Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004-2021 by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780771096419
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

(2015)

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of The Handmaid’s Tale’s publication, which is amazing to me—it doesn’t seem that long ago. Over that thirty years, this book has been published in approximately forty countries, and translated into approximately thirty-five languages. I say “approximately” because new ones keep popping up.

But things were slower at the beginning. I’d say the first reviews, in the English-language countries at any rate, were so-so. The Handmaid’s Tale is not a very cozy book. It’s not the sort of book in which you fall in love with the sprightly, courageous, but conscientious heroine and approve of everything she does. Pride and Prejudice it isn’t. In fact, it got dissed in the New York Times, and being dissed in the Times invariably causes your publishers to cross to the other side of the street when they see you and then run away very fast and hide under a rock. The reviewer was the eminent American novelist and essayist Mary McCarthy, and she was not amused. (She was not amused in general, so I was not alone in failing to amuse her.)

Her review was somewhat incoherent—the Times told me later that she had recently had a stroke, though they hadn’t known that when they assigned the review. She did agree that we should be wary of our credit cards—they were rather new then, back in 1985, having been deployed en masse only in the 1970s—because such cards, if we came to rely on them and only on them, could so easily be used to control us. And this was even before the Internet! We didn’t even know about digital signatures.

But apart from the credit card angle, Mary McCarthy found the tale implausible—surely such a retrograde thing could never happen, in the forward-looking United States—and she also found the language uninventive. Her review was somewhat of a blow to me, as I remembered reading her novel, The Group, back in 1962, in the bathtub, with considerable interest. But it wasn’t the first time I’d had a bad review, and it would not be the last. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, though it sometimes also makes you more peevish. As you have just seen.

But after that rocky start, other commentary on The Handmaid’s Tale appeared. The general import was: In the United Kingdom, they thought it was a pretty good yarn. They weren’t too bothered by the prospect of its scenario actually happening in the U.K., as they’d already done their religious civil war, back in the seventeenth century, and they weren’t anticipating another one anytime soon. In Canada, they asked nervously, “Could it happen here?” It’s the sort of question Canadians often ask, since they imagine their country as the Land of the Hobbits, where the little furry folk innocently drink beer and play hockey and smoke pipeweed and have jolly parties, thinking no harm, and where the evil Eye of Mordor has not yet located them and sent trolls and orcs and Nazgûls and whatnot to exterminate them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.