Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Yes, I did feel as if the "shifgrethor" thing could have done with a bit more elaboration. I'm not sure whether Le Guin left it this vague deliberately, so that the reader should feel as lost as Genly ... but then, since Genly appears to come to some sort of understanding by the end, I felt as I though I should too, and I didn't, or not that I could express. Which maybe brings us back to that that saying in words what can't be said in words? Or ...
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On the way to work this morning I listened to an old Slate Book Club podcast about this book. (It's no longer available or I'd link to it, but I still had the episode on my phone)
They mentioned shifgrethor in passing and in a way that assumed it was obvious what it meant once one understood that shifgrethor was derived from the word for "shadow". I remembered that there is that scene in the book where Genly is told this and it's like he suddenly understands.
The other thing that I found interesting about the podcast was that they acknowledged a lot of the same weaknesses but seemed to put them on the character of Genly. i.e. "the book was well written, Genly was a sexist jerk" They also seemed to think that LeGuin felt the average SciFi fan was a "white male engineer" and that Genly was supposed to allow that kind of person a way in. So to go back to what
issybird was saying it
was LeGuin projecting what she thought a certain kind of man thinks.
They also talked a little about LeGuin's Daoism and how that possibly influenced some of the gender essentialism that seems to be there. I don't really know anything about Daoism but apparently it's very big on binaries - yin/yang, male/female, dark/light?