Finished January 16th
Picked this up at a used bookstore a couple years ago. The only thing that took some getting used to was the massive amount of description. It's like Atwood wants the reader to see exactly what she sees in her head...it leaves little room for imagination and assumption on the reader's part. It was too much for my taste. I felt bound, if that makes sense...not free to see what I wanted. Which, I guess is fitting, now that I think about it. (The Handmaids in the novel wear what I would call "blinders," like race horses, so they are restricted in what they can see and other people cannot see their faces.)
Here's the description on the back of the book:
Offred (of Fred) jumps back and forth between the past and present throughout the novel. Atwood writes in a style that was a bit confusing for me at first because there's generally no segue between the time switches and the dialogue isn't written as I'm used to. Hardly any quotation marks. It's all just a free-association-type thing. But good. I did enjoy it. It got me to thinking about a lot of social themes and how far a government will go to maintain control if they are uncontested.
Memorable quotations:
- It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
- We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
- But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
My rating: 7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment