Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Prose.
Time Line.
Books of Poetry.
Books of Prose.
Novels.
Essays.
Poems selected from her books:
- The Circle Game.
- The Animals in That Country.
- The Journals of Susanna Moodie.
- Procedures for Underground.
- Power Politics.
Includes her classic:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
an open eye
a fish hook.
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- You Are Happy.
Includes many brilliant 'songs' but especially the Circe poems and "Siren Song":
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.
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Prose: Novels
Oryx and Crake
If you think bio-engineering is a good and well-controlled area,
read this engrossing book and think again.
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
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]:
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Illness is a design fault... It could be corrected.
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When it becomes clearer that genetic engineering is toxifying:
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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]
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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:
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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.
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Winterson's favorite Atwood genetic invention is (as is mine):
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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.
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The Penelopiad
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:
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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!
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Prose: Essays
Negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing
(essays) (2002)
Six stimulating and delightful essays adapted from her delivery of the Empson Lectures.
Her Introduction includes [p. xvii]:
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This book ... is about writing ... it's about the position the writer finds himself in;
or herself, which is always a little different.
It's the sort of book a person who's been laboring in the word-mines for, say forty years
... might think of beginning,
the day after he or she wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders what she's been up to all this time.
What has she been up to, and why, and for whom?
... Perhaps I have reached the age at which those who have been through the wash-and-spin cycle a few times
become seized by the notion that their own experience in the suds may be relevant to others. Perhaps I wish to say:
Look behind you. You are not alone. Don't permit yourself to be ambushed.
Watch out for the snakes.
Watch out for the Zeitgeist—
it is not always your friend.
Keats was not killed by a bad review.
Get back on the horse that threw you.
... advice no doubt useless.
...
These are the three questions most often posed to writers, both by readers and by themselves:
Who are you writing for? Why do you do it? Where does it come from?
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She gives two dense pages of phrases paraphrased from other fiction writers she concludes [p. xxii]:
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Evidently any search for common motives would prove fruitless.
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She then asks novelists what it feels to begin a novel. This is a little more successful
leading to her tentative comment [p. xxiv]:
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Possibly, then, writing has something to do with darkness,
and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it,
and, with luck, to illuminate it and bring something back out to the light.
That book is about that kind of darkness, and that kind of desire.
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After a Prologue that is orientation to the "not tightly sequential" organization of the chapters we have:
- Orientation: Who do you think you are?
Subtitled: "What is a 'writer' and how did I become one?"
A quote from [p. 9]:
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My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous,
a marshmallow compared to the others [in her family].
... It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons
is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
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and from [p. 14]:
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In 1956 ...
I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down,
and after that writing was the only thing that I wanted to do.
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- Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double
Subtitled: "Why there are always two"
So, who do you find if you meet the author? Probably not
what you hoped for, as in this quote from [p. 35]:
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There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board pinched from a
magazine — "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like
wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté."
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A quote from [p. 57]:
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Here is my best guess, about writers and their elusive doubles, and the
question of who does what as far as the actual writing goes.
The act of writing takes place at the moment when Alice passes through the mirror.
...
At this one instant,
... Alice is neither here nor there,
neither art nor life, neither the one thing nor the other, though at the same time
she is all of these at once.
At that moment time itself stops,
and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world.
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- Dedication: The Great God Pen [a pun not a typo]
Subtitled: "Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?"
A quote from [p. 64]:
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The money factor is often underplayed in biographies of writers,
the biographer being as a rule much more fascinated by love affairs,
neuroses, addictions, influences, diseases, and bad habits generally.
Yet money is often definitive, not just in what a writer eats but in what he or she writes.
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and from [p. 68]:
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I can still hear the sneer in the tone of the Parisian intellectual
who asked me,
"Is it true that you write the bestsellers?"
"Not on purpose," I replied somewhat coyly.
Also somewhat defensively, for I knew these equations as well as he did,
and was thoroughly acquainted with both kinds of snobbery:
that which ascribes value to a book because it makes lots of money, and
that which ascribes value to a book because it doesn't.
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- Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co.
Subtitled: "Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil's book?"
A quote from [p. 104]:
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Can everything and everyone be used by you —
viewed as material, as they are by Hugo, the writer whose wife calls him a
"filthy moral idiot" in the Alice Munro short story called
"Material"?
... The lovely tricks, the magic. The art.
It doesn't compensate — or not in the wife's mind —
for the filthy moral idiocy of Hugo.
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and from [p. 122]:
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The secret is that it isn't the writer who decides whether or not his work is relevant.
Instead, it's the reader.
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- Communion: Nobody to Nobody
Subtitled: "The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between"
A quote from [p. 151]:
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That is who the writer writes for: for the reader.
For the reader who is not Them, but You.
For the Dear Reader.
For the ideal reader, who exists on a continuum somewhere between Brown Owl and God.
And this ideal reader my prove to be anyone at all
— any one at all —
because the act of reading is just as singular
— always —
as the act of writing.
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- Descent: Negotiating with the dead
Subtitled: "Who makes the trip to the Underworld, and why?"
A quote from [p. 157]:
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The Minoan civilization which once flourished on Crete
left remarkably few written texts, and this was possibly because the Minoans
weren't overly afraid of mortality
— writing being, above all, a reaction to the fear of death.
[referencing Dudley Young's Origins of the Sacred.
Atwood then goes on to list considerable supporting data.]
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But here in the world of writers [p. 178]:
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All writers learn from the dead.
... Because the dead control the past, they control the stories,
and also certain kinds of truth
...
so if you are going to indulge in narration,
you'll have to deal, sooner or later, with those from previous layers of time.
...
The dead may guard the treasure, but it's useless treasure unless
it can be brought back to the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more
— which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers,
the realm of change.
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- 17 pages of notes.
- 10 pages of bibliography.
- 4 pages of acknowledgments.
- 8 pages of index.
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- 1939.
- Born in Ottawa, Canada.
- 1964.
- The Circle Game. Poems.
- 1968.
- The Animals in That Country. Poems.
- 1969.
- The Edible Woman.
- 1970.
- The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Poems.
- Procedures for Underground. Poems.
- 1971.
- Power Politics. Poems.
- 1972.
- Surfacing.
- 1974.
- You Are Happy. Poems.
- 1985.
- The Handmaid's Tale.
- 1985.
- The Handmaid's Tale
short-listed for
the 1986 Booker Prize.
- 1988.
- Cat's Eye.
- 1989.
- Cat's Eye
short-listed for
the 1989 Booker Prize.
- 1993.
- The Robber Bride.
- 1996.
- Alias Grace;
short-listed for
the 1996 Booker Prize.
- 2000.
- The Blind Assassin wins
the 2000 Booker Prize.
- 2002.
- Negotiating with the dead: a writer on writing
(essays).
- 2003.
- Oryx and Crake;
short-listed for
the 2003 Booker Prize.
- 2006.
- The Penelopiad.
- 2008.
- One of 48 women poets in
100 essential modern poems by women:
- 2009.
- The Year of the Flood: A Novel.
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