The Tombs of Atuan

What Hacker News says

1. NelsonMinarApr 2025
   The best thing about this illustrated edition is Le Guin's own comments written in the past few years reflecting on these books.

   Here's the last paragraph on her comments on Tombs of Atuan. (Um, spoilers, I guess.)

   > Rereading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements. It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character. Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at. But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free—why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake? It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage. Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on a desert ground. And I rejoiced to see it fall. I still do.

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2. creerAug 2023
   I loved these books precisely because they were a refreshing look at fantasy. But yes that makes them completely different reading and there's no problem with not liking them. They are not about plot, they are about the emotions of the characters and the mood of the landscape. And I find these extremely emotional to read because of how much they engage us into the emotions and surroundings of the characters. Also really, the mage has found a direction where not doing anything or much is the way. That doesn't help on plot :-) I loved that the books powerfully evoke the emotions of stages of life:

   A Wizard of Earthsea, the young wizard

   The Tombs of Atuan, the adventure (not about the adventure but about the wizard)

   The Farthest Shore, mage at the end of failing magic

   Tehanu, retirement, ex-wizard, reconciliation

   Tales from Earthsea, short stories of wizards in the field

   The Other Wind, more retirement, old wizards, settling accounts

   And considering how long apart they are written, I marvel at how well they keep to this effort on emotion and mood.

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3. 37ef_ced3May 2021
   The real star of the Earthsea trilogy is the second book, The Tombs of Atuan:

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs_of_Atuan

   The others put me to sleep, honestly

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4. ilamontMay 2021
   I have a bit of a different take on Le Guin's best work.

   I couldn't get into The Dispossessed. I will try again, though.

   I read The Wizard of Earthsea when I was a teen and loved it, struggled with the second book (Tombs of Atuan) at the time, then returned to it 30 years later and now consider it a truly fine work as a story and an examination of religion, tradition, and belief.

   Immediately after completing Atuan, moved on to the third book in the series (and liked it) but couldn't get into #4.

   I've also enjoyed her short stories, including some of her later collections from the 1990s and 2000s.

   A book that is seldom on her "best of" lists but I think should be there IMHO: The Beginning Place. I first read it in the U.K. (with an alternate title, Threshold) but returned to it recently and it holds up in terms of the story and the scope of the strange world it describes. Not to mention the beauty of science fiction or literature or prose or whatever you want to call it in the hands of a master:

   The creek, his companion and his guide: what of it? It must join a river, or become a river, downstream, and large or small it must run at last into the sea. His breath caught. He stared blankly at his fire, his mind held by that thought: the sea that lay beyond the coasts of evening. The darkness to which this living water ran. White breakers in the last of dusk and out beyond them the depths, the night. The night, and all the stars.

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5. voidifremovedApr 2018
   A Wizard of Earthsea, and then The Tombs of Atuan.

   Then read the rest of the series, which are all good, it is just the first two are particularly wonderful.

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6. ExploitsforFunJan 2018
   I just finished re-reading A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan last week. It was enjoyable because I picked up some of the themes that teenage me missed when reading the series all those years ago. A gifted writer RIP
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