Margaret Atwood

"We both wait for my answer."

Atwood's second novel opens with a powerful 1st person voice, an unnamed unreliable narrator walking into ominous isolation. She is on her way from Toronto to a fishing trip in Quebec with her quiet bearded boyfriend and a married couple, David and Anna. David has a Woodie-Woodpecker laugh.

We slowly learn her oddities, and her relationship to the island home they are staying on. Her father owns the island. He's not wealthy, but it's small island and he's an show more obsessed naturalist searching for something. And he recently disappeared. So, the two couples are staying in her own childhood home, with reminders of her deceased mother and childhood, while knowing her father may be around somewhere, living or as a corpse.

Relationship strains, sex, and isolation warp the background texture of her response and relationship to this place and to her missing father. She is searching for him, but discretely and in more convoluted ways. Meanwhile she becomes emotionally isolated, and flat. All the while David, clearly aware of feminist trends but emotionally abusive to his wife, gets wilder. Is she suffering grief? Is she sane?

I liked the voice, read well enough in my audio edition, but I’m mixed on the book. It's interesting in light of who Atwood was then, and how she was developing as a writer. It has a lot of autobiographical references, the father like her father, the narrator a lot like Atwood herself, cosmopolitan but comfortable in nature, soon to get divorced, and also who didn't drive. But the book felt undercooked to me. I thought the narrator's "voice" was strained by doing other book-practical things, like building the book's setting, which just needed information. The odd logic in the narrator's mind, an illogic, albeit given she had a loosening tie to normal sanity, was still very hard for me. I think Atwood was doing at least four things at once: making social commentary, searching an inner life when in a kind of state of grief, and getting the reader in touch with nature, and creating an unreliable narrator.

I'm going too long, but I want to add that I couldn't help thinking of different ways how Atwood could have used this voice. It's striking but loses something in needing to convey everything. I like to think that if Atwood had written the book as a standard 3rd person narrative, and then inserted narrator's voice in places, the same voice would have lit up page, heightened by the contrast. This is just me thinking out loud.

Recommended for Atwood completists and those who can't resist an unreliable narrator. show less

This is Atwood at her best, reflective, with a touch of acerbic humour, and a little cynical in places. Not actually stories, more like ideas, vignettes, all of them clever and thought-provoking. As expected some sparkled, some merely glowed but there are no duds. It's a slim book yet not to be read in one or two sessions, but rather to be dipped into and savoured in individual bites. I started noting favourites but the list got too long. These were at the top of the list: Encouraging the show more Young; Gateway; Our Cat Enters Heaven; Chicken Little Goes Too Far; and best of all, The Tent. show less

Artist Renée Nault pulled key scenes from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to make this powerful graphic-novel companion. I abandoned the source material many years ago out of annoyance and boredom with Atwood’s passive writing style. So much of the story’s impact comes from the shocking and frightening dystopian elements she dreamed up, and fortunately, this adaptation does justice to those with vivid, expressive drawings. It maintains the contemplative tone of the source show more material but winnowed that down so it balances rather than overwhelms. Atwood’s main ideas were also preserved.

Nault’s ink-and-watercolor artwork is beautiful, and her artistic interpretation suits the cast of characters. The commander and his wife are old and look severe, with the wife’s anger and anguish written on her pinched and gaunt face. June is young, with a doll face and delicate frame that reinforce her vulnerability. The rebelliousness of June’s friend Moira comes through in her punkish appearance, as shown in flashback scenes.

Being already familiar with the story, I can’t speak for readers who make this adaptation their first experience with The Handmaid’s Tale, but Gilead is here in all its horror. At the least, readers will feel what Atwood intended for them to feel: alarm over the oppressive and especially repellent misogyny. show less

I really enjoyed this series of essays where Atwood explores debt and credit from a philosophical, sociological, historical and literary perspective. Our built in sense of justice and equity, our inherited morals and culture, our collective history, all impact the way we view money and debt. She ends with the impact of our capitalist society and its toll on our planet and proposes a reframing: not a popular outlook but certainly a needed one. An interested and wild ride through the world of show more money. show less