Just Beautiful. Just Brilliant.

This may be the best Ursula K I've read since the Left Hand of Darkness. Beautifully written, incredible characters and a lovely transformation. Treat yourself. This is a marvel.

10 people found this helpful

Le Guin at her best!

What did you love best about The Telling?

While involving the reader in an intriguing tale of a woman discovering herself on a strange world the main character discovers that stories are much more important than she ever realized. They impact both for her own past and the history of the planet she has come to.

Among the upper crust of Sci-Fi authors, Ursula K Le Guin lives up to her reputation in this book as she wraps you in multiple layers of intrigue, politics, religion and emotion.

9 people found this helpful

Tough read

I am a long time Le Guin fan. The Telling is a very slow introspective examination of a society and culture through the eyes of a visitor from earth. There is very little action and with the exception of the main character, the listener really does not get to know the other characters in the book very well. The text concentrates on an examination of a planets society that has been perverted by exposure to off world technology and has turned technological progress into a religion of sorts, repressing the worlds native history and culture. Typical to Le Guin, her writing is fluid and poetic. I thought this story was wonderfully narrated. In the end, I struggled to get through this book. It never captured my full attention and I found myself wishing for something to happen or for the plot to move forward. I am hesitant to recommend it.

18 people found this helpful

Tell me about it!

If you could sum up The Telling in three words, what would they be?

Don't toss traditions

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Telling?

When the heroine and her nemesis realize their childhood experiences caused them both to reject their peoples' traditional values, and to rethink those decisions. The realization that life is not black or white, but many shades of gray.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no

8 people found this helpful

We are the world. We're its language.

“We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling

Le Guin, so far, for me, has yet to disappoint. This is one of her more Eastern-influenced books. There are elements of Buddhism (and a real feeling of Tibet) that runs throughout this novel. It is a book about a world (Aka) where the corporation/government has outlawed history, culture and writing. Books have been distroyed. Knowledge painted over or burned. But the native Akans seek to keep their history alive through stories, hidden books, etc.

In many ways it is a retelling (through Science Fiction) or reframing of China's 'Great Leap Forward'. There are elements of families divided, fanatical bureaucrats, and survival underneath it all. It is a novel about contrasting cultures, the transmission of history and philosophy through community and stories. It is, like many of Le Guin's novels, an exporation into the anthropological questions that arise when cultures meet.

It wasn't my favorite Le Guin, but it was still very good and moving.

7 people found this helpful

Beautiful, Poetic, Moving!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Ms. LeGuin uses the english language with the same flare as Sandberg, or Twain. She paints landscapes and portraits with her words, creating people and places you can actually care about, while sharing their lives and adventures. Storyteller, Wordsmith, Poet, a truley gifted artist!

What did you like best about this story?

visiting another world.

7 people found this helpful

Enlightening

What made the experience of listening to The Telling the most enjoyable?

This story put words to how I feel about religion.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Telling?

When she tells her story to the monitor.

Which scene was your favorite?

I loved the first time she goes to the fertilizer, with all the script on the wallsl

3 people found this helpful

Lesser telling in the Hainish Cycle

This is the 3rd book I've read in the cycle, after Le Guin's incomparable Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. While there is much to like in The Telling, including a sharp, poignantly traumatized central character and the author's remarkable anthropological insight, this later work (copyright 2000) lacks the narrative fluency and mind-blowing alterity of the great novels. Contrasting oral tradition with technological obsession, The Telling introduces myriad ideas about religion, zealotry, violence, and memory, without fully synthesizing them into a compelling narrative. I kept waiting for the story to take off. The performance is good, though the recording suffers in places from crude edits. A worthwhile read chiefly for hardcore Le Guin fans.

2 people found this helpful

An OK, but not top-form Le Guin

I know Le Guin likes to subvert hero-quest style stories these days, and that's fine. I like Le Guin best when, despite subverting that narrative style, the story manages to find its own kind of narrative momentum, and to surprise me. This book, despite (because of?) being *about* narrative, never really managed to do that for me. Being light on revelation and plot, more like an anthropological treatise, but with a less-than-usually plausible treatment of the society it explores, this book left me cold. There were some pretty moments (nice depiction of generic Abrahamic fundamentalism as Earth's global response to ecosocial crisis), but, after that... hmm. I put it this way: If the Left Hand Of Darkness or The Dispossessed were *massages*, they would be good, deep-tissue massages after a nice long sauna. The Telling is more that kind of massage you get from an awkward stranger where they brush your hands lightly over your back, but are too shy to really get in there.
The reader adopts a kind of depressed, shrinking style throughout; I'm not sure if that's a deficiency or not. It's certainly in keeping with the mood of the book, so I'm not sure whether to count it as a deficiency or not.

4 people found this helpful

conflict between science and tradition

this is a classic story about the intersection between Science and Technology, Religion and Tradition. We must understand that there is Beauty in what we have lost in our search for greater power. what is more important -- power and self-reliance, or beauty and community? Where is the balance?

1 person found this helpful