Word: atwood
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Reading Margaret Atwood's short stories is like seeing life studies done by an artist famous for large, symbolic canvases. Absent are the extended metaphors that gave form to her earlier novels. The protagonist of An Edible Woman, for example, feels so cannibalized by the people in her life that she serves her fiance a bride made of sponge cake and icing, then flees from the altar. Gone too is Atwood's allegorizing. In last year's The Handmaid's Tale she offered a vision of America transformed into a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy...
...Here Atwood is concerned with rapid and telling characterization, especially of men. In Scarlet Ibis, Don and Christine have gone on vacation to Trinidad, where the decomposition of their marriage picks up speed. Don is the kind of fellow on whom a sunburn, "instead of giving him a glow of health, made him seem angry." He began "drumming his fingers on tabletops again." < When he made love to his wife, it was "as if he were listening for something else, a phone call, a footfall. He was like a man scratching himself. She was like his hand...
...HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood. This chilling cautionary fable postulates a future U.S. ruled by Fundamentalist Christians and offers an oppressed heroine strong enough...
None of these triumphs has yet produced a solid profit for the News. Despite McClatchy's first-ever monthly profit, in May, the paper will probably end the year in the red. The Times's publisher, Robert Atwood, 79, says that he is far from abandoning the war. "We're in a position to buy them out and relieve them of their losses," he says. But more quietly, Atwood offers a notion that seven short years ago would have been unthinkable: the Times might contemplate a joint operating agreement with the News. "I guess McClatchy's pockets are deeper than...
...cautionary tale, Atwood's novel lacks the direct, chilling plausibility of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. It warns against too much: heedless sex, excessive morality, chemical and nuclear pollution. All of these may be worthwhile targets, but such a future seems more complicated than dramatic. But Offred's narrative is fascinating in a way that transcends tense and time: the record of an observant soul struggling against a harsh, mysterious world...