Bullies. We hear a lot about them in this day and age: the Internet has made their actions so much more insidious, their violence finds new ways to huBullies. We hear a lot about them in this day and age: the Internet has made their actions so much more insidious, their violence finds new ways to hurt and the shield of anonymity has given them a unprecedented boldness.
Imagine if you will, a solitary, bookish kid who moves to a new neighborhood and doesn’t know anyone, or what the unspoken rules of her new school are. Imagine that this kid is bespectacled, has an overbite and dresses kinda weird because her parents are raging hippies. Well, that was me, and you can bet I spent most of my elementary and high school life being bullied. Nothing physical – and thank God there was no Internet then! But children and adolescent have their own way of inflicting invisible wounds, they have a very specific style of cruelty and hatred. The girls especially: they have a bloodlust…
Reading “Cat’s Eye”, I wondered if Margaret Atwood didn’t have a similar experience. She describes what it feels like to be on the receiving end of another child’s psychological violence much too well to have never know it herself. This book is the story of Elaine, a well-known painter who goes back to Toronto for a retrospective of her work. She has accidentally become a feminist icon, something she has mixed feelings about, but decides to go anyway. The old familiar city brings back vivid memories of her childhood, and specifically of her toxic friendship with Cordelia, a girl who spend years torturing her under the camouflage of friendship, until Elaine was the one with the upper hand…
Atwood is an incredible writer, and a very keen observer of human nature. The way she captured the twisted relationship of abuser and victim in “Cat’s Eye” is very evocative: it certainly stirred up a lot of dust with me and brought back memories of things I now realize have affected me very deeply. Any relationship that affects your formative years leaves a trace in you forever, and it never fades away completely. Elaine only manages to understand this in retrospect because there is no other way to see such an influence. Some reviewers have described this book as depressing, but if anything, I thought it was more bittersweet.
Relationships between women are very complicated, whether they are friendships, family relations or romantic attachments. Atwood is a master at painting such relationships with an incredible realism that never falls into the easy trap of cattiness. Even when she describes flaws she reserves judgement. Cordelia is cruel and manipulative, but Elaine also enjoys some aspect of her status as the victim, albeit guiltily. It is a form of attention, and she hungers to be seen, to be important to someone, even if it is just as a punching bag. The victim and the bully ultimately need each other and neither can walk away.
OK, there are generalizations about gender roles and behaviours in this book. I understand that generalizations are unreliable and wrong, but if I may just say, my own experience has showed me that when people have a weak or no personality, they start behaving stereotypically because they don’t know how to think independently and be themselves. No one is two-dimensional, but in stories like this, one has to remember that the narrator describes their perception, which is always going to be incomplete and flawed: no one knows another person in their entirety, you can only know what they show you. I don’t agree with the narrator’s opinion about everything, but I am not sure I’d go as far as describing it as sexism.
I love Atwood’s writing, and I have yet to be disappointed by her books. “Cat’s Eye” is a beautifully written and honest story about the inner world of girl friendships and I strongly recommend it to everyone – no matter which side of the bullying equation you’ve been on....more
Of all the dystopian and post-apocalypse stories I have read, I think this one might be the most introspective. I shoul4 and a half stars, rounded up.
Of all the dystopian and post-apocalypse stories I have read, I think this one might be the most introspective. I shouldn’t be surprised, as Atwood is a master at capturing the inner workings of people’s minds, but I still found it riveting. Maybe because the narrative is strangely relatable, in a heart-wrenching way. When you see what the so-called bad guys have been through, can you really pretend to not understand their actions?
The story of Snowman (who was once Jimmy) rests on a foundation of genetic experimentation, ruthless for-profit science and the slow erosion of real human connection. Told in flashback, from a wasteland that used to be the United-States, Snowman remembers growing up, watching his parents’ marriage collapse, developing a friendship with a budding psychopath, falling in love with a woman who lived a life of abuse and exploitation… things which inevitably lead him to his current state: a man living on a deserted beach, who interacts with genetically manipulated children and gives them a new creation myth to believe in.
Atwood kept me on the hook by dropping increasingly tantalizing clues as to who the titular Oryx and Crake are, and what they did that resulted in the world being the way it is. Her prose is effortless to read, always just on the edge of poetry, and when it’s used to tell as troubling and fascinating a story as Jimmy’s, it makes for one Hell of a good novel! She slips plenty of symbolism and allegories in there, but the writing is so fluid that you barely notice how much there is going on in each page. There is something of “The Island of Doctor Moreau” and “Brave New World” (and a little bit of “Jurassic Park”) in this book, but with enough seemingly small details that make the world much more realistic: the games Jimmy and Crake play, the drastic segregating of social classes, the dehumanizing spectacles so readily available online…
I was especially unsettled by the references to pharmaceutical companies who have an active interest in keeping sick people around in order to sell them medication – and the possibility that they engineer diseases that they have a ready-made cure for. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I also know how aggressive these companies are and how hard they push doctors to sell their products even when patients don’t really need it (Interesting example: a general practitioner tried to convince a lesbian friend of mine to go on birth control pill by arguing that “you never know what might happen”… Whether the implication was that she would get raped or that she would one day accidentally have sex with a man is something we are still debating).
