The Rest is Silence

"That’s the art, eh? What to say, and when to say it. And the rest is silence.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales from Earthsea

Solid. A couple of the stories really resonated with me (The Finder, On the High Marsh, Dragonfly). I cried at the end of one, and one made me pause for half-a-day chewing on it. Overall, I prefer her novels (or novellas) and this showed in this series because I gravitated towards the longer stories. Like with Tehanu, Le Guin alters the form. She is focused as much on the community as on the mages, witches, and magicians. She is looking at community, power, gender, and areas where the page folds, bends, or rips. Her magic is found in the ghost notes of fantasy. She would rather wander in the woods than travel over the expected trails of fantasy. The genre isn't where she creates. She creates in people, in weakness, in the humanity of the oppressed AND the oppresser.

- Foreword - nonfiction introduction: ★★★☆☆
- "The Finder" - School of magic is established (largely by women; or the Women of the Hand) on Roke island: ★★★★★
- "Darkrose and Diamond" - Romance between the daughter of a witch and the son of a rich merchant: ★★★★☆
- "The Bones of the Earth" - Ogion the Silent deals with an earthquake: ★★★★☆
- "On the High Marsh" - Mysterious healer arrives in a remote village with a livestock epidemic: ★★★★★
- "Dragonfly" - Postscript to the novel Tehanu: ★★★★★
- "A Description of Earthsea" - Fictional reference material*: ★★★☆☆

* Most of the story descriptions were lifted/based on the Wikipedia page for Tales from Earthsea.

14 people found this helpful

A bridge between books 4 and 6

I have not read the later books of Earthsea properly. The first three books I read as a teen multiple times. Then five years ago I picked up Wizard of Earthsea, the first in the series. Which lead me to read the sixth book (The Other Wind) of the series. I thought I had read the fourth book (Tehanu), but I have no record of reading it.

So I am all wrong about reading this series. I have picked up the threads of the story and I think I mostly know what is going on. But if I were recommending it, I would tell you to read the series in order and not spread out by 30 years. (Although it was over 30 year spread from the start to the completion of the series.)

There are six stories here and a description of Earthsea. The stories range from 130 to 25 pages. Not unusually, I liked the longer ones more than the shorter ones. The first two and last I think were the best. Throughout the book there was an exploration of why the wizards were only celibate men. A history that shows that the founding of the school at Roke was not by only celibate men. And the final story is about a woman that comes to the school to learn to be a wizard.

The other theme of the book is why and how power is used. All of the stories concern power of one sort or another. When the magic is present to only some. And that magic gives power, there has to be some sense of how and why it should be used. Magic in Earthsea is bound by a balance. Use of magic is limited by the balance of the world around you. The stronger the magic, the more impact it has. Roke is concerned with magic, but not always with the ethics around magic. There is not a religious system in Earthsea that teaches ethics. It is the magic itself that teaches. But like many teaching, experience is how many learn. And experience can be a hard teacher.

I need to go back and try to read book four and see if I have read it and forgotten or if I have not yet read it.

10 people found this helpful

Le Guin gets away from what made the first 3 great

The first three Earthsea books were absolutely wonderful. They were pure stories, and the philosophy expressed in them was based in human experience and learning. They were powerful and touching. In Tehanu, Le Guin started to stray from that power, and weaving her own politics and philosophy, which are very different from my own. This book goes further down that road, such that even the good stories lack the power and heart of the first three books. Of the five stories, three are pretty much forgettable. The first one is good, but lacks much of the human motivation that could make it touching and powerful. The last one tried to be great, but tried too much by half, imposing greatness on the main character without building the personal and character base needed to connect with and awe the listener. It makes me doubt whether Le Guin can capture the former greatness in the last book to close out the series.

2 people found this helpful

Awesome

Loved hearing the history of Earthsea. The stories were easy to connect with and I was emotionally invested in the characters. Especially in The Finder and in The Bones of the Earth.

2 people found this helpful

Mixed

Well it’s better than Tehanu, which made a mockery of common sense. The first story here was good. The second one is just annoying and I’ve stopped after 25 minutes. Can’t stand the main character. Might just skip to the next story, or the next book. Worth getting though, at least for the first story.

1 person found this helpful

Essential reading for fans of Earthsea Cycle

I seriously debated about whether or not to listen to this book because I just wanted to get on with the last book to find out what happened to Ged and Tenar...
I am so glad reason won and that I did listen to "Tales Of Earthsea". It lays essential back storylines, histories. I loved all of the stories. It is also well worth the time to listen to the forwards and afterwords of the author as they further understanding of the world of Earthsea. Listening to the author explaining her thought processes was fascinating. Great read!

My only complaint is that although Jenny Sterlin is a fantastic narrator for the most part, it was hard for me to listen to her grating attempt at the old men voices of the master wizards of Roke. I wondered if doing it made her throat sore. But this was a minor irritation that was easily overlooked.

1 person found this helpful

One of the best Earthsea books!

It seems I read this book of short stories out of order, and should have read it between Tehanu, and the final Earthsea book, The Other Wind. however, it seemed to fit just fine as a final volume of Earthsea, and one of my favorites.

Jenny Sterlin, who did a stellar job narrating Tehanu, returns for this Earthsea installment and does an equally excellent job.

I felt that many of the Earthsea books were just a smidge too long, so the short story format worked very well, with the author having only meat in her stories, no filler. There are a variety of tales here, all of them good, and nearly all of them dealing with the same issues: the Wizards gaining of balance, their loss of balance, and finally, a story that seems to imply that balance will be restored.

