now I only have 'Oryx and Crake' and I have not read it. I don't have any other books by her and I know little about her except that she is a well known critic. What I do know is that she is fairly popular and seems very well educated (according to wikipedia)...what are your opinions? Is her work good?
I hope death is joyful, and I hope I'll never return -Frida Khalo
If I seem insensitive to what you are going through, understand it's the way I am- Mr. Spock
Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil. - Baudelaire
I've only read The Handmaid's Tale so far, and thought it was well written and well worth the time.
http://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale...9060723&sr=1-1
I'd be interested in your eventual opinion of Oryx and Crake.
Handmaid's Tale was a good read, although ironically I only really liked one character, who was a man.
I think she is interesting, except that she can't not write in an ironic tone - I think that is her weakness, that her tone is so monotonously ironic, and never sounds beautiful - she is obsessed with her own theories of Canadian literature, to the point where, despite her middle class upbringing of privilege - her successful school days, her best-selling career in every genre, and wide fame and awards - she always needs to write about depressing things, and surviving in some wasteland - despite the fact that she drives a car, doesn't need to worry about anything, and has yet to be forced into any of the positions she describes - I think her obsession with survival, and how it pertains to Canadian literature is pretty much idiosyncratic to her - her thematic criticism to me doesn't seem justified by the tradition, and merely seems made up.
That being said, Alias Grace is a good novel, as is Cat's Eye, and perhaps Surfacing and she has the occasional good poem every now and then, though I think she has abandoned that, as she has run out of ideas.
As a personality, she is most disagreeable, and self centered but that doesn't make all her works bad, it just shows in much of their attitude.
Handmaid's Tale did get a bit 'let's jump on my high horse' at times.
I really appreciate your thoughts and I have heard good things about 'the handmaid's tale'
JBI, you told me exactly what I wanted to know so thank you for that.
I hope death is joyful, and I hope I'll never return -Frida Khalo
If I seem insensitive to what you are going through, understand it's the way I am- Mr. Spock
Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing 'evil'–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil. - Baudelaire
My problem with Atwood is her apparent inability to portray men as anything but two-dimensional and monotonously negative... it's as though she cannot conceive of a strong male character... and her way of creating strong female characters seems to me to not so much be a case of creating a strong female character but producing these strong female characters by surrounding them with flat and insipid male characters..
I don't know, maybe it's necessary to have weak and underdeveloped male characters in order to make her heroines stand out more, but to be honest I don't think this is really the case... I think her writing, and her stories would be much more powerful and interesting if every single man in them wasn't portrayed in the same malevolent light... it just takes away from her writing and her "feminist" themes... I just can't help thinking also that if a man were to constantly portray his female characters as so malevolent and flat and negative he would be labelled misogynist and castrated for it.. at least today anyways.. I would describe Atwood as more "sexist" than "feminist"...
all that said though, I do think she can tell an interesting story, and is quite a capable writer, I just think she has tired out the same basic theme by using it over and over...
It's not so bad in The Handmaid's Tale (although Nick and Luke are entirely 2D).
It's the survival bit - the only way to really work a contemporary, Canadian system of "wilderness" is to feature the woman in a wilderness of men as predatory - it's all straight out of Frye and D. G. Jones. The struggling, sort of Susana Moody type character is in sharp contrast to the Successful sort of embracing figure of Catharine Parr Traill who completes the binary, and is the model for the women in Margaret Laurence's work, notably Morag Gunn from The Diviners.Originally Posted by islandclimber
The Moody mold is there everywhere - she is obsessed with it, to the point where the Parr Traill mold, women both successful as career women, and as writers and mothers, doesn't hold. The healthiness of such heterosexuality, seems alien to her, as her outside politics seem dominated by looking at images of women suffering - she feels comfortable using these images for herself, which is audacious, yet she has also no problem borrowing the men from those pictures, and transporting them into contemporary Canada, or whatever.
Of course, she is quite monotonous - I don't think she has ever written anything happy, but if you read her early essays of criticism in Survival, it all makes sense, in a sense - she has constructed Canada as a wilderness, and merely peoples it.
There is one sort-of feminist book that I like- Quartet, by Jean Rhys. It works because you really pick up on the lonely quality and everyone is maginified to symbols- the physically and emotionally weak woman, the dominant yet crushing man, the jealous wife who gives in to the man's desires...
