|
Loading... The Year of the Flood (2009)by Margaret Atwood
Absolutely mesmerizing. I just learned it's book 2 of a trilogy. (  ) usefuljack | May 17, 2013 |  Absolutely mesmerizing. I just learned it's book 2 of a trilogy. ( ) usefuljack | May 17, 2013 | I really enjoyed this book, although not quite as much as Oryx and Crake. Both are beautifully written and I am very excited to read the third, MaddAddam. I really like the idea behind the Gardeners and really enjoyed the split perspective in this novel. It was really insightful to see the progression of the two main characters with the split between the pre- and post-flood selves and their pre- and post-Gardener personas. Very intriguing and exciting read. I love Atwood. (  ) Zura27 | May 7, 2013 | This was more interesting to me than Oryx and Crake, the novel to which it is a sequal of sorts. The Year of the Flood can easily be read without having read its predecessor. Perhaps I enjoyed The Year of the Flood more because it has more characters, and the interactions between them give the book additional richness. The novel's dystopic world is an extension of current trends - corporations gaining more power and control over our lives, our food becoming more and more processed both chemically and through genetic manipulation of plants and animals, sex and entertainment compensating for the general emptiness of people's emotional lives (a major theme is prostitution). What I found especially interesting is the depiction of the environmentally conscious religion followed by all the main characters at various times in their lives. I've heard it said that our planet can only be saved by a shift in attitudes which has the power of religious conviction. The religion around which The Year of the Flood revolves is focused on environmental protection, something I can only admire; at the same time, it has the negative qualities of religions I'm familiar with - a dogmatic. coercive and patronizing approach to teaching people its doctrines, while the leaders hypocritically shade the truth and make adjustments to the doctrines whenever it's inconvenient, impractical or counterproductive to follow them. It's a complex portrait of how religion works, suggesting that its power for good may be inseparable from the harm it causes. margad | Apr 28, 2013 | http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2013/03/review-year-of-flood-by-margaret-atwo... On a recent road trip, I brought along Margaret Atwood's stupendous The Year of the Flood unabridged audiobook. It was good- five star, top shelf, rave to your friends until they're sick of hearing about it good. The Year of the Flood is about the end of the world. While the book's structure is divided between the time before and the time just after a pandemic that pushes the human race to the brink of extinction (the "waterless flood" the novel's religious zealots warn about), human life was over long before the disease's outbreak. Atwood writes about people trying to build a life in the ruins of civilization. As power and wealth concentrates to the elite few, how do the rest of us forge a life? Can you get a decent job, find a decent place to live, raise a family? Through the eyes of two survivors, Toby and Ren, Atwood shows us a world in which the corrupting power of oligarchy's decadence and self-service rips civilization apart. Dystopic fiction is by its nature less escapist than most sci-fi and fantasy. But when it's done poorly, it drifts into sentimentality or (worse) nihilism. Atwood walks a fine line with her sinister, all-powerful CorpSeCorps. As in The Lord of the Rings, the bad guys are unstoppable, and the good guys are too fractured and divided to win without a lot of good fortune. The God's Gardeners, the religious zealots who shelter and adopt Toby and Ren at different points in their lives, are working to build a second Eden without attracting too much attention from the CorpSeCorps' goons. The group's theology is barely coherent, featuring "saints" like Rachel Carson of Birds and Jesus of Nazereth the Fish Conservationist, and indulging in debates over what level of genetic modification and invention qualifies a creature as "real." But, the Gardeners save Toby from an abusive situation that was rapidly deteriorating. Against the comedy of the heroes rests an avalanche of very real horrors. Both Toby and Ren are sexually abused. Both women trade sex for food, safety and survival. Both women find that their lives before the Flood are not as safe as they would have liked to believe. At its heart, The Year of the Flood is about the human capacity to dream, the ability to imagine that this must be the worst it can get and that things will turn around soon. I think that this hopefulness is why Atwood infuses so much humor into the Gardeners- because she believes that the human ability to laugh at ourselves, to enjoy ourselves no matter what the circumstances must be as strong (if not stronger) than our tendancy towards self-destruction. As Ren observes towards the end of the novel, “The Adams and the Eves used to say, 'We are what we eat,' but I prefer to say, we are what we wish. Because if you can't wish, why bother?” ( ) jscape2000 | Apr 17, 2013 |
 Om Margaret Atwoods ”Syndaflodens år” kommer att räknas till de stora framtidsskildringarna går inte att säga ännu, men potentialen finns.  That it's funnier and less gruelling than The Handmaid's Tale owes much to Lorelei King's honey-coated reading and the enchantingly old-fashioned hymns from the God's Gardeners' Oral Hymn Book, sung by the equally honey-voiced Orville Stoeber. Now that's something you could never get from the printed page. In Hieronymus Bosch–like detail, Atwood renders this civilization and these two lives within it with tenderness and insight, a healthy dread, and a guarded humor. "The Year of the Flood" is a slap-happy romp through the end times. Stuffed with cornball hymns, genetic mutations worthy of Thomas Pynchon (such as the rakuunk, a combined skunk and raccoon) and a pharmaceutical company run amok, it reads like dystopia verging on satire. She may be imagining a world in flames, but she's doing it with a dark cackle. Personally, though, I prefer Atwood in a retro mood. I’d easily take “Alias Grace” or “The Blind Assassin” over the lucid nightmares of “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Oryx and Crake.” But fans of those novels should grab a biohazard suit, crawl into a hermetically sealed fallout shelter, and dive right in.
References to this work on external resources.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Book description |
|
| Haiku summary |
|
No descriptions found.
From the Publisher: The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners-a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life-has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers. Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move, but they can't stay locked away. By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.… (more)
Quick Links |
Google Books — Loading...| Swap | Ebooks | Audio |
| 8 avail. 1480 wanted |
(3.93)| 0.5 |  1 |
| 1 | 11 |
| 1.5 | 3 |
| 2 | 39 |
| 2.5 | 18 |
| 3 | 168 |
| 3.5 | 92 |
| 4 | 414 |
| 4.5 | 87 |
| 5 | 243 |
L'any del diluvi by Margaret Atwood was made available through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Sign up to possibly get pre-publication copies of books.
Become a LibraryThing Author.
20
Wikipedia in English (2)
