More than 40 years ago, I read a little volume of stories by Ursula K. Le Guin called Orsinian Tales, all of them written in a realist mode – not science fiction or fantasy – but set in a wholly imaginary central European country called Orsinia. I remember enjoying them. They had a certain mood or feeling to them that I liked. But the details didn’t stick in my mind.
Just this past week. I picked up the Library of America volume called The Complete Orsinia, which contains those short stories that I read all those decades ago plus a novel called Malafrena. And I decided it was time to read the whole thing.
It was an interesting experience. I still feel that the stories have a distinctive mood to them, but I don’t think they’re great stories and I don’t think Malafrena is a great novel. This is not Le Guin at her best.
But the final chapter of Malafrena is extremely interesting and is what makes the novel worthwhile. Le Guin often likes to give her primary attention, as a storyteller, not to the obviously crucial events but to what precedes or succeeds those events. So for instance, one of her best short stories is called “The Day Before the Revolution.” The revolution itself goes undescribed: what we hear about is the anticipation of the revolution and all that has been done to prepare for it. And in that final chapter of Malafrena what we have– though much of the novel is the story of an attempted insurrection, attempted but failed – is a kind of melancholy reflection on that failure and its consequences for a couple of the participants in it. So what the novel seems to care the most about – or maybe it’s just what I care the most about – only appears at the end. I’m not sure how things could have been done differently, though; maybe make that last chapter a short story called “The Year After the Insurrection.”
I don’t think Orsinia is Le Guin at her best because I think the stories to some degree, and the novel Malafrena to a considerable degree, are really pastiche. Le Guin started writing Malafrena when she was quite young, and had not, as she herself says, seen much of the world or much of human experience, and so essentially it’s the attempt of a young and very intelligent and artistically sensitive American to write a novel like one by Stendhal or Turgenev. It’s a skillful pastiche, but pastiche all the same. And it doesn’t have the passionate life in it that her later work would have. I think she just had to discover her métier and that was science fiction and fantasy. Those were the genres that released her imaginative powers. If she had stuck with with realistic fiction, I think she would have been a competent writer – she probably would have published novels and stories – but I don’t think she would be anybody that we would be talking about now. She had to find her métier and thank goodness she did.
