The Dispossessed: A Novel (Perennial Classics) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Whether or not THE DISPOSSESED passes as good sci-fi, I know not. I am not very knowledgeable of what SF fans look for in a book. As a novel, and as a philosophical exploration of authoritarianism, anarchism, capitalism, communism, revolution and utopianism -- this book is first-rate. The questions Le Guin grapples with here are by no means simple. Even great philosophers, like Marx and Bakunin, had difficultly imagining what an ACTUAL society would look like without bosses and owners. But through the gripping tale of an anarchist caught between two fundamentally different worlds, Le Guin seeks answers to many of the questions these philosophers left untouched. How would an anarchist society function? What would it take as its fundamental principles? What problems would that society have? What would a "propertarian" capitalist society appear from the perspective of an anarchist? Without offering any quick or final answers, Le Guin sheds light on these issues and beckons the reader to imagine the possibility of another world. After all, the evolution of culture here on planet earth was why Le Guin wrote this book in the first place. Inspiring, moving and transformative, this book was a pleasure. Thank you, Ursula. You have successfully removed another brick from the wall.

Ursula LeGuin is one of my favorite writers and I just re-read this novel (in my early 40s, around the age of Shevek, the protagonist) after having read it the first time about 20 years before. The Dispossessed is a startlingly ambitious and perfect novel. On its face, the novel is about a physicist from a world of self-exiled anarchists (Anarres) who decides to travel to the "propertarian" (capitalistic) mother planet (Urras), both to complete his life's work of reconciling two contradictory theories of physics (Sequency and Simultaneity) and to tear down the walls between his society and the Urrasti world left behind.

One of LeGuin's remarkable achievements is her conception of an anarchistic society, something that has never existed in history. LeGuin fleshes out a world of 20 million anarchists, explaining how the people of such a society might live and love, how such a large community could function without a government. But this novel is so much more than a writer's imagining of functional anarchism. This novel is not really about politics, it is about love and the nature of human interaction.

The life work of the protagonist is to reconcile Sequency -- time as linear, history as progress -- with Simultaneity -- time as instaneous, history as cyclical. Similarly, Shevek tries to reconcile his society of Anarres, where there is no government oppression or inequality but also where individuality is stifled and creativity devalued, with Urras, where there is unjust distribution of power and wealth but also great beauty and achievement. LeGuin tells Shevek's tale in two different time arcs, a linear progression through Shevek's journey to Urras and the events there, and a looping back through Shevek's life from infancy to reach the beginning of Shevek's journey at the end of the novel. LeGuin writes the novel in two chronologies as if to highlight Shevek's struggle with reconciling the two theories of Time. This literary device works brilliantly, as the reader rushes through the novel not only to find out what happens to Shevek while in Urras but also to find out why Shevek chose to leave Anarres for the journey.

Underneath it all, LeGuin is not just trying to reconcile competing conceptualizations of time, or to decide what is the best way for people to govern themselves, but rather to harmonize the contradictions that exist within human nature. We are all "propertarians," as LeGuin demonstrates simply and beautifully early in the novel with a heartbreaking passage in which Shevek as a toddler is enjoying warmth and sunlight flowing through an open window, trying to "possess" the sunlight, only to have a larger boy shove him aside. We are all anarchists as well, disregarding government mandates for the sake of personal choices. Humans are both greedy and altruistic, inclined both to take and to help, to hate and to love. LeGuin settles on love as the human constant, the key variable in the equation of human interaction, but does not presume to define love, only describe aspects of it. LeGuin shows us that trying to understand human nature, and reconcile its contradictions, is easily as difficult as trying to construct fundamental principles of the physical Universe and reconciling the conflicts in our perceptions of reality. Following Shevek as he finds his own answers to both is a rewarding journey. This is a great novel.

The Dispossessed is one of my favourite books - one that almost always gets re-read when I pick it up just by accident. Ursula K. Leguin does construct a world for utopians; but this world is not really a conventional utopia. Our united suffering is one of the key themes, and while the book is often explaned in terms of its idealology, it shines in its personal relationships. I love Shevek, I love Shevek and Takver together, I love Dap with Shevek's younger daughter. Ursula K. Leguin can explore difficult ideas with a flowing style that never makes you think you are being preached or pandered to.