The ethical use of science and the implications of transhumanism (and human enhancement technology) are obvious themes, but they are approached subtly, along with other more universal themes. Needing love, the urge to exact revenge when love is taken away: those things can’t be solved by gene-splicing, and Crake’s quest struck me as his attempt to reject his humanity because it disgusted him and made him feel weak. He wanted to cut out the parts of him that he considered to be diseased, the same way a surgeon might amputate a gangrened limb. In the process of getting himself rid of his human flaws, he unfortunately caused rather massive collateral damage…
If you are into elegant, thought-provoking speculative fiction that stays with you for a long time, this is an amazing novel that deserves your attention....more
“Neverwhere” was my first Neil Gaiman book, and it was love at first page. I was immediately drawn in by his clever and engaging style, his detailed a“Neverwhere” was my first Neil Gaiman book, and it was love at first page. I was immediately drawn in by his clever and engaging style, his detailed and surreal world building and the devouring need to know more.
Richard is a sweet, slightly clumsy, very ordinary bloke. An act of kindness has him accidently thrown into a whole new world, just below the surface of the one he knows so well, and we follow him down this amazing and creepy rabbit hole as he tries to help a young girl named Door figure out who killed her parents. On this journey, he meets a triple-crossing thief, a tough-as-nail hunter of mystical beasts, a pair of terrifying villains and a very strange angel.
The parallels between “Neverwhere” and “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are hard to miss. A protagonist lost in a world where the logic he knows doesn’t apply, where things are taken very literally indeed and out of which he desperately wants to get out to go back home. But can he really go home after seeing what he has seen? Of course, this is Gaiman, so it is much more gritty and creepy than anything Lewis Carroll could have come up with. Let’s face it, a world for people who fall “between the cracks” will be dirty and dangerous and Richard is too nice to be really prepared for a place like that.
Neil Gaiman has imagination in spades, and this book is a glorious display of what his brain can come up with. His prose is smooth and flows almost poetically, his descriptions are colorful and baroque, his characters strange and seductive – everyone has an agenda, and you never know who will be your friend or betray you. The world he built is beautiful, but also scary and kind of grimy: so it’s like the real world, really… except it really isn’t. That is one of his wonderful gifts: he writes fantasy, but in a way that makes you believe that the story could have actually happened exactly as he told it.
For Gaiman novices, “Neverwhere” is a good place to start, as it’s lighter (both in tone and in physical weight) than “American Gods”, but it has his signature blend of loveliness and creepiness. Feel free to ignore the horrid BBC tv adaptation; get your hands on the radio play instead....more
This is a book about books and the people who love them.
I picked it up randomly when I worked at a bookstore: I was making one last pile of books to buy with my employee discount before starting my first “adult” job. It had a cool cover, so I plopped it on the pile. It took months before I got around to reading it; I finally did one evening when I was alone in my first apartment. I felt lonely and lost, so grabbed something from my pile of unread books… and a few pages in, I was no longer lonely or lost. I was in a dark, gritty, gorgeous city, full of beautiful but shifty people, whose passions were about to take me on a very Gothic journey of secrets, forbidden love and vengeance.
When Daniel first visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, he picks up an obscure novel by Julian Carax: “The Shadow of the Wind”. Enchanted by the book, he decides to go and find the author’s other works only to discover that a mysterious man has been tracking down every copy of Carax’s books to burn them. Daniel refuses to surrender his copy and thus begins a race against the strange man to find out the truth about Julian Carax, and to understand why someone would want to destroy every trace of his existence.
I wish I could read Spanish, because if the prose managed to be this beautiful translated to English, I think it would take my breath away in the original language. I feel like Zafon was having so much fun writing this, because the writing flows with a palpable joy, even when it describes terrible, dark turns of event. The atmosphere swallowed me whole, and I quickly forgot to be annoyed by the two-dimensional female characters (who are really there to give the male characters a motive to do whatever it is they will do, and as such, are more plot devices than characters per se) or the uncanny coincidences, but then again, it is a neo-Gothic novel…
This book made me laugh and cry and feel like my chest would burst with all the emotions it made me feel. The main character is still so young, and he feels things with the raw intensity of youth, and it bleeds off the page, straight under the reader’s skin. It also expressed the unabashed love of books that I have had almost my entire life, more beautifully than I could have ever done myself.
