Reading this book over a decade after I read it the first time, gave me a different perspective on it. Reading it living in Massachusetts instead of Canada also made me think differently about the story.
I didn't pick up on the fact that the Rachel and Leah Centre where the women in this reproductive dystopia are taken for their retraining is actually Harvard University. When I first read it, I imagined it was set in a generic or Toronto-like city (Atwood after all seems to like Toronto), and recognizing the few features that are described made the second read through a very different experience than the first.
It was as creepily dystopic as I remember it, if anything, I think if was more eerie for me reading it as an adult rather than as a teenager. When the handmaid loses her job and is reduced to a nobody, an extension of her husband, his response to it hit me harder this time than the first time that I read it.
I also loved the "Historical Notes" at the end in which academics 150 years later attempt to reconstruct the history of Gilead, in part from the testimony of the handmaid (the narrative is revealed to have come from the transcription of a set of tapes found in a trunk in Maine - the researchers actually needed to construct a tape recorder to play them). It's so similar to what we frequently do in literary studies, and it made the relative nature of the story so much more realistic for me. Not only is the story fragmentary and unorganized, but it also clearly depends on the narrator's memory, which is demonstrably false sometimes, for example, when she tries to imagine what has happened to her husband, or when she writes, "I don't want to tell this story anymore".
I'm very glad I reread this book, aside from the fact I've included it in one of my reading lists.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
The Mimic Men V. S. Naipaul
I think this is one of the first books I've ever read (at least that I'm consciously aware of) that won a Pulitzer Prize. I can see why it won it. I can also see why popular fiction will never win the Pulitzer.
The novel tells the story of a Caribbean politician and his life "in parenthesis" on his home island and in London. The narrative voice doesn't shift from place to place, which keeps the focus on the cohesiveness of the personality that moves between the two spaces. The narrator's depiction of his own life is strangely muted at times, as if he really doesn't ever care what happens to him. He never seems to get angry for instance, even at things he should be angry about, and when people around him express other strong emotions like anger or jealousy, he is terribly uncomfortable with it.
The narrator is fascinated with the quality of light in both places, but most particularly in London, something shared with some other postcolonial writers, and his depictions of landscapes frequently employ light as a descriptor of the mood that each place evokes. It's a very interesting engagement with the physical, yet non-tangible element (light) of landscape.
This is certainly one of those books that sticks with you after you've read it and worthy of a reread at some future point.
The novel tells the story of a Caribbean politician and his life "in parenthesis" on his home island and in London. The narrative voice doesn't shift from place to place, which keeps the focus on the cohesiveness of the personality that moves between the two spaces. The narrator's depiction of his own life is strangely muted at times, as if he really doesn't ever care what happens to him. He never seems to get angry for instance, even at things he should be angry about, and when people around him express other strong emotions like anger or jealousy, he is terribly uncomfortable with it.
The narrator is fascinated with the quality of light in both places, but most particularly in London, something shared with some other postcolonial writers, and his depictions of landscapes frequently employ light as a descriptor of the mood that each place evokes. It's a very interesting engagement with the physical, yet non-tangible element (light) of landscape.
This is certainly one of those books that sticks with you after you've read it and worthy of a reread at some future point.
Lady Audley's Secret Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Victorian novel, so of course it's a long one, but it's also sensationalist fiction, which makes it fascinating reading.
I'd read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White whcih is the other great Victorian sensation novel, but I think this one was better crafted. I especially liked that the villain in this one was a woman, but because a woman also wrote it, she is portrayed as a criminal without all the misogynistic Eve-spawn crap that most men (at least in the Victorian and earlier eras) wrote into any depiction of evil women. I actually rather admired Lady Audley at times, even though she was a horribly spoiled young woman who could not be content to live with the decisions she's made in her life (the limited nature of those options in the society depicted does somewhat mediate this problem, but she still takes the lowest road possible).
I read Collins in a Victorian lit class, but I think if I wanted to include a sensation fiction novel, I would include this one rather than Collins, just as I would replace Rushdie as a representative postcolonial writer with Zadie Smith.
I'd read Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White whcih is the other great Victorian sensation novel, but I think this one was better crafted. I especially liked that the villain in this one was a woman, but because a woman also wrote it, she is portrayed as a criminal without all the misogynistic Eve-spawn crap that most men (at least in the Victorian and earlier eras) wrote into any depiction of evil women. I actually rather admired Lady Audley at times, even though she was a horribly spoiled young woman who could not be content to live with the decisions she's made in her life (the limited nature of those options in the society depicted does somewhat mediate this problem, but she still takes the lowest road possible).
I read Collins in a Victorian lit class, but I think if I wanted to include a sensation fiction novel, I would include this one rather than Collins, just as I would replace Rushdie as a representative postcolonial writer with Zadie Smith.