The Farthest Shore
Ratings230
Average rating4
The third book of the Earthsea Trilogy. Another fantasy; however, reads the book more closely it is a story about one mortality and legacy. Sometime legacy lays too heavily an individual. It is also a coming of age story. Though often considered as a young adult tale the adult reader can enjoy and learn from the book.
Le queria dar mas a este libro y veo que para mucha gente es su favorito de la saga pero para mi no me ha funcionado bien.
Creo que se parece demasiado al primero, y aunque nunca me cansare de este mundo y ver mas de el me ha encantado y no hay nada que me haya disgustado, tampoco hay nada que me haya encantado como fue el caso de los otros dos libros.
Cuando viajan al sur los efectos del olvido y la desesperación crecen.Y si en el sur hay una cierta formación de estrellas pero es eso? No creo que se explique bien, al final foco esta prácticamente en la otra punta del mapa.En un momento dado Ged le da su nombre a Arren y le dice que lo necesitara antes del final. Creo que me he perdido el momento donde lo necesita.
Audiobook reread. I love this book. It deals with, among other things, power, balance, friendship between generations, the shrinking of magic loyalty.
While still a solid installment in the Earthsea cycle it is so far my least favorite.
Pros:
Still great prose, even for a younger target audience.
The two main characters develop very nicely.
Talking dragons are always awesome.
Still a great magic system with an expanding world.
Cons:
Overall plot felt lacking and unlike the previous two books wasn't super clear what the main goal was.
Other characters are very much side characters with little depth. While the world is expansive the people in it are lacking.
I would prefer more conflict but do understand it's original target audience is younger.
26/09/2023
I feared finishing this for the longest time because I thought it was quite the depressing read but actually it was a lot more.
The book alluded to depression and many serious topics like drugs and it was very frank and real in the way only a fantasy book could be when it talks about things in the real world in its own image.
The most worth while aspect of this book was following Arren on his journey. It was not that he grew ultimately wise as he was confronted with each of his weaknesses but rather the admittance that though his journey is great he is also but a man. I couldn't have loved it more.
While I wouldn't recommend someone to read this during a depressive episode like I was in, I would certainly say this is an enjoyable read for those wanting something relatable.
Final rating: 5/5
Le Guin is so real for having the first Earthsea book be like a revisionist Tolkien riff that is kind of standard in style and tone and then just throw the entire approach out and make books 2 and 3 stylistic experiments where Tombs of Atuan is like Lovecraft anthropology and then this book is like a 250-page dream sequence that mostly consists of two guys on a boat having conversations with progressively more and more insane people. Sparrowhawk is the most goated old dude that just kinda hangs out in all of fantasy, I really love how he's still kind of an idiot despite speaking only in esoteric wise man like gandalf or whoever.
3.5 stars
life and death, death and life, beginnings and ends... i didn't love this book as much as i loved the first two, but i appreciated the discussions about life - what it means to die, what it means to live. her books and her prose make me... ponder.
i think what makes me like this book less is that the stakes are too high... i don't know. but i liked how the first two & tehanu are more contained, more... i can't think of the right word. this one feels a little more like a classic hero's journey than the others. i liked it but i didn't love it - i think that's the best way i can express this.
This series has been on my list for years. I'm glad to have it under my belt, but I definitely enjoyed the second book more than the other 2 I've read so far. LeGuinn's writing doesn't really flow for me, it more goes from one event to another. This style does cut out a lot of minutiae, but I guess I like some minutiae. Overall, I am inversted enough to see what happens in this world, but it's not urgent.
Le Guin's books really come alive when her characters, chiefly Ged, speak openly about different topics and share nuggets of wisdom. The dialogue is wonderfully done in these moments.
I struggled with this book more than the other two. While I enjoyed the two characters, I just found the majority of the journey and story quite boring. I loved the interaction between the wise wizard and the prince, however, things just felt flat in other instances and was just boring to me. I'd be okay with rereading it to see if it is just my current circumstances that caused me to not enjoy this one as much.
Quotes
“No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.”
“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?”
“But when we crave power over life—endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality—then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.”
“Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.”
“The Farthest Shore” est le troisième tome du cycle Earthsea d'Ursula K. Le Guin, également connu en français sous le nom de cycle de Terremer.
On y retrouve à nouveau Ged, le héros du premier tome et personnage secondaire du deuxième, désormais vieillissant et Archimage. Il est cette fois accompagné dans sa quête par Arren, un jeune prince. Leur but ? Découvrir pourquoi la magie disparait peu à peu des îles d'Earthsea.
Leur voyage les mènera dans le sud et l'ouest de l'archipel, à la rencontre de peuples que nous n'avions pas encore eu l'occasion de découvrir jusque là. Personnellement, j'ai une tendresse particulière pour le peuple des mers. On retrouve également avec plaisir des dragons, souvent cités mais rarement aperçus dans les romans précédents, hormis une scène marquante du premier.
A travers les aventures du vieux mage et de son jeune compagnon, Ursula K. Le Guin nous parle de la mort et du rapport des êtres humains à cette issue qui peut être terrifiante et malgré tout inévitable. Encore une fois, le récit peut sembler très classique mais révèle une réelle profondeur au lecteur prêt à l'accueillir. Le tout dans un style fin et poétique auquel l'autrice nous avait déjà habitué dans les deux premiers tomes.
