Word: guinness
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...course, Hugh is the champion that they are waiting for, but this certainty is a tribute to Le Guin's narrative savvy. Because she moves briskly without ever seeming to hurry, she makes Hugh's transformation from supermarket clerk to Arthurian knight-errant whisk by as inevitably as a theorem, as acceptably as a rabbit coming out of a hat. The author brandishes her magic instead of concealing it; when Hugh accepts his mission on behalf of the people of Mountain Town, he is given a standard-issue sword and sent out to slay a woefully worn...
...most effective prop in Le Guin's act is the quick, sharp description, the vivid detail that lights up its surroundings. The author catches one of Hugh's fellow checkers with a single sentence: "She had a lot of dark red hair, which she had recently got made into a fashionable mane of curls and tendrils that made her look twenty from behind and sixty face on." She gives Mountain Town a medieval European feel simply by looking down at one of its narrow lanes, "so steep that at intervals the street broke into steps, like a person...
Although she assembles an array of epic material, Le Guin does not venture much past the borders of the lyrical. The novel thus seems a little too modest for its own good. It concludes with a conventional clinch, boy and girl returning to a real world now much nicer than before, that undercuts the stern logic of initiation and quest. Like many would-be heroes challenged in first combat, Hugh is wounded; unlike them, he heals easily. Despite this tentativeness, The Beginning Place demonstrates what readers of Le Guin's highly praised science fiction have known for a long...
Though they have covered many odd, speculative spots in the universe, most of Ursula Le Guin's 19 books were conceived and written in one place: an 80-year-old four-story frame house perched on the west bank of the Willamette River in Portland, Ore. The rooms are large, the furniture casual, obviously lived-and lounged-in by the three Le Guin children, who grew up there: Elisabeth, 22, Caroline, 20, and Theodore, 15. An occasional antique betrays an interest in the past; Charles Le Guin, Ursula's husband of 26 years, teaches history at Portland State...
...books, chiefly on the American Indian. The little girl turned into an avid reader and writer; her tastes in both ran to the exotic or bizarre. The first story she can remember completing told of a man who was eaten by elves. As her manuscripts began piling up, Le Guin pondered but put off resolving the question of whether she should turn her hobby into a profession. "I mean, it's like music," she says, recalling her decision. "Are you just going to play the piano in the basement, or is it going to be for real...