Reviews

The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1) Special Edition by Margaret Atwood

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emilybebs's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

lunchous's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated

5.0

chirson's review against another edition

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4.0

I don't know if there's much left to say about this novel that hasn't been said much more eloquently by others. I read it first when I was less than twenty (I think! I remember reading it at the kitchen table, but not so much what year it was), and in translation. I'd found it to be quite cold and mean-spirited; I felt it judged the reader just as it judged every character it showed. For the record, Polish education had given me a good few experiences with writing from and about totalitarian regimes, but (or perhaps, therefore?) I found the voice of Offred to be too clinical and fake. I couldn't put myself in her shoes at all.

Fast-forward more than a decade, into a world which is oddly similar to the one Atwood wrote in, and thus in a way about, I suppose. This time I still feel distant from the narrator and the world, but I get why - the narrator is distancing herself as well. In many ways, she is not an active agent but a witness, and distanced from her own body, from her own experience. She has few words, so the words she has, she turns around in her head. She is a poet.

I feel like a lot of the novel is concerned with what we do with stories and how we approach the subjectivity and personhood of other people. On the one end, we have the regime that dehumanises practically all human interaction, that has no space for kindness or love, replaced by duty. On the same side lies the framing epilogue, whose jokes and dispassionate clinical interest are so out of step with what we were witnesses to. The (POC?) characters of 2175 look down on the (mostly) Caucasians of late 20th century Gilead and say that morality is relative and it's not our place to judge the actions of Gilead's inhabitants - a mirror image of today's defenders of "it was a different time"-ism, perhaps.

And on the other hand we have Offred, self-described wimp, looking to ascribe humanity, motivations, feelings even to those who oppress her (it's particularly striking how much space she dedicates to guessing/imagining the internal life of men, always aware of the irony - that she is supposed to lack any interiority, to be empty so as to be filled). Tempted to sympathise with them just a little. Making mistakes due to this.Here, I finally could reduce the distance between the character and the reader.

(It's amazing how different the novel feels, to me, from the series. And even the elements that the two share (many of which I thought had been invented for the series, and which in fact were quite directly lifted, sometimes with lines of dialogue) seem to have a different tone. The show filled in the gaps, and the text seems the worse for it.)

saraamitchell's review against another edition

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2.0

as a character-driven person i literally could not connect with anyone in this book which made it so hard to read. the concept overall was interesting but the writing style was not for me.