Burning Questions – 4/5
This is the latest collection of nonfiction from Margaret Atwood which comes from the years 2004-2022 or so. She mentions early on that she’s published a version of this book for each 20 years of her writing career, and given that she’s rounding the corner on 85 years, I am imagine there won’t be another collection of the same, but I wouldn’t put it past her. Among other things, there’s no doubt in my mind how ridiculous sharp she still is, and this comes up later when she discusses dressing up with her partner Graeme Gibson for Halloween as Odin’s ravens, whose names mean Thought and Memory. She dresses up as Memory, which is poignant, as she explains because Gibson did not have a good memory by his own admission, and sad because he died of complications of dementia. That’s one of the threads of this collection that stands out, her partnership with Gibson, and her eulogizing him, his writing, their relationship, in ways both before and after he died. She discusses in ways that his long diagnosis gave them time to prepare. Another thread here is her discussions of science fiction and fantasy, and how that often leads her to write book introductions to various texts like Zamayatin’s We, and similar novels. This also begins in 2004 when she was writing the Oryx and Crake books — and so a lot of the essays and speeches here are connected to the eco-literature themes of those books — but also to the 20 year rise in a specific brand of Christian Nationalism in the US and other parts of the world, which reflect in part the vision in The Handmaid’s Tale. This also coincides with the constant assault on body autonomy rights and reproductive justice as well. It also coincides with the writing and publishing of The Testaments and the Handmaid’s Tale television show.
Another great thread through this collection is a discussion of writers less well-known like Gabrielle Roy and Marie-Claire Blais. And of course, I was excited to read more about her reactions and connections with Shakespeare late in her career when she was asked to write for the Hogarth Shakespeare series, which lead to Hag-Seed, which I think is by far the best of the bunch, and secretly one of my favorite of Atwood’s books. This is a good collection that is marred by reading it straight through. I ended up with two problems with the book, which is simply the nature of such a book, and maybe is more of a warning than a criticism. One, Atwood repeats herself over the years, and why wouldn’t she, but it means some of the topics and even specific sentences circulate through the text, so by forewarned. Two, there’s a lot of introductions to other books here. And what that means it on the one hand: be prepared to want to read several books as a consequence of this book: good! But also be prepared to have those books slightly spoiled because publishers cannot help themselves by publishing important details of plot in the introductions of novels.
Dearly – 2/5
I often say that every good poet has one great novel in them. Whether this is Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and contemporary novels by Ben Lerner, Patricia Lockwood, Michael Ondaatje, Melissa Broder, and James Dickey.
That said, not all rectangles are squares, and be warned about novelists writing poems. Anyway, that’s my entire review of Margaret Atwood’s book of poems here.
