Word: atwoods
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...Margaret Atwood...
...bridal clothes and] hurl the brides over the stair railings or drown them in the bathtub." But while the dolls effortlessly return to life, the people in the novel, like the three pigs in the twin's version of the classic children's tale, tend to "get boiled." Atwood's comic parallels, even when a little heavy-handed, are always a lot of fun. After all, it's only make believe...
Real life in this novel is even more complex, funny and fascinating than its mock fairy-tale frame. Atwood's latest novel involves three college acquaintances' entanglements with evil: Roz, the daughter of successful Jewish immigrants; Tony, a historian of warfare; and Charis, a believer in aura and the virtues of fruit. In telling their stories, Atwood takes a stab at the rationales of many such modern fairy tales, examining contemporary female stereotypes as well as issues of personal and moral responsibility. Her heroines have to fight for what is theirs, and often seem to lose what little they...
...tone of the novel is not vindictive. The Robber Bride is not the self-indulgence of a man-hater run amok. Rather it seeks to exploit and break down, sometimes clumsily, the myths surrounding the first generation of the women's movement. Atwood's tongue-in-cheek allusions enable her to wittily explore the complexities of gender relations in this generation. At times, however, her acuity yields to carelessness. This is most notable in her depiction of Charis, and her airy speculations on numerology; Charis relates that seven is "two threes and a one, which [she] prefers because threes...
...Atwood digs up the pieces of their experiences, reconstructing them the way a historian puts together the pieces of a life, a movement or a battle. With all of the talk of war between the sexes, for instance, we might forget to think about the battles between supposedly allied forces. For Tony, the novel's academic, "the personal is not political...the personal is military" and "war is what happens when language fails." Such personal complications are what decide and entangle the roots of history. It is often at this point that fiction begins to enter into the picture. Embarrassing...