individualistic side of the anarchist spectrum/ethos she espouses.
All her books are undoubtedly political, satirical, serious in intent. This could become a negative, if I wasn't in fact in the market for her product, ready to agree, primed with my own sympathetic politics of non-conformism, more anarchism than anything as rigid or consistent as Marxism.
She reviews Mieville in a way that makes me want to read him: everything by him, to become a follower.
Le Guin evokes Suvin in places, giving her own synopsis of SF definition: "one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near future that's half prediction, half satire." It's her own: there's no novum there, this from the woman who 'invented' the ansible.
Any other hesitations? Perhaps, I might think, maybe she's dated, part of a golden age past. But Le Guin's work ages better than just about any other writer I've tried to re-read from that time. Its literary quality, well-crafted imaginative exactness, and human capability all are timeless, and these pieces equally so.
In a final piece, a journal of a time spent at a writer's retreat, we get the story of a week in which Le Guin wrote a 40-page short story, a wonderful meditation on just how lovely the woman's approach to life could be.
Perhaps we are seeing her only at her best moments. Or perhaps she was, unusually capable of maintaining her poise even when no-one was looking.
I'm excited by this project, and have just received another title in the mail, one that I'll add to my list for this year's reading project. It's The Lathe of Heaven printed in a copy of Amazing Stories, sent to me as a Christmas present from my mother, all the way from Oklahoma. It's a blast from the past for me, straight from my grandmother's cupboard, where my aunt used to stash her books:
Next, I'm diving, this very evening, into The Wind's Twelve Quarters & the Compass Rose.
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