I have only rad one of Atwood's books.
Quite by accident, I ran across The Blind Assassin at our library. I thought it was quite good. I am not a literary critic, and at my stage of life, I like to read what is interesting. This book was interesting and held my attention. Sometime later, I got an unabridged cd, and found it enjoable to listen to.
Last edited by dfloyd; 08-28-2009 at 03:38 PM.
I think she is OK, but her "agenda" spoils her work for me. I would like to see her write without this huge black cloud, but I don't think this is likely, even so, I don't think I would read her work for pleasure, or of my choosing.
You hit the nail on the head! I get tired of all her CanLit theories too - if you look at her list of favourite authors and books, it's almost exclusively Canadian content only: http://www.infloox.com/person?id=93b89bb3&lang=de ...I honestly do wish she'd branch out a bit and try something else for a change. You know that old saying, "You are what you eat"? maybe it should be modified to "You are what you read".
That's not what I said at all - you seem to misunderstand me. I am not criticizing her championing of Canadian works - I personally think she has done great things in that regard, and was there at a time when Canadian literature was essentially not even recognized as a tradition - her influence helped to bring several great writers wider attention, and to establish Canadian literature as a discourse.
It's her use of thematic criticism which gives me trouble, because, quite simply I don't agree with her thesis - she seems to misunderstand (purposefully I think) Frye's Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, and rework it to fit her own Susana Moody-driven image of Canada as apocalyptic Eden.
Her work perhaps just shows the limitations of thematic criticism as applied to a modern, multicultural set of texts - whereas the Canada as Wilderness worked somewhat in the beginning (I think she misinterprets lots of works from mid-20th century), the same themes have been superseded, or replaced by more contemporary issues, notably post-modern politics, issues of historiography, immigrant and multicultural narrative and cultural identity, and labor issues. The And as For Me and My House model of struggling artist against a wilderness just doesn't hold much ground anymore, especially when you consider what is coming out of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and other cities, which feature the city, rather than the wilderness as backdrop - Ondaatje himself, in In the Skin of a Lion directly references that, by recasting Frye's notion of "The belly of the Whale", the voyagers trip into Canada by following from the sea by river into Hudson's Bay, and then wandering through the wilderness - by replacing it with the arrival of immigrants into Union Station in the 20s.
Beyond that too, Hugh MacLennan writing during the second world war (his novel set during the First World War) in Barometer Rising describes a similar situation, where the wilderness is silent next to the human aspect of Halifax, and industry:
A growing moon, pale as the inside of an oyster shell, hung over the forests and harbours of Nova Scotia, and in this nocturnal glimmer the edges of the province were bounded by a wavering flicker of greyish white, where the sea broke over the rocks of the coast. On all the solitary points thrusting out into the Atlantic, into the Fundy or the gulf of St. Lawrence, lighthouses winked or gleamed like fixed stars… The highways were empty and dark, and the windows of the farmhouses gave no light but that reflected from the moon. In the north of the province, around the Sydneys, pouring slag flared against the sky and turned the harbour into a pool of ruddy fire, while the last blast furnaces trembled under the pressure of armament production. In all other parts of Nova Scotia, silence gripped the land like a tangible force, for in only two of its counties was there the noise of a great city or factory, or the rush of traffic over a road. (MacLennan 157)
Her work just doesn't hold ground anymore, and held little ground - in truth, The Moody Parr Traill binary, which sort of extends itself to a discussion of Atwood's works, versus someone like Margaret Laurence's sort of destroys the myth - Parr Traill was able to negotiate the wilderness, and the struggles between work, art, and motherhood, and by extension, Laurence's Hagar or Morag are able to negotiate the land as well - except Traill is denied a voice in favor of Moody within Atwood - the struggle of the woman against the endless cold and wilderness - the struggling artist unable to gain expression.
She essentially misreads Irving Layton in that regard, taking poems like The Birth of Tragedy, and The Cold Green Element as aspects of a sort of struggling artists survival within the Canadian wilderness, but ultimately, neglects to read other poems by him, such as Against This Death.
I could go on forever, but I think I have bored most of you already.
We read The Handmaid's Tale in class. I liked it for the most part. It was bleak and eventful. Eventfully entertaining. Like a comic book.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