I lose track of the amount of people I have recommended this book to. I usually tell them it’s one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. Maybe because it reaffirmed my old belief that one is never truly alone when holding a good book? In any case, it is one of my all-time favorite books, that I will probably go to again and again, when I am in need for luscious prose and brutally intense emotions....more
Many things about this book surprised me, and while it is a flawed work, it’s also beautiful, thought-provoking and evocative. Before picking up this Many things about this book surprised me, and while it is a flawed work, it’s also beautiful, thought-provoking and evocative. Before picking up this book, it must kept in mind that it is a draft: this is the first two parts of a book Némirovsky envisioned as a musical suite, so five novellas that tie together, but never got to finish because she was taken to Auschwitz, where she died. She had no idea how it would end because the war was still going on when she passed away.
Irene Némirovsky wrote this book during the German occupation of France during World War II, and somehow, she refrained from demonizing the occupants. I think that was what surprised me the most: the German soldiers she wrote about are young men, not always likable, but deeply human. Some of them hate the French people, others are simply obeying orders and are in way over their heads, and some hate this war just as much as the occupied people do. Being a Russian Jew, Némirovsky’s own life in Occupied France must have been a complete nightmare and yet she retained an incredible compassion and candor (at the very least in her work) towards other people, regardless of which side of the conflict they were on.
The French characters of “Suite Française” are also very human and realistic: some kind, some greedy. Fear and desperation will either make the best or the worse of human nature come to the surface and I have never read a more haunting example of that that the fleeing Parisians we meet in the first part of this book. Different people from different walks of life leave the city in a hurry as the Germain invasion reaches Paris, turning the city into a chaotic mess: confusion, panic and egotism drive a middle-aged couple, a bourgeois family, a pompous writer and his mistress and many others to leave the city and try to find a safe place in the country side. It gets messy and heartbreaking: Némirovsky shows incredible empathy in those pages.
The second part is very different in tone, and focuses on a small village not too far from Paris, and how it’s inhabitants are coping with life under German occupation. It focuses specifically on the story of Lucille, a young woman who is unhappily married to a man who was drafted, and now keeps his home and tenants with the help of her resentful mother-in-law. Their lives are disrupted when a German officer is billeted to live under their roof for the duration of the occupation. Through that part, we also see how the enemy presence affects the villagers: the anger and jealousy, the obsession with resources, the secrecy… One woman takes a German lover, arguing that some of their men are much worse than them, people write denunciating letters to the Germans about their fellow villagers to keep the enemy attention off them, the local aristocrat makes deals with the officers to retain certain privileges… All this may sound cliché, but it is written with a great deal of sensitivity.
As mentioned previously, the novel is unfinished, and while we have notes indicating where Némirovsky wanted to take the story, we are inevitably left hanging. It is a miracle that her manuscripts we kept safe as long as they were and that we can now appreciate the work she pursued up until she was taken to a concentration camp. It is almost impossible to disassociate her story from the one on the page, which I believe influences how we read it and relate to it. Some passages are really dark, some very syrupy: obviously, it was meant to be reworked and polished.
Despite that, it is a lovely read and I believe it to be an important book, more as a historical document than as a novel per se, and in my opinion, as a lesson in compassion and observation of human nature and the realities of war. Not the big explosions and death tolls: the small ways it disturbs daily routine, breaks people’s innocence, changes the way people look at strangers. Recommended....more
This is my favorite Atwood novel. The complex interweaving of storylines that ultimately come together in a portrait of a flawed life floored me the fThis is my favorite Atwood novel. The complex interweaving of storylines that ultimately come together in a portrait of a flawed life floored me the first time I picked it up. On the re-read, I discovered even more things to be swept away by. I am impressed.
Be warned: this is not a happy book. Characters are terribly flawed when they are not flat out despicable. But I like that! I love reading about deeply imperfect people, because heaven knows there is no such thing as perfection. I loved to look through Iris’ eyes, at her life and at the world she grew up in, suffered and lived through. I found her story very moving, especially the way she feels the world changing around her. There is a bittersweet cynicism in the tone of the book that really hit home with me.
I am also a sucker for non-linear storytelling (I like using my brain, what can I tell you), and this mix of old lady reminiscing, newspaper clippings, novel-within-a-novel thing was challenging, but very rewarding when the strings finally tie-up at the end. This is an extremely clever book that displays Atwood's technical brilliance, with a fascinating story. Highly recommended for anyone willing to be challenged....more
I have been hearing about Jonathan Safran Foer for ages, and he is one of those authors I keep meaning to read and s"The world is the smallest thing."
