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Originally Posted by Dazrin
Explaining isn't the right word. She didn't try to explain the book in the introduction (thankfully) but she was trying to explain why the book was written as it was and the tone was defensive.
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This is one of my pet peeves, when authors feel as if they have to explain or defend what they were trying to do. I wish they'd let it go. I'm a firm believer in letting a book stand on its own merits and open to whatever interpretation, pass or fail, readers give it. And as you say, it was a prize winner!
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Originally Posted by latepaul
Oh and the scenes on the farm? Grim.
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Overall, I thought the book was too evocative of recent (in real terms) history, as if she just lifted it. The farm evoked the extermination camps of the Holocaust, the border crossing Berlin, and so forth. It didn't come across as organic to me.
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I did read in one of the three introductions in my copy, that LeGuin intended the masculine pronouns to stand for generic ones and later regretted it. I do think it would have made it more striking if the Winter natives were constantly referred to as they/them or something. It would have jarred in a good way.
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Yes. By using masculine pronouns, Le Guin made maleness the baseline. It was a poor choice and illogical, too, in a book sprinkled with Gethenian words when a Terran word would have been an exact, or nearly exact, translation. It's akin to dialogue that reminds you it's purportedly in a different language or the person has an accent by having a character say things like "Ah, oui!" and then going on to use four-syllable English words.
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**(it would have helped if the section at the end of the book about the days of the week and months and so on were at the beginning not the end. The first chapter of Estraven's journal I thought the bits in italics were other characters, that he was describing their place in the hierarchy. It took about 3 pages to realise they were days.)
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That was something else that bored or confused just to create atmosphere. I did snicker a bit that while coming up with this whole new calendar and in a book set in the far future, Genly still gave the temperatures in Fahrenheit! I prefer Fahrenheit myself for day to day use and not only because it's still current here, but not in a scientific context.