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The Other Wind : An Earthsea Novel Paperback – January 1, 2003
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- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOrion Childrens
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2003
- Dimensions5.28 x 0.79 x 7.72 inches
- ISBN-109781842552117
- ISBN-13978-1842552117
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- ASIN : 1842552112
- Publisher : Orion Childrens; New Ed edition (January 1, 2003)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781842552117
- ISBN-13 : 978-1842552117
- Item Weight : 8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.28 x 0.79 x 7.72 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,574,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #349,858 in Science Fiction & Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (US /ˈɜːrsələ ˈkroʊbər ləˈɡwɪn/; born October 21, 1929) is an American author of novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, her work has often depicted futuristic or imaginary alternative worlds in politics, the natural environment, gender, religion, sexuality and ethnography.
She influenced such Booker Prize winners and other writers as Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell – and notable science fiction and fantasy writers including Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She has won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, and World Fantasy Award, each more than once. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin has resided in Portland, Oregon since 1959.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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"She asked him to assure the High Bang of the Kargs that his daughter was well..." (location 1117)
Translation: "She asked him to assure the High King of the Kargs that his daughter was well..."
Note: Oddly, this line was regarding one character giving another character this message through an interpreter...
"I will come to conduct you to the kings presence when the fifth hour is told..." (location 1201)
Translation: "I will come to conduct you to the king's presence when the fifth hour is told..." (missing apostrophe)
"...wizard Seppel of Pain..." (location 1276)
Translation: "...wizard Seppel of Paln..."
Note: Paln was constantly misspelled as Pain.
"'Between Pain and Semel, and the Island of Havnor, is only the width of the Pelnish Sea,' said Prince Sege." (location 1283)
Translation: "'Between Paln and Semel, and the Island of Havnor, is only the width of the Pelnish Sea,' said Prince Sege."
Note: At least they got "Pelnish" right...
"Who goes to the dry land when they diet..." (location 1904)
Translation: "Who goes to the dry land when they die..." (die, not diet)
Note: That's actually quite funny, but it's really not appropriate for the conversation!
"The women looked at her, some thinking her plain, some beautifid, some pitying her for having to go barefoot in the palace." (location 1998)
Translation: "The women looked at her, some thinking her plain, some beautiful, some pitying her for having to go barefoot in the palace."
Note: Seriously? Just do a spell-check!!
"Long ago the Grey Mage of Pain had brought ruin on his island by summoning the souls of the dead to advise him and his lords..." (location 2186)
Translation: "Long ago the Grey Mage of Paln had brought ruin on his island by summoning the souls of the dead to advise him and his lords..."
Note: Paln again...
"There had been more than one duel in wizardry between a man of Roke and a man of Pain..." (location 2187)
Translation: "There had been more than one duel in wizardry between a man of Roke and a man of Paln..."
"'What a ragbag you are bringing them, to be sure!' she said. 'A sorcerer with nightmares, a wizard from Pain, two dragons, and two Kargs. The only respectable passengers on this ship are you and Onyx.'" (location 2642)
Translation: "'What a ragbag you are bringing them, to be sure!' she said. 'A sorcerer with nightmares, a wizard from Paln, two dragons, and two Kargs. The only respectable passengers on this ship are you and Onyx.'"
One of the most distracting, and terrible, errors were in names. The series places a huge importance on names, so it's ridiculous that the publisher wasn't as careful. In Tehanu, the publisher constantly misspelled Sparrowhawk as two words: Sparrow hawk. It's subtle, but very distracting.
In the end, given this poor handling of the conversion from the physical book, I would simply wait for a new digital edition with revisions or just get the physical book at the library or a bookstore.
That is not to say that the later books and the issues they bring up are not valid, but in the older books, when humans tried to avoid death, magic and beauty languished, and they were brought back to life when the man representing the urge to live forever was defeated; but in the later books, magic, dragons and magical creativity have to be given away along with the willingness to allow life to end at death. This is a strange inversion of structure of the original stories and one I find depressing.
I read the books in chronological order and I am glad I did. I'm not reviewing "Tales from Earthsea" here, so I'll limit my comments to advising other readers to do as I did and read the books in order.
"The Other Wind" is beautifully written, and does a wonderful job of bringing the cycle to a place where one can see that life in Earthsea will go on whether or not the author continues to tell the story. Change comes, accepted beliefs are challenged and found to be mistaken, and the truth is a paradox. Maybe that's what makes me love Earthsea so much: dragons and mages are found only in our fantasies, but in LeGuin's hands, they come to life in a way I can fathom, a way that allows me to believe that their world just might really exist. Hmm. Anyhow -- read the book! It's really good.
Enjoy them all and then think about them for the rest of your life!
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You see, "Tehanu" is not the story of that character. It is, almost entirely, the story of Tenar; the female protagonist of "The Tombs of Atuan". It mainly covers what happened to her after the events of that book.
A big part of what Tenar did was adopt the child Tehanu, but in "Tehanu", Tehanu herself is very young and mostly silent. She emerges as a character only at the very end of that book, which - my opinion - has no business being called a 'novel' in it's own right at all.
You need to have read "The Tombs of Atuan" to know who Tenar is and her relationship to Ged. You need to read this book to get the remaining three-quarters of Tehanu's story. Once you have the whole thing, it's wonderful stuff, but you do need to have all of it.
You can see this anger in the earlier stories of 'Tales from Earthsea', but the final story, 'Dragonfly', which is the prelude to this book, is a rediscovery of what Earthsea was about.
The single most important motif in the original Earthsea stories was the wall of stones which divides the living from the dead, and the effects of unwise traffic across that wall. Two subsidiary motifs were dragons and the old powers of the earth. LeGuin recaptures and develops the importance of these in 'The Other Wind' in a way which she failed to do in 'Tehanu'. This story is a story about what would happen if the wall of stones itself came under attack - if the dead, from their side, began to pull it down. The theme is powerful, and readily captures the imagination.
What this book doesn't recapture is the way the original Earthsea stories were put together - and the reason why they were so successful as children's stories to read and re-read. A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore are stories about growing up, about how children become adults. The first two are significant achievements in the genre. To achieve this, they are written through one set of eyes.
'The Other Wind' loses both the simplicity of a single narratorial point of view, and, crucially, contains no children. Here we meet our favourite characters again - Ged, Tenar, Lebannin, Tehanu and Orm Irian, but we do not spend enough time to ground the tale in their consciousness.
This is a good book, but a minor one. It is a story about Earthsea philosophy and rationale. What it lacks is the Aristotelean focus of 'what happens next?'
It does, though, open the door for more Earthsea books which we want to read, and which a child of any age could read. This was a door that Tehanu closed.
Intriguingly, the former wizard Ged dreams of a time _after_ the time he lost his power. Above all things, we would like to read another novel about Ged as wizard.
The thing that struck me once I’d finished this book was that it felt unnecessary. LeGuin seems to have written it to retcon the nature of death in Earthsea, making the Dry Land of the dead into a perversion of the natural cycle of reincarnation, a prison for the dead who suffer there, but in “The Farthest Shore” Ged says that the ghosts in the Dry Land are merely shadows and names; the people those things belonged to are reborn in the world of the living. LeGuin retconned this to devote a whole book to the assertion that because death exists, it is necessary and better than eternal life. And if you take that claim solely within the context of Earthsea this is true because LeGuin made the only alternative an eternity of stasis devoid of human connection, but she clearly wanted to write something profound and true about the real world, and I cannot say she succeeded. Not only does her argument lack applicability to the real world (and present no meaningful difference between reincarnation and straightforward death), LeGuin doesn’t seem to realise she refutes it. In a scene near the climax, the Summoner of Roke says, “But it is not right to want to die… For the very old, the very ill, it may be. But life is given us. Surely it’s wrong not to hold and treasure that great gift!” To which Lebannen replies, “Death also is given us,” but you’re not obliged to keep or use a gift if you don’t want it.
Which isn’t to say this book lacks anything of value; it is an Ursula LeGuin story after all and she could always write well. The characterisation’s mostly good as well; I was touched by Tenar’s pleasure in having someone to speak her native language with, and her relationship with Tehanu was well done. I also liked the wizard Onyx: his respect for Alder and Seppel as fellow magic-users in spite of Alder’s lower social status and the stigma of Seppel’s magical tradition was nicely endearing. Lebannen comes across better than in his previous appearances in that we see bits of him being a wise king, and his frustration with the Kargish princess dumped on him as a fiancée, while not pleasant, is at least sympathetic as the reaction of someone constrained as he is.
That said, he might just be frustrated with the problematic aspects Seserakh brings with her: she comes from a Kargish culture that feels very much like a Middle-Eastern stereotype. Her people are native to a desert and have extreme patriarchy (Tenar suggests Seserakh’s father might kill her if Lebannen rejects her as a bride, and Seserakh veils herself in the presence of men); if it weren’t for the fact that the Kargs are white I’d assume it was straightforward racism, but with this and in light of the previous books it feels more like LeGuin’s desire to critique the patriarchy, her previously-established worldbuilding, and her desire to avoid fantasy’s typical Eurocentrism all converged to produce these weird uncomfortable implications. (I am white, though, so it’s not like I have any kind of definitive opinion on this.) Then there’s how thinking about Seserakh causes Tenar to slip into a whole paragraph of the kind of gender essentialist rubbish I thought she’d got past in Tehanu, and the conflation of going unveiled with confidence and fearlessness, which… I’ve read the words of Muslim women on wearing veils and all I can say is that I don’t get the impression that LeGuin did. The veil thing just gets even more uncomfortable when Lebannen’s friend says “If anyone gave me a package like that… I’d open it.” Why is that line given to someone we’re meant to like? Finally, Seserakh seems to start liking Lebannen on the basis of very little interaction, and it feels like LeGuin was trying too hard to convince us they’d have a happy marriage.
The dragons still aren’t as compelling as Yevaud was in “A Wizard of Earthsea”, but we get a clearer picture of their alien amorality and freedom. We also get a picture of the various cultures of Earthsea working together to solve a problem, and an implication that this example of people with different cultures and worldviews sitting down, talking things through, and cooperating is the template for Earthsea’s future.
“The Other Wind” isn’t as good as the first four books. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than “Tales From Earthsea”. It is a fitting close to the series, which is good because despite the muddled half-finished state in which she left her examination of Earthsea’s gender politics I think LeGuin had run out of anything new to say here. Ultimately I don’t think I can give it more than three stars – there’s half a good novel in this, but sadly LeGuin wasn’t able to free it from the other half.
If you liked "Tehanu", as well as "Tales from Earthsea", you will probably like "The Other Wind" too. Le Guin fits a new adventure, a huge change and dragons in this small book and it's really impressive how she does all that. I guess it is needless to say, but I like to add it anyway, that Ursula K Le Guin is truly a master of language and of course the art of writing. In Earthsea words are important and she knows how to use them. :')