Margaret Atwood
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Selected Poems 1964-1975 (1987) by Margaret Atwood |
you fit into me like a hook into an eye an open eye a fish hook. |
This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: ... Alas, it is a boring song but it works every time. |
Oryx and Crake ( 2003) by Margaret Atwood |
Short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2003, this satisfyingly apocalyptic "speculative" fiction is one of Margaret Atwood's best. The protagonist's wry sense of humor, in a world where he may be the last living human, relieves the terrors of the book (including being hunted by intelligent and freaky genetically engineered predators) and make it (despite other reviewers) LESS "grim and depressing" than Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. As the protagonist (Jimmy or Snowman) scavenges the little that remains of civilization, he remembers how his biotech world was smashed by the creative and dangerous genius, Crake (named ironically for an extinct animal).
Like others of her books (most notably "The Blind Assassin", her Booker Prize winner) this novel by Margaret Atwood works through a sequence of flashbacks. Here she uncovers the cause of the destruction as well as the origin of the genetically engineered Children of Crake. The latter look like humans, for the most part, but how much genetic engineering does it take, how much splicing of genetic features borrowed from other organisms, to make a human non-human?
Atwood's attention to words is a delight. One sees it in her own excellent writing, and in her many puns in the names of the products and organizations (HelthWyzer, Extinctathon, MaddAddam, RejoovenEsense, BlyssPluss), and in the words (berating, bemoaning, doldrums, lovelorn, leman, forsaken, queynt) that Jimmy says to himself because he can no longer say them with people who understand them.
The Year of the Flood: A Novel ( 2009) by Margaret Atwood |
May well be the best book read in 2009.
Anyone interested in the Fate of The World
could be fascinated by Margaret Atwood's recent novel of 'speculative fiction' (her words).
This is a pre-quel to her Oryx and Crake and is more accessible
in that one sees the motivations and the developing story of the various groups.
By contrast,
Oryx and Crake,
a 2003 Best Book,
while also excellent,
is madder and more puzzling to read.
Both books end up in the same place, so either can be read first;
they are both about deceit, deception, and the desire to be God.
Remember [p.147]:
Illness is a design fault... It could be corrected. |
When it becomes clearer that genetic engineering is toxifying:
The ratio of women to men fleeing the Corporations was roughly three to one. Nuala said it was because women were more ethical, Zeb said it was because they were more squeamish, and Philo said it amounted to the same thing. [p.247] |
While it solves nothing permanently, the fight of a commune of women and children against some large testosterone-endowed ruffians is a joy [p.254].
This book is rightly praised by many, including novelist Jeanette Winterson, who writes:
In this strangely lonely book, where neither love nor romance changes the narrative, friendship of a real and lasting and risk-taking kind stands against the emotional emptiness of the money/sex/power/consumer world of CorpSEcorps, and as the proper antidote to the plague-mongering of Crake and Jimmy, for whom humankind holds so little promise. |
Winterson's favorite Atwood genetic invention is (as is mine):
the liobam — a cross between a lion and a lamb, engineered by a lunatic fringe religious group that's tired of waiting for the prophecy of the lion lying down with the lamb to come true. Their own breed has curly golden hair and long, sharp canines, and will look at you very gently while it rips your throat out — which is pretty much the metaphor for the world of lethal paternalism created by CorpSEcorps. |
The Penelopiad ( 2006) by Margaret Atwood |
If you are going to read The Odyssey this gives you a view of what Odysseus' faithful wife might have been doing with her life.
It was an intriguing reference in the brilliant Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey": A Biography by Alberto Manguel.
Atwood's uses the maids of Penelope and Odysseus' household as the equivalent as the Greek chorus and commentary, culminating in Chapter 24: "An Anthropology Lecture", which shows the maids to be:
The twelve moon-maidens, companions of Artemis, virginal but deadly goddess of the moon ... The thirteenth was our High Priestess, the incarnation of Artemis herself. She was none other than — yes! Queen Penelope! |
100 Essential Modern Poems By Women (2008)
edited by Joseph Parisi and Kathleen Welton. |
Related pages:
Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and related topics. How to Write Poetry. |
Copyright © 2010-2016 by J. Zimmerman, except for the quoted poems.
All rights reserved. |
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