Ce roman met fin à la trilogie originale d'Earthsea, publiée au tournant des années 1960 et 1970. Je vais désormais poursuivre mon voyage dans l'archipel avec les trois tomes suivants, publiés dans les années 1990 et 2000.
This book makes me want to drop my readthrough of Earthsea. I'm yet to decide. If I ever read Tehanu it seems like it's gonna be more of a hate read than anything else since reviews say it's as bad as this one only with 1000% more of “THE MESSAGE” and it completely ruins Ged's character.
This one is pretentious. There is nothing happening for 98% of the time and when there finally is something it's so extremely vague that even the metaphors she tried to put in there sound dumb. No tension. No sense of awe even though they are traveling through half of the world. It's all dull and vague. And I HATE her style of writing where she spoils the ending at the beginning. I know this is a children's book but god damn it why?!
I really liked first book and second one was passable, admittedly better as it went, but this book is jaw-droppingly poor compared to it. I cannot even fathom how this book can have average rating above four stars.
Originally I didn't know whether to first read Le Guin's sci-fi or fantasy novels so I created a poll and Earthsea completely obliterated Hainish Cycle. Can someone for the love of all good books explain to me how that's possible?
This one started out pretty slow for me. Then I felt like stopping because everyone they came across was just rambling on, and the gibberish started to get on my nerves. Not sure if it was my mood or the book. I decided to keep reading, and I'm glad I did. I loved the dragons and the ending. They redeemed the book for me.
This book really makes me think Le Guin was a secret pulp fiction fan, of Robert E. Howard in particular. The parallels between this novel and many of the Conan stories are too close to be ignored. Drugs and dreaming, dark dangerous magicians, high seas adventure, and interesting fully realized cultures are staples of REH.
I think this novel may have even been a rebuttal to Howard's dark world view.
Where Howard espouses a philosophy wherein civilization is an island of relative stability doomed to constantly sink back into barbarism, Le Guin counters with relentless optimism. She argues a core of good in people, and the desire to be better. While she doesn't shy away from dark motifs, there's an overarching theme of hope in her writing that, while I don't fully agree with, I find refreshing and charming.
Le Guin's writing style is wispy and beautiful. Her prose magical. I'm constantly bombarded with imagery in the style of Amano Yoshitaka and french impressionism. I've never had writing evoke that kind of response from me. It's kinda cool.
Also. Can I please just fucking live on a flotilla with the Raft People? I love theeeeeem.
Lovely, as the previous Earthsea books have been. As all Le Guin is.
In Book 3, Ged/Sparrowhawk is now Archmage of, er, Earthsea - whatever the main map is about - and is summoned, by Handsome Young Prince Arren, to look into a general problem that people are observing: a great sickness is eating away at the outer lands. Wizards are losing their mojo. Crops are dying. People are being weird. SICK LAND.
Ged has kind of an inkling of what's up and, after Arren is moved to bow down and pledge himself (“MY LIEGE!”) to him, enlists Arren as his squire in what is essentially a long road movie. They pass through a variety of islands in this island world. There's the sad, shitty island where everyone's addicted to a type of opium, the market sucks, and Ged + Arren meet a messed-up, wild-eyed wizard who speaks in riddles. There's the sad, aggro town where they can't dye their silks very well anymore, everyone gets sort of pathetically mad, and they meet a messed-up, wild-eyed wizard who speaks in riddles (yes, another one). There's lots of sea travel. There's an awesome boat society interlude. There are dragons. I won't spoil anymore.
Anyway, the magic of Le Guin's fantasy is how richly tactile it is, and how ponderously wise. As I've said before, it's better Tolkien than Tolkien. This one felt a bit like T.H. White's Once and Future King, in that it combined a genuine feeling of Legend with a genuine feeling of mundane, quotidian humanity. Good values!
Lovely and lovely. I read it also with a parental eye, thinking what age might be appropriate to introduce Earthsea to a kid. There's some deep meditations on mortality, human folly, and one very gross (and scary) scene of violence, so maybe tweens.
Not as unique as Tombs of Atuan, but still enjoyable. Very classic fantasy feel.
Another excellent book by [a:Ursula K. Le Guin 874602 Ursula K. Le Guin https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg]. Here she brings a more adult Ged/Sparrowhawk to the narrative, a fantastic unfolding of what she accomplished in the previous two books. You can notice the growth of the character Ged, now in his winter and on the edge of the land without sun.In a similar manner to the second book, [b:The Tombs of Atuan 13662 The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2) Ursula K. Le Guin https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1166571534s/13662.jpg 1322146], Ged gets to the aid of another character, the immature and passionate Arren/Lebannen, teaching him important lessons about life and death. The end of the book is impressive, showing how [a:Ursula K. Le Guin 874602 Ursula K. Le Guin https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg] knows how to keep the pace, style and the raise an amazing climax such as seen in the previous books, [b:A Wizard of Earthsea 13642 A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1) Ursula K. Le Guin https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1353424536s/13642.jpg 113603] and [b:The Tombs of Atuan 13662 The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2) Ursula K. Le Guin https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1166571534s/13662.jpg 1322146]. A classic, and a must read for all fantasy fans.