margaret atwood

27 June 2013

The Handmaid’s Tale: Feminist Dystopia

In my recent post on apocalyptic fiction, I promised you a post on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – and here it is! The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and is therefore the most recent of my reviewed books of Atwood (I have previously written reviews on The Edible Woman and Surfacing). However, it is actually the first book I read by Atwood – I read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for the first time because it kept appearing in connection with science fiction and dystopian literature. That sparked my interested and I was […]

8 June 2013

Surfacing: Identity

Margaret Atwood’s second novel Surfacing (1972) follows in the footsteps of her debut novel The Edible Woman: it also portrays a woman who undergoes a transformation, albeit a strikingly different one. The Narrator of Surfacing has no name, which I think is deliberate: she has no identity, but she could also represent something bigger – all women, all Canadians. In the novel, the Narrator, together with her boyfriend Joe and her friends, married couple Anna and David, travel to the Narrator’s family cabin next to a lake in a remote area of Quebec. There, the Narrator wants to find her […]

10 May 2013

The Edible Woman

Margaret Atwood’s debut novel, first published in 1969, was way ahead of its time. Initially it reminded me of Mad Men: a TV show in which women are undermined by the patriarch society from not so long ago. For the record, I have only seen three episodes of Mad Men and then I gave up, because it is neither fun to watch nor did I really care about any of the characters. What Mad Men and The Edible Woman have in common is the behavior of men towards women. The Edible Woman, however, is an “original”, a real product of […]