Dragaera

OT: GRRM finished AFoC (sorta)

Casey Rousseau casey at the-bat.net
Tue Jul 5 14:36:21 PDT 2005

Philip Hart writ:
> On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Mark A. Mandel wrote:
> 
> > --- Matthew Hunter <matthew at infodancer.org> wrote:
> >
> > > That's the problem.  Ged didn't present a new story; LeGuin's
> > > guilt did.
>
> > Are you a telepath? Or did she confess somewhere?
> 
> It seemed clear to me on reading _Tehanu_ that Matthew's view was
> correct or that someone else had written the book.  Of course such
> an opinion can't be proven.

Ah, but of course "someone else" wrote the book.  That's the point I've made
time and again.  LeGuin could not help being a different person in the late
80's writing Tehanu than the one who wrote the original trilogy twenty years
earlier.  Likewise, I was a different reader when I arrived at Tehanu than I
was when I first listened to Aunt Ursula weave her tales of a wizard named
Sparrowhawk.  To expect either of us to remain the same is an exercise in
frustration.  

I think we can agree that the caution Matthew urges with respect to this
book should be observed carefully, especially with younger readers, or ones
with a strong emotional connection to the Ged, Tenar, & Co. of the original
books.  I don't think it will be necessary for all such readers, but
certainly given the sample at hand, one may not say that there are no
readers for whom Tehanu would be disturbing and potentially traumatic.

Matthew, is this fair?  I don't know about anyone else, but I'd like to put
this particular issue to bed.

C.