Always Returning Home

Utopias are impossible. But we can write them, said Ursula Le Guin, the master of fantasy literature and science fiction, and continues to look to the future to come to terms with the age we live in. Considered one of the most creative examples of Le Guin's utopian imagination, Always Coming Home is not a traditional novel, as can be understood from the first lines. This book, which combines a wide variety of forms such as stories, poems, myths, folk tales, dramas, essays and documents with dazzling mastery, is designed as a fictional ethnography of the distant future. Always Returning Home tells the world of the Kes people, who are assumed to live hundreds, perhaps thousands of years from now, in a geography that does not yet exist. The Kes are a peaceful people living in the Na Valley in Northern California, after humanity led itself to destruction. While Le Guin introduces us, step by step, to the social utopia that the Kes people have woven around themselves with an incredible wealth of detail, perhaps she is paying off the USA's debt to the American Indians; because it is impossible to miss the similarities between this imaginary people and the American Indians. This comprehensive ethnography, which is articulated around the life story of Northern Owl, a girl born in Sinsan, one of the nine towns of the Valley, weaves together with an impressive power of persuasion a social life proposition that can be called the antithesis of modern capitalist society.
Kes live in a world that is unlike the one we live in today, starting from the human-nature relationship. Perhaps the most fundamental feature of this world, where time follows a cyclical course determined by seasonal dances rather than a linear one, is that it is alien to the progressive ideal. In this society where differences are accepted as they are, change is not progress or regression; It just points to change. Kesler are not interested in what is going on in the rest of the world, nor are they interested in the beginnings and consequences. Their central cultural concept is the "Joint" that allows things to both stay connected and move around each other.

Le Guin's extraordinary creative imagination makes it very difficult to attach the labels we are familiar with today to Kesler's world. The only way to get to know the Kes life, which is based on a completely different social organization and completely different spiritual values, and to breathe the liberating air of this imaginary society, is to follow the Northern Owl and mingle with the people of the Valley. Ursula Le Guin has created an exciting and convincing utopia that arouses a fierce longing in the reader and pushes him to question again and again the way of life in which he is drowning. Don't deprive yourself of this happy getaway among the people of the valley. "Sometimes you open the cover of a book and get the feeling that the world that opens in front of you in five or ten pages is more real than the room you are sitting in... Always Coming Home is definitely a book that is a candidate to be among the classics; perhaps it is a work of genius."
-Oxford Times-

"A call for peace and common sense coming from the heart... simply a wonderful book." Today "Le Guin is a master at creating cultures that stand convincingly side by side, without giving the impression of being held together by a makeshift stitch. Even when writing a utopian novel, she manages not to seem dry or impossible."
-London Standard-
(From the Promotional Bulletin )



Number of Pages: 528

Printing Year: 2013


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Ayrinti Yayınlari

Number of Pages: 528

< strong>First Printing Year: 1998

Language: Turkish