Very Far Away From Anywhere Else by Ursula K Le Guin

I read this book quickly, in a couple of sittings, and both times I found myself straining to continue reading as the practical circumstances of the moment conspired against me (e.g. the first time needing to go to sleep due to a late hour and an early start, the second time walking home from the station in the dark and there not really being enough street lights to read by, but I managed, I managed, I managed)…

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This is a fucking beautiful book. Short, achingly short, perfectly short but still so short…

It’s neat, tidy, clean, clear and an absolute and essential fucking rollercoaster of emotion and reality and literary potency.

This is a world away from The Word For World Is Forest (linked to my comments), but it’s just as fucking good

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Very Far Away From Anywhere Else isn’t one of Le Guin’s famous novels, and partly that’s because it doesn’t fit within any of her multiple “series” of novels (though you could potentially argue (fatuously) that it exists within the distant past of the Hainish Cycle (I’ve really gotta read the rest of those and re-read the one I read when too dumb to enjoy it)), partly that’s because it’s a “young adult” novel, partly it’s because it’s a novella (and that’s a length of book that can be ignored), partly it’s because Le Guin was pretty prolific and so it’s inevitable that some of her work remains obscure… but most significantly – in my opinion – is because this book doesn’t have any elements at all of genre writing within it.

This is a straight piece of literary fiction about seventeen year olds, set near to the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States of America in the middle of the second half of the 20th century, which is when (and probably where) it was written.

The novel is from the perspective of a boy, Owen, who is supposedly typing up and editing the notes he made to himself on a dictaphone, and it explores a significant friendship/romance and the ways in which ambition, education, small town mentalities, norms and expectations all intersect and overwhelm any but the least introspective teenager.

It’s fucking beautiful.

It’s fucking sad.

It’s about friendship and needing to grow up and being ready to be grown up but not quite being ready to grow up…

It’s about sexism and repression but not as much as it’s about toxic masculinity and gender norms…

It’s about car culture, about university culture and attitudes to education…

It’s about place, and about growth and about the risk of stagnation and how easy it is to give up…

It’s about the danger of not listening to yourself and about the ease with which you can abdicate all responsibility to the self and how fucking important it is that you don’t do that.

Maybe that is why I found it so moving, tbh, as I always fucking have (most of the time) abdicated responsibility and it’s how I’ve always (most of the time) ended up so miserable and stuck and in a rut.

It made me cry a lot, reading this, and I don’t think it was solely because I made such a mess of my own life (mostly but not entirely) from the point of Owen’s life that is dramatised in the narrative onwards… The characterisation and the narrative Le Guin creates here is clear and crisp and serious and moving and personal and universal and all the other things that good writing is meant to be…

Honestly, I fucking loved this, and will likely read it again, which isn’t something I think or feel very often at all. Actually, I’ve had that thought after reading a couple of Le Guin’s shorter novels: her writing really, truly, is fucking exceptional. So human, even when (unlike here) it’s not literally about humans.

Strangely, Very Far Away From Anywhere Else wasn’t included in the recent Library of America edition of Le Guin’s other narratively unconnected novels (Five Novels) so that may either mean it’s easier to find on its own (it’s not listed as out of print on her website) or you can do what I did and wait until you organically find a beautiful old paperback edition in, for example, a Windsor, Ontario bookstore.

Really excellent. Find it, if you can.

Very very very much worth the roughly 60 minutes it will take to read.

🙏🙏🙏