The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin is such a multilayered and sensitive novel.
The base line is a story of two persons of different anatomies and cultural backgrounds spending loads of time in the icy wilderness together and finding warmth of companionship in all that snowy loneliness. Then there are layers of gender, interconnectedness of society and nature, loyalty and patriotism, and a dig at Freud and his sublimation theory.
I was most fascinated by the existential quality of the novel. The world described is that of ice and snow, harsh as the cultures of the two countries that inhabit the planet of Winter. Against this brutal background, two lonely souls from the opposite sides of the Universe meet (and I mean meet in the Buber sense), and build a bridge of understanding between themselves and their two cultures. The story made me feel sad and full of hope at the same time for the possibility of a human connection that is the only thing left amidst the constant danger of and, basically, inevitability of death.
The story has a documentary style of an explorer’s journal, where a story of an alien in a foreign land is a part of a dialogue with the Winter’s fables, local’s observations, and notes from the crossing of a glacier that could have been written by Shackleton.
A quiet, but powerful book. Much more than I expected it to be. And look at that beautiful cover!