How do you write about a world you have never seen? It’s a strange question for a writer of science fiction to ask, yet this was the spark that led a young Ursula K. Le Guin to Orsinia. Orsinia, “an unimportant country of middle Europe,” was where, as a young writer in the early 1950s, she began to wrestle with ways to describe those worlds. She yearned to grapple with themes of government, revolution, and liberty; but having never left the United States, she felt unequal to the task of setting a story in Europe.
So Le Guin created Orsinia, a land striving to be simultaneously plausible and unreal—a country that doesn’t really exist, but which could exist. It’s a strange warping of genre conventions and a foreshadowing of how Le Guin’s later novels would blend the lines between science fiction and fantasy.
Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the rare writers to be included in the Library of America during their lifetimes, insisted that the Orsinia works be her first anthology. The resulting volume combines the text of Malafrena, Le Guin’s full novel, with a collection of Orsinian Tales and Other Stories. In Malafrena, which she describes writing “in a white heat,” the plot follows the struggles of willful, idealistic Itale Sorde, the son of a provincial landholder who goes to the capital for his education and remains there out of a passionate desire to see his country free and independent. The reader has the sense that Le Guin herself is struggling alongside Itale, learning through his story the techniques of fiction—how to develop a character, a plot, a setting. Because of this, the story of the rebellion itself sometimes seems stale, a repetition of other failed revolts led by various literary characters who felt (as Itale did) that they “must succeed, because [their] hopes were so high” and who found, instead, that “it was all air, words, talk, lies: and the steel chain that brings you up short two steps from the wall.”
Overall, Malafrena has that feeling, as though it were straining to reach something it couldn’t quite touch. Le Guin wants to show us that revolution comes at a human cost—even outside of lives lost—but Itale Sorde’s yearning for his lakeside mountain home lacks the feeling of emotional realism.
Perhaps the trouble is Itale himself, for the clunky writing disappears after his tale ends. In this volume, the strongest writing appears in the short stories, where Le Guin revisits Orsinia at various points in its history. While Malafrena seems bogged down by a sense of righteous purpose, the stories highlight individual lives, using them to show the political realities of the time. Though some are comparatively short, they show a depth of character and setting that Malafrena lacks. In 1960, a man wanders away from his minders in Paris, uncertain if this is a plea for asylum or an attempt to gain a moment of freedom. In 1150, a man struggles with the choice between pagan sacrifice and Christian faith as his wife endures a difficult labor. In 1920, a blind man and the woman who loves him vow to leave a miserable life in the provinces in the hope that life in the city will be better.
There are tales of mining accidents and marriages, musicians, miners, and brothers—ordinary people living history one day at a time. The best show the value of relationships in the world after World War II, when Orsinia falls behind the Iron Curtain. Here there is a hint of the sort of fiction that blends politics and prose, and would later win renown for Le Guin. And here, as a writer, Le Guin is able to take advantage of what the Orsinian setting offers: freedom to look beyond the practical details of place and setting to focus her gaze on the characters themselves.
Erin Mundahl is a reporter for InsideSources.
