I started tackling Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre a couple years ago — I think the first one I read was Alias Grace, and since then I’ve read 17 of her books. Every time I go to Half Price to see if there’s anything new (to me), and I’m starting to run out! Dancing Girls is a short story collection (her first one, in fact), and while it wasn’t one of the better Atwood books that I’ve read, it was still pretty good. “Everyone thinks writers must know more […]
Perception and Remembrance
The Blind Assassin is Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize and Dashiell Hammet Award winning novel (2000) that spans the major events of the 20th century while telling the tragic story of the Chase sisters. It is an ingenious combination of history and mystery with love, infidelity, avarice, godliness, war and literary references woven deftly within. This is also a novel about women, class and perception, or misperception/blindness as the case may be. The novel is narrated by Iris Chase Griffen, daughter and wife of captains of […]
A haunting reminder of what we can be: just boys grown tall.
Some spoilers below. My wife attempted this book a few months ago and it devastated her. For her, it was an unremitting wasteland of degraded women that, instead of highlighting the great strides towards equality that we’ve made, emblazoned the vast distance we’ve had to travel to become a society barely cognizant of the barriers still firmly in place. To read such a visceral recitation of subservience and lack of empowerment endangered her emotional equilibrium. So, despite near universal acclaim, I was somewhat reticent about […]
“She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn’t happened before.”
I love Margaret Atwood. Joe Hill named a boat after her in The Fireman (review forthcoming), and I may have squealed a little in delight when I saw it. I’m still getting through her whole bibliography — I love going to Half Price Books and seeing if they have anything by her that I’ve missed. Her novels and short stories rarely miss the mark for me. Wilderness Tips, a short story collection published in 1991, does not disappoint. “The girls in the stories make such fools of themselves. They are […]