Resumo de Buffalo Gals And Other Animal Presences

What a book, what a strange book! A big bag of
tricks, a collection of poems and (sometimes very) short stories whose subject
matter Le Guin flippantly describes as always satisfying one of the
Twenty-Questions categories: animal, vegetable, or mineral? The poems are mostly unremarkable?a few are
charming and one, about woodpeckers in the backyard, is very fine, but it?s the
prose that gets you thinking, shaking your head in awe or amusement. The stories are idea-driven or
idea-dominated, sometimes to the exclusion of plot and character: some really
consist solely of an idea and are not really stories at all; some are
more traditional, hinging on very simple changes in point of view. Nearly all have embedded in them a refreshing, eye-opening concept.
The novella-length title story features a very young girl
who survives an airplane crash in the desert only to discover and (to a certain
extent) be welcomed into a parallel, ?Dream Time? world of animals who can talk
and cook and act as hosts and advisors, who keep house and raise families but
are at the same time archetypal figures unattached in time. The open-minded protagonist tags along after
Coyote, who ?caused the world? and who becomes a sort of adoptive mother to
her; she meets the Horse Prince and Great Owl and his intimidating sister,
Hawk, and sleeps over at Chipmunk?s and Chickadee?s. There?s a patina of sadness over the cracked, jaunty plot, which
ends in the realm of the speculative?where indeed most of the book is firmly
planted. There are stories told by oak
trees and wolves, stories about translating the poetry of ants and penguins and
moss, stories about unicorns and relativity and the implications of quantum
theory for everyday life. One longer
story, mesmerizing and unsettling and more in the vein of traditional science
fiction, is about a ragtag scientific voyage into deep space, to a planet made
entirely of one large, semi-sentient plant, and the effect the silence and
foreignness of untouched wilderness have on the human psyche. Also on hand is the oft-cited piece of
philosophy ?She Unnames Them.? There?s
a story near the end about the death of a panther; it?s an effective meditation
on loss and reclamation, but in it Le Guin can?t resist a dig at ?the men with
the guns.? In general, there?s some
hard-to-swallow silliness to be found, particularly in the introduction, tired
traditional ideas about supposed sexual dichotomies?believing for instance in
Civilized Man (as if only men were guilty of being out of touch with nature),
who ?climbs up into his head and shuts out every voice but his own,? or in the
implicit Wise-Woman model of right living?which kind of thing always
characterizes as oppressive a world view, as ugly an exclusivity, as anything
misogyny can come up with. This
stifling essentialism creeps into some of the stories and chatty
section-prologues. But Le Guin?s
inventiveness is sound, irrepressible, a saving grace.
Aggressively irreverent, fresh, puzzling, wistful, lovely,
sometimes earthy, sometimes intellectual, the book is a talking piece,
something to take with you. At the
heart of a lot of it is well-practiced nature writing: Le Guin is knowledgeable
about and comfortable with these animals and vegetables and minerals. In the worldview on display here, she places
perhaps a little too much faith in the realm of instinct?all cats probably
aren?t petunias, and couldn?t put themselves into boxes to tweak the memory of
Schrodinger: my cats are dumb as stumps, anyway?but the overall effect
of her thought experiments and brain teasers is galvanizing: it gives your
imagination a jump-start to watch Le Guin?s in action.

Resumos Relacionados