I have been hearing about Jonathan Safran Foer for ages, and he is one of those authors I keep meaning to read and somehow never quite manage to get around to. I decided to break this bad habit of always skipping him and tackled his debut, “Everything is Illuminated” with some reservation. I had heard a lot about the unusual structure of this book, the postmodernist trope of the author including himself in his narrative and all that; that kind of stuff doesn’t exactly annoy me, but it does make me feel like patting the book on the head and reassure it that, yes, it is very, clever, good boy.
I ended up enjoying "Everything is Illuminated" a lot more than my cynicism had predicted I would: the story is sweet, funny, heartbreaking and moving, but I also found it rather self-conscious - which I suppose makes sense as it was Foer's debut novel.
A young man named Jonathan Safran Foer travels to Ukraine, looking for the woman who helped his grandfather escape the Nazis during WWII. He hires Alex as a translator, and Alex's grandfather as a driver: little does Jonathan know that Alex's English is not exactly up to par, and that his grandfather will only drive around with his crazy female dog (named Sammy David Junior, Junior) in the backseat and that no one in Ukraine seems to understand the concept of vegetarianism. But the trip will prove to be much more interesting and rewarding than he could have planned. Told alternatively in Alex's broken English, in letters he wrote to Jonathan after his journey and in the history of his grandfather's village that Jonathan is working on, this novel makes for a constantly surprising and often rather strange story.
As I was reading, I was reminded of Nicole Krauss' (Foer's ex-wife) "The History of Love" (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which was her debut novel and has a similar narrative structure of three different voices woven together to make a story about loss, memory and intimacy. The two books might as well come as a set, his and hers. This was a good and entertaining read, but I think I preferred hers.
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Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of the brilliant gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello (one of the best live musical acts I have ever seen) plays Alex in the movie adaptation, and as I read, I kept picturing his amazing face and stage presence. I have to find the movie, because I kept humming this as I read: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3SUP......more
I read “Perdido Street Station” and thought that China Mieville was a genius. Then he wrote “The Scar” and I started wondering if there was a word thaI read “Perdido Street Station” and thought that China Mieville was a genius. Then he wrote “The Scar” and I started wondering if there was a word that could outrank genius… Yes, I am fangirl-ing all over the place.
The chaotic madness Mieville created with PSS was refined and polished for this not-a-sequel-but-definitely-follow-up second book! The simple title is in fact loaded with many different levels of meaning, and China is a master at multi-layered storytelling. On the first level, this is about an enigmatic linguist named Bellis Coldwine, who leaves New Crobuzon to get away from the aftermath of some unpleasant events, only to end up gang planked on the floating pirate city of Armada. Right there, I was impressed: traditional fantasy female characters are young, pretty, clever… in short, a bit unrealistic. But China isn’t afraid of showing warts, and he gives us a grumpy, cynical, smoking protagonist who doesn’t play well with others. In other words, a realistically flawed lady, caught up in a dangerous situation, too complex for her to handle.
Because this is Mieville, his politics shine through: Armada is an equalitarian patchwork city, each parts of it governing itself. As a pirate-city, it is also a refuge for misfits and weirdoes of all kinds; first and foremost, Tanner Sack, a condemned criminal also gang planked along with Bellis. The difference between them (and the brilliantly shown opposite views on their situation) is that he becomes fiercely loyal to his new home, which accepts him for who he is and truly makes him feel like he is useful and belongs there - as where she hates it and wants nothing more than to get back the city she was fleeing in the first place.
We soon realize that there is a bit more to this pirate-city than just recruiting new citizens: its enigmatic (and heavily scarred) leaders, the Lovers, are looking for something very specific, and the people they kidnap all have a role to play in their search. Can I just say how much I loved the concept of that couple! Inseparable, united by their demented plans, mirror-versions of each other… They were creepy, weirdly romantic and totally terrifying all at once.
Just as with every other book of his, China Mieville puts on an impressive display of wild, baroque imagination, clever use of his staggering vocabulary and word-play. But where PSS was a bit all over the place, “The Scar” is more focused, and possibly a more enjoyable book, if only because of that more clearly defined structure. If PSS was the urban fantasy that brought to mind Charles Dickens, “The Scar” is a nautical tale on the scale of “Moby Dick”: there is a mad quest, a conspiracy, an incredible cast of fascinating and well-fleshed out secondary characters… I have to say that I really do feel like both novels are in-dissociable: they complement each other so well, and I can’t read one without immediately wanting to read the other… Obviously, I adored it and I enthusiastically recommend it to everyone!
Musical pairing: when I heard the band “Legend of Dead Seagullmen”, I could not stop thinking about “The Scar”! I bet these guys are Mieville fans!...more
Do not be fooled by the “Oprah’s Book Club” nonsense: this book is both beautiful and brutal. It can feel slow at time, but it is also impossible to fDo not be fooled by the “Oprah’s Book Club” nonsense: this book is both beautiful and brutal. It can feel slow at time, but it is also impossible to forget.
Mