handflex2005's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
tansybradshaw's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
As with any essay collection - there are ones I loved and ones I could leave. As a writer, the ones I love more are the ones talking about writing, society and art.
neelram's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
deeclancy's review against another edition
5.0
This marvellous tome is a book of essays, lectures, and reviews by Margaret Atwood, covering 2004 up to 2021. When I bought the hardback version, I thought I'd perhaps dip in and out of it over a long period, but I ended up reading it sequentially from cover to cover instead.
Atwood's enthusiasm for writers she admires is pretty infectious, and I now have a list of authors and books that I feel I simply must read, based on these essays. The pieces are not strictly 'criticism' in the traditional sense, because often she has met or had friendships with the people whose work she writes about. And even where this isn't the case, her observations about literature are invariably interwoven with autobiographical details related to where she was when she first encountered authors' works.
Atwood's knowledge of literature is deep. She refers to her own dystopian fiction as 'speculative' fiction, The Handmaid's Tale being the obvious example of her work in this genre. When I first read this book in the '90s as part of a course on feminist literature, admittedly, I thought it was somewhat of a stretch to think things could get to that point in the U.S. At the time, I actually preferred her non-speculative novels. Now that it has gone mainstream in reaction to the rise of the right, my younger self seems a little too optimistic.
I have one bugbear: In the 2016 essay, 'We Hang by a Thread' (based on a lecture), Atwood, almost as an aside, says that the handmaids in her famous book are 'free from rape, narrowly defined.' Even narrowly defined, they are absolutely not free from rape. Anybody required to have sex with a master figure under a repressive regime is experiencing rape, as well as slavery. What does she mean by this comment? It is really difficult to say.
This reminds me of the time Whoopi Goldberg bewilderingly said, in reference to Roman Polanski's rape of a 13-year-old girl (with the tacit cooperation of Hollywood luminaries present at the time, which gives us a taste of how deeply ingrained the Hollywood corruption was, even pre-Weinstein), that it wasn't 'rape-rape'.
Of course, Atwood is talking about her own fictional characters, rather than trivializing the ordeal of a living woman who was raped as a child, as Goldberg was doing. It's not even remotely as problematic as Goldberg's comment, and perhaps I am misinterpreting Atwood's aside. However, these comments, as well as others made by women slightly older than I, are a pattern that I've noticed. Is there an entire generation of women out there who really don't know the legal definition of rape?
Angelica Huston, for example, has said that sexual predation by older men toward female children was the norm in the 1970s, by way of excusing Roman Polanski. I was a child in the '70s, and no - this was absolutely not the norm among the vast majority of decent people (though we knew it occurred). It was rightly considered deviant then, as it is now, to approach a child sexually, except, it seems, in certain circles in Hollywood where it was totally accepted.
The fact that a person has directed a few films does not make the deed any less criminal than if it was done by a man in a dirty raincoat offering children candy outside a school. Sorry Hollywood, but it's time to face up to the fact that the game's up and most people see through the decades of rank hypocrisy. Artistry does not justify pedophilia, and if you define yourself as liberal left, you're going to have to admit that the right of people (women, men, especially children) to freedom from sexual predation while in the course of their work is a universal right that extends to film sets. No wonder things are so politically polarized in the U.S. when such double standards exist!
Do these women actually believe it isn't rape unless a stranger leaps out of a bush and puts a knife to a woman's throat? Is that generation of women so inured to sexual predation that they see it as normal, or are they trying to justify artistic friends and personal compromises? It's difficult to say. In fact, statistically, most rapes and sexual assaults are perpetrated by people already known to the victim, and this familiarity can be heavily weaponized by the perpetrator. Any form of non-consensual sexual contact is sexual assault, and in most jurisdictions, any non-consensual sexual intercourse is defined as rape. Added to this, a minor is not capable of consent. Period.
It seems rather unfair to dwell on that one phrase in a book that is absolutely full of wonderful observations and essays I know that I will revisit. But it needed to be said, in this post-#MeToo age. As there is one essay entitled 'Am I a Bad Feminist?', I would say Atwood is, overall, an excellent feminist, and she makes some salient points in this essay on the importance of rationality in the age of online, passion-driven activism, when people see passion as a justification in its own right. For the most part, the women of #MeToo took to social media because the justice system has failed them, and for many, it took massive courage to speak out. But where due process is in the course of taking place, we must respect this. In 'Am I a Bad Feminist?' Atwood makes this point powerfully.
She is obviously more than willing to say things that many on the left-of-centre are afraid to say, including that historically, purveyors of revolution have tended toward misogyny. In her essay on the writing of her book The Testaments (the recent, long-awaited follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale), she recounts the story of: 'Olympe de Gouges, the author of Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), which claimed for women a small portion of the kinds of rights that revolutionary men were claiming for themselves in 1789, ended up being accused of sedition and treason and beheaded by the guillotine.' (p. 414-5)
Plus ca change! I remember sitting at a Trotskyist meeting I was invited to on the 'question of women' or some such title, in Dublin as a student (in the '90s, the time I first read Atwood), and listened in horror as two women speakers gave the same party line that had clearly been fed to them by a man. This party line was that women's rights were important, but 'the revolution' was more important, and everyone must work toward that FIRST. On completion of 'the revolution', the issue of women's rights would THEN be addressed. Somehow, I intuited from this meeting that the attitude, should the elusive revolution be obtained somehow, would be as Atwood describes in the same essay in telling parentheses: '(The pattern was repeated almost exactly during the course of the Russian Revolution, and indeed during the aftermath of the Second World War in England and North America. Thanks for your help, ladies, now scurry back to your nests and stay there because that's where you really belong. And please, no impudence.)'
Uppity, impudent women of the past are, of course, the reason we can vote, get a third-level education, own property, and drive cars. Currently, in Iran, they're the reason people are finally on the streets saying No to theocratic dictatorship. Obviously, I never became a Trotskyist after that experience as a college student: I was too far gone into my feminism at this point to get sucked into a political philosophy that demeaned women. This was a time when Irish women still could not take their rights for granted in many areas, and when there were still Magdelene homes in operation. Sexual predators often got away with their activities because of what women were wearing when attacked (and other excuses), and judges believed this was right and proper. Women were pretty much brainwashed by the prevailing cultural narrative to blame themselves for injustices that they faced.
Other highlights in this book are the essay The Gift, which is about a book that I now absolutely must read; Atwood's insights in several of the essays into life and culture behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall; and her tributes to her late long-term partner Graeme Gibson. This book helped me to appreciate the vast range of Atwood's knowledge and provided great insight into the various forces that have shaped her as one of the most interesting and widely read authors of our time.
Atwood's enthusiasm for writers she admires is pretty infectious, and I now have a list of authors and books that I feel I simply must read, based on these essays. The pieces are not strictly 'criticism' in the traditional sense, because often she has met or had friendships with the people whose work she writes about. And even where this isn't the case, her observations about literature are invariably interwoven with autobiographical details related to where she was when she first encountered authors' works.
Atwood's knowledge of literature is deep. She refers to her own dystopian fiction as 'speculative' fiction, The Handmaid's Tale being the obvious example of her work in this genre. When I first read this book in the '90s as part of a course on feminist literature, admittedly, I thought it was somewhat of a stretch to think things could get to that point in the U.S. At the time, I actually preferred her non-speculative novels. Now that it has gone mainstream in reaction to the rise of the right, my younger self seems a little too optimistic.
I have one bugbear: In the 2016 essay, 'We Hang by a Thread' (based on a lecture), Atwood, almost as an aside, says that the handmaids in her famous book are 'free from rape, narrowly defined.' Even narrowly defined, they are absolutely not free from rape. Anybody required to have sex with a master figure under a repressive regime is experiencing rape, as well as slavery. What does she mean by this comment? It is really difficult to say.
This reminds me of the time Whoopi Goldberg bewilderingly said, in reference to Roman Polanski's rape of a 13-year-old girl (with the tacit cooperation of Hollywood luminaries present at the time, which gives us a taste of how deeply ingrained the Hollywood corruption was, even pre-Weinstein), that it wasn't 'rape-rape'.
Of course, Atwood is talking about her own fictional characters, rather than trivializing the ordeal of a living woman who was raped as a child, as Goldberg was doing. It's not even remotely as problematic as Goldberg's comment, and perhaps I am misinterpreting Atwood's aside. However, these comments, as well as others made by women slightly older than I, are a pattern that I've noticed. Is there an entire generation of women out there who really don't know the legal definition of rape?
Angelica Huston, for example, has said that sexual predation by older men toward female children was the norm in the 1970s, by way of excusing Roman Polanski. I was a child in the '70s, and no - this was absolutely not the norm among the vast majority of decent people (though we knew it occurred). It was rightly considered deviant then, as it is now, to approach a child sexually, except, it seems, in certain circles in Hollywood where it was totally accepted.
The fact that a person has directed a few films does not make the deed any less criminal than if it was done by a man in a dirty raincoat offering children candy outside a school. Sorry Hollywood, but it's time to face up to the fact that the game's up and most people see through the decades of rank hypocrisy. Artistry does not justify pedophilia, and if you define yourself as liberal left, you're going to have to admit that the right of people (women, men, especially children) to freedom from sexual predation while in the course of their work is a universal right that extends to film sets. No wonder things are so politically polarized in the U.S. when such double standards exist!
Do these women actually believe it isn't rape unless a stranger leaps out of a bush and puts a knife to a woman's throat? Is that generation of women so inured to sexual predation that they see it as normal, or are they trying to justify artistic friends and personal compromises? It's difficult to say. In fact, statistically, most rapes and sexual assaults are perpetrated by people already known to the victim, and this familiarity can be heavily weaponized by the perpetrator. Any form of non-consensual sexual contact is sexual assault, and in most jurisdictions, any non-consensual sexual intercourse is defined as rape. Added to this, a minor is not capable of consent. Period.
It seems rather unfair to dwell on that one phrase in a book that is absolutely full of wonderful observations and essays I know that I will revisit. But it needed to be said, in this post-#MeToo age. As there is one essay entitled 'Am I a Bad Feminist?', I would say Atwood is, overall, an excellent feminist, and she makes some salient points in this essay on the importance of rationality in the age of online, passion-driven activism, when people see passion as a justification in its own right. For the most part, the women of #MeToo took to social media because the justice system has failed them, and for many, it took massive courage to speak out. But where due process is in the course of taking place, we must respect this. In 'Am I a Bad Feminist?' Atwood makes this point powerfully.
She is obviously more than willing to say things that many on the left-of-centre are afraid to say, including that historically, purveyors of revolution have tended toward misogyny. In her essay on the writing of her book The Testaments (the recent, long-awaited follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale), she recounts the story of: 'Olympe de Gouges, the author of Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), which claimed for women a small portion of the kinds of rights that revolutionary men were claiming for themselves in 1789, ended up being accused of sedition and treason and beheaded by the guillotine.' (p. 414-5)
Plus ca change! I remember sitting at a Trotskyist meeting I was invited to on the 'question of women' or some such title, in Dublin as a student (in the '90s, the time I first read Atwood), and listened in horror as two women speakers gave the same party line that had clearly been fed to them by a man. This party line was that women's rights were important, but 'the revolution' was more important, and everyone must work toward that FIRST. On completion of 'the revolution', the issue of women's rights would THEN be addressed. Somehow, I intuited from this meeting that the attitude, should the elusive revolution be obtained somehow, would be as Atwood describes in the same essay in telling parentheses: '(The pattern was repeated almost exactly during the course of the Russian Revolution, and indeed during the aftermath of the Second World War in England and North America. Thanks for your help, ladies, now scurry back to your nests and stay there because that's where you really belong. And please, no impudence.)'
Uppity, impudent women of the past are, of course, the reason we can vote, get a third-level education, own property, and drive cars. Currently, in Iran, they're the reason people are finally on the streets saying No to theocratic dictatorship. Obviously, I never became a Trotskyist after that experience as a college student: I was too far gone into my feminism at this point to get sucked into a political philosophy that demeaned women. This was a time when Irish women still could not take their rights for granted in many areas, and when there were still Magdelene homes in operation. Sexual predators often got away with their activities because of what women were wearing when attacked (and other excuses), and judges believed this was right and proper. Women were pretty much brainwashed by the prevailing cultural narrative to blame themselves for injustices that they faced.
Other highlights in this book are the essay The Gift, which is about a book that I now absolutely must read; Atwood's insights in several of the essays into life and culture behind the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall; and her tributes to her late long-term partner Graeme Gibson. This book helped me to appreciate the vast range of Atwood's knowledge and provided great insight into the various forces that have shaped her as one of the most interesting and widely read authors of our time.
sephlav's review against another edition
4.0
This woman is really worldly and smart and makes me want to get my life together