Reading The Ursula K Le Guin Prize - Sift
- Publisher – The 3rd Thing
- Published – Out Now
- Price – $24.00 paperback
Of all the books on the Ursula K Le Guin prize shortlist, this was the only one I wasn't able to easily source a copy of. All but one of the others are available as ebooks, and The Skin and Its Girl - which has no digital edition in the UK - is readily available in bookshops. Sift, on the other hand, is very hard to get hold of here, and I went to great lengths to try and find a US-based store that would ship it to the UK without my needing to take out mortgage to make it happen. I'm glad that I went to the effort, though, because this is great.
Here's the synopsis:
Two women set out through the haze of social and environmental collapse in search of fertile soil. As they travel through deserts, burned-over forests, and lightless mountain caverns, they learn to navigate the terrain of their evolving connection. An invocation, an elegy, a postcard home, Sift is a story about family wounds, humanity’s failures, how to care for one another at the end, and how to make a new beginning.
The book arrived at my house today and I honestly wasn't expecting to read it so soon, especially as I'm still partway through last year's Booker Prize winner Prophet Song. But the physical book is a real thing of beauty and once I realised it's a novella and barely 100 pages long, I decided to sit down with it this afternoon.
Sift will inevitably be compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it's an apt comparison in a lot of ways. Both deal with a pair of mostly-nameless characters travelling across a hostile, ravaged world in search of a new beginning. But where The Road is almost unrelentingly bleak, giving us only a glimmer of hope at the end that we fear might be snuffed out at any moment. Here the hope is more substantial, brought to us through the human connections that we cling to and nurture even through catastrophe.
Hattman's writing is spare and haunting, at times feeling like prose poetry. The story is painted in brief vignettes that slowly deliver us a fragmented mosaic of meaning to piece together. Though the subject matter is vastly different there's an ethereal, fragmented, dreamlike quality to the prose that reminded me in places of Jenny Offill's Weather. This is a really beautiful piece of work, and it's going to stick with me for a long time.
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