Cards of Grief

Jane Yolen is always a thoughtful and somewhat poetic writer, and those are both true for this short novel which tells the story of first contact between what appear to be Earth-originating anthropologists and the natives of the planet known as Henderson's IV, in the year 2132. The story is told through a series of recordings taken by the visiting ship, each one being an interview with either one of the natives or one of the anthropologists. Together they tell the story of the first contact and what went right and wrong; they also show us more about the culture, world, and belief systems of the native inhabitants, who refer to their world as the Land of the Grievers. Their culture is built around grief and mourning; and the main character in the book is the Gray Wanderer, a woman who is by profession a griever who ensures the dead are remembered.

It's an interesting picture of an alien culture and beautifully told, although the titular cards of grief don't even show up until the very last chapter and seem almost an afterthought; I wished they'd played a bigger part in the story and had time to be described in more detail. Overall though it felt a little more like a sketch of a story than a fully satisfying tale in its own, more like the retelling of a novel than the novel itself. If I recommend one novel by Jane Yolen it's generally "Briar Rose", and that still remains my favourite of her adult novels.

A Jane Yolen that reads like an [a:Ursula K. LeGuin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg], how curious! Of course, it doesn't actually read like an Ursula LeGuin, it merely resembles her greatly in form; the book is presented in the form of a series of documents, recordings, and debriefings, concerning the contact of anthropologists (xenologists?) with the people on the planet L'Lal'loria. The book explores their "grief-centred culture [which is:] as much art as religion," and Lina-Lania, chief griever to the Queen.

I'm just going to get this right out there; this was a slow, haunting book to read, and after I was finished it annoyed me to hell. The book seems to believe it was about grief, but I would disagree: the culture did not actually focus on grief as such, (that is, the loss to the living) but rather memorialized and celebrated the dead, for whom the only proper attitude could be mourning.

(I'm not sure I'm making this distinction well, and I hope no one reading this is recently bereaved, but grief is really a selfish emotion, it seems to me, in much the same way that love can be. When we grieve, it's about what we have lost. I don't mean to say grief is bad, it's just that it's about one's own hurts, and a culture actually organized around grief seems to me monumentally narcissistic and maladaptive.)

Despite that they weren't really making "grief" into an art-form, it made me want to clobber them. The only thing they could really look forward to was their deaths, when they would have their bid at real immortality, if their griever was skilled enough.

The rest of the book is your bog standard "Our two cultures were destined to meet in tragedy" story, which, don't get me wrong, takes skill to carry off, but I'm not quite sure if there's anything deeper underneath it. LeGuin is an anthropologist, her books are always about societies; I'm not quite sure what this book is about, if anything.

Filed under enjoyable to read, frustrating to contemplate. Karen Aich, you won't like it for stylistic reasons.