The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

IN ONE OF HER LETTERS TO ME, in response to my praise for The Dispossessed, Le Guin said that the process of writing this book was particularly important for her, in that she felt it had taught her how to make her work more capacious. Certainly Shevek, the novel's protagonist, is by far her most complex character, a physicist of genius, a dedicated anarchist, and a pilgrim who mediates between antithetical worlds.

The book begins and ends at the launch port of the anarchist nation of Anarres. Between the port and the rest of the land there is a forbidding wall, more ominous for looking so commonplace: There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.