The Ender books are finally available on Kindle, and i have now finally read Ender book #2, Speaker for the Dead. I was surprised to find a lot of Brazilian Portuguese (my native language) in the story, but I realize that the author's experiences as a missionary for the Mormons in Brazil must have informed much of Ender's experiences as a "Speaker for the Dead," basically a representative of a secular religion of truth-speaking in a Catholic planet hostile to missionaries.
O. S. Card says this is really the book he wanted to write, when he wrote the novel version of Ender's Game - the first book was written to fill in the back-history for Speaker for the Dead. After reading both books, it's easy to agree with him.
Quotes:
I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.
To understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story, what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling.
Only when the loneliness becomes unbearable do adolescents root themselves, or try to root themselves.
Many fail at adulthood and constantly reach backward for the freedom and passion of adolescence. But those who achieve it are the ones who create civilization.
In the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough.
"The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlänning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the främling - Demosthenes merely drops the accent from the Nordic framling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it."
She suspected that in fact there was no meaning, that by telling his stories when he Spoke people's lives, he was actually creating order where there had been none before. But it didn't matter if it was fabrication; it became true when he Spoke it, and in the process he ordered the universe for her as well.
Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.
You're so busy pretending to believe them, there isn't a chance in the world you could learn anything from them.
As long as you keep getting born, it's ok to die sometimes.
Also noteworthy: the story of the three rabbis, in chapter 16 (The Fence).
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