In The Other Wind, we see many plot threads resolved, but the one plot thread that I felt was left irritatingly unaddressed was the Wizards sexism, and exclusion of women from the school of Roke. The final story in this collection, Dragonfly, suggests strongly that the practice has ended, with the final words being that they will go back to the school and "open the doors". And with those words, I feel satisfied to close the book (literally) on Earthsea, a place that I enjoyed spending quite a bit of time in.

1 person found this helpful

Fifth book of the Earthsea Trilogy

Wizards, cowherds, witches, sailors, sorcerers, merchants figure in this quilt patched together with glimpses of Earthsea myth and history. Read it to sleepy children, read it to bedridden old folks in pain, reread it for yourself. A treasure. The narrator is faultless and charismatic.
Last and Best: LeGuin reads her own essay, outlining her struggle to weave a path from Ged's world of imagined men's privilege on Roke and Gont through Tenar's reimagining the construction of female power by men on Atuan. Then LeGuin lands Ged and Tenar together in middle age, each with a further altered perception of self as shaped by gender, and she introduces Tehanu, the young smoldering spark of insistent, living change.
At a late 20C Wiscon, after the author had finished The Other Wind, she replied to collegial queries about her ethics in using such power to create flawed emphatic cultural myths of gender. LeGuin stated with conviction that the myth was incomplete, and that more would be written to explore all mythic possibilities in Earthsea, but not by her. This essay is Sartor Resartus. Celebrate with her your own right to be emphatically wrong.

1 person found this helpful

The best series.

This series has totally captured me, much like a song of ice and fire, with its rich symbolism and enchanted world. Read it!

“What matters is whose house we live in"

Ursula K. Le Guin’s fifth Earthsea book, Tales from Earthsea (2001), collects two novellas, three short stories, and a Description of Earthsea. Though some of the tales are better than others, all of them are vintage Le Guin: thought-provoking, imaginative, original, moving, and poetically and precisely written. The characters are compelling and the action suspenseful, without relying on violent action. Except for the novella “Dragonfly,” which is “a dragon bridge” between the fourth and fifth Earthsea novels, the stories are stand alones.

In the Foreword (well read by Christina Moore), Le Guin talks about things like the commodification of fantasy, how she came to revisit Earthsea after having subtitled Tehanu “The *Last* Book of Earthsea,” and how real world history writing is similar to fantasy world history writing. All with her wit and clarity.

“The Finder” is a moving novella about love, power, learning/teaching, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny, similar to what is going on around the later chaotic time of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s natural gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a crazy, amoral wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. How this hellish situation leads to the founding of Roke School (by men *and* women) makes an interesting story. Especially moving and neat are Otter’s relationships with a nude, deformed, mercury-poisoned female slave and with a pirate king’s “crafty man” finder, the Hound.
“All the hope left in the world is in the people of no account.”
(4 stars)

“Darkrose and Diamond” is a romantic story about Diamond, the gifted son of a wealthy lumber merchant, who thinks he can only choose one thing, music, magic, or business, though his mother believes that everything in life is connected, tangled together. Will Diamond follow his bliss and his heart or fulfill his father’s desires? Will Diamond’s beloved Darkrose, daughter of a witch, fit into his life? Le Guin has decided that the voluntary celibacy of wizards is misguided, unnecessary, and possibly harmful.
“Why can’t you have everything you want?”
(3.5 stars)

In order to try to save Gont Port Town from being destroyed by an earthquake, the old wizard Dulse teams up with his former student Ogion to use a powerful elemental spell taught Dulse by his teacher Ard sixty years earlier. The perfectly crafted story, about relationships between teachers and students, fathers and sons, friends and friends, and humans and the earth, is moving. It also says subtle, potent things about gender. It’s poignant to see Ged’s old teacher as a young man.
“In the dark under the water all islands touch and are one.”
(5 stars)

The widow Gift thinks that a traveler who shows up one day at her farm is a king or a beggar. He is surely broken and may be mad, but she senses that he is a kind and true man and offers him hospitality, and he sets about healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. The story is like a western in which a damaged gunfighter shows up in a small town, hides his guns for fear of harming another person with them, and works on a widow’s ranch. What is the man’s story? Who is he running from? Is he dangerous or safe? When a scarred stranger called Hawk shows up at Gift’s farm, we expect a wizardly showdown. Will Le Guin subvert genre again? Her story is a moving middle-aged romance.
“The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.”
(4.5 stars)

“Dragonfly” is a novella about an uneducated, uncouth, large, vital, beautiful young woman who wants to find out who she is and so tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards disguised as a young man and catalyzes a change in the school. The story develops more of the human/dragon thing introduced by Tehanu. The relationship between Irian and a bitter expelled wizard from Roke called Ivory, is neat and funny. I love it when he tries to cast a love spell on Irian, and she punches him while her dog grins at him. The story links Tehanu (1990) to The Other Wind (2001).
“I think we should go to our house and open its doors.”
(4 stars)

After the five tales comes A Description of Earthsea, in which Le Guin writes a kind of encyclopedia entry on Earthsea, with topics like the traits and cultures and histories of the Hardic, Kargad, and Dragon peoples (including their Languages, Writing and Magic), the School on Roke, and Celibacy and Wizardry. Most of this appears here and there throughout her six Earthsea books, but it’s ever a pleasure to read Le Guin’s writing.
(3 stars)

The audiobook closes with a new Afterword (well read by Christina Moore) in which Le Guin explains why she published the fifth book of tales before she wrote the sixth novel. She uses an analogy between the “uncertain beginning of the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony,” wherein he’s searching for the right way to go forward, and what she was trying to do with these tales: find the right way to finish her Earthsea cycle. She also talks about the need for the reality of imaginative fantasy literature in our contemporary virtual world.

The audiobook reader Jenny Sterlin is prime.