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I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries
The Library of America doesn't know me from a hole in the wall, but nonetheless it loves me and wants me to be happy. I began to suspect as much with its recent publications of classic science fiction and female-authored noir, but I have just discovered that it will be publishing The Complete Orsinia by Ursula K. Le Guin. This is a big deal. Early imprinting on Coyote and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven notwithstanding, the original Orsinian Tales (1976) is very possibly my favorite book by Le Guin. I discovered it in my sophomore year of college, a slim little Bantam paperback with an inaccurately fantastic cover of a castle on a hill and a medieval walled city; it might suit the country's early history as depicted in "The Barrow" or "The Lady of Moge," but not the twentieth century in which the rest of the stories take place, from the pre-WWI "Brothers and Sisters" to the Cold War-era "A Week in the Country" and all the complicated terrain of memory, nationality, and love in between. I want to say something insightful about the way she looked at real and imaginary history and the way the two can exist in simultaneous superposition or within the cracks of each other, but mostly I know that lines and characters from some of those stories will be in my head forever. A few fountains clattered in deserted squares. Knocked the keystone out of your arch, didn't it? She came from the plains of a foreign land, windswept plains ringed by far peaks fading into night as nearby, in the wild grass, the smoke of a campfire veered and doubled on the wind over the flames and a woman sang in a strange tongue, a music lost in the huge, blue, frozen dusk. Damn, I left my cabbage in the bar. I love the linked stories of the Fabbre family best; I think they must have been important to Le Guin, too, since they provide the strongest continuity throughout the cycle. The latest generation features in the title story of Unlocking the Air (1996), the collection I bought just for that one last glimpse of Orsinia in 1989. The novel Malafrena (1979) I can take or leave, but I've been looking for the early Orsinian poems since college. Now I just have to wait until September. That's a good reason to be around then.
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Yes! I am so glad it's being done while she's around to appreciate it. And I've seen multiple reprints of her seminal science fiction and fantasy in my lifetime, but the Orsinian material is so much less well known, I'm especially glad it's being recognized.
(Knowing that Malafrena was written first fascinates me, because it means that the Fabbres all spun off a one- or two-line mention of a textile worker with revolutionary politics in Orsinia's nineteenth century. His descendants inherit the politics, straight down the line.)
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I'm happy about the recognition, but I'm also happy about the book.
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OHHHH MY GOD
Wow and while she's still alive! that almost NEVER happens, jeez.
I LOVE the Orsinian stories, I actually wore out my first paperback of them, it split in half, but I still kept it. I even like Malafrena. And like you I bought Unlocking the Air, just for one last glimpse of it. Wow.
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I know! The whole thing makes me so happy.
I LOVE the Orsinian stories, I actually wore out my first paperback of them, it split in half, but I still kept it.
Aw.
I even like Malafrena.
I've been meaning to re-read it for years: I'm not sure if the problem was the novel or me or neither, just the fact that the nineteenth-century political novel is not the genre most congenial to me. I mean, you read my anecdote about War and Peace.
And like you I bought Unlocking the Air, just for one last glimpse of it. Wow.
I don't know if authors are allowed to write introductory essays for their own material in the Library of America. If they are, I hope she writes about Orsinia. I've read some interviews over the years, but I would still like to know.
I hope the country is doing all right these days. I hope they don't have fascist political parties or border troubles with Russia. Last I checked the Czech Republic was doing all right and their history is the closest, so I'm hoping.
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No, I want the same thing. I don't know the chances, but it would be nice.
[edit] "The poem 'Folksong from the Montayna Province,' Le Guin's first published work, joins two never before published songs in the Orsinian language."
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....no, I got it wrong, at least according to her Paris Review interview -- the story she got nothing for was An die Musik, probably MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE THING SHE HAS EVER WRITTEN (I used to quote it to my mom a lot) and the one she was paid for was April in Paris. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin
Philip K. Dick (she was in high school with him!) went the same route -- he was actually highly educated and read a lot, but none of his literary stuff would sell, so he published science fiction instead. Ditto Delany. Ace books would buy those very short novels by young writers in the sixties and seventies and not pay a lot, but you could actually make money, and you couldn't with litfic (still can't really unless you're J-Franz or whoever).
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In 2001, most of the literary magazines paid exposure for poetry and the speculative ones would at least kick me five dollars . . .
(I wish it were possible to make a living as an author of short fiction. It would make me so much happier.)
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Demoralizing.
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Yes! Summerlong! I saw it in Porter Square Books a day or so ago; I have not yet read it. I read about it in an interview nine or ten years ago: he said then that it was his Persephone novel. I can remember only that his Hades was an Armenian gentleman named Mr. Mardikian; why not? I have been looking forward to it ever since, but in recent years had rather despaired. I hope it's good!
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-- No wait, here it is! Eight years ago now, wow. http://thegreenmanreview.com/gmr/book/selection_beagle_summerlong.psb.html
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You'll have to tell me if the current first chapter resembles it at all!
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That's cool.
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In September, enjoy!
I love that I will be able to point people toward a handy compilation, rather than telling them to scour used book stores like I did in college.
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I love that it's happening in her lifetime.
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Truly. They are wonderful stories.
Nine
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I would also have rejoiced in a set of her Ekumen novels and stories—and in fact I wouldn't mind if that happened at all—but Orsinia turned out to be very important to me in ways I am still sorting fifteen years later. I can see where it influenced my knowledge of what can be done with language and how compelling a story can be when it's just people talking. I paid attention to what it did with character. I wonder if it was the closest thing to mainstream fiction to obsess me in the same way as a secondary world.
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I love the first part without reservation; I find the second part the least interesting because it is a fairly straight retelling of the Aeneid; I find the third part more interesting than the second, because it is again outside the scope of Vergil's poem, but not as strange or as numinous as the first. I'm not sorry that she went the whole way through the story, but the aspects of it that work best are those that are least familiar to me. For people who have not studied the Aeneid, however, I accept that this might not be a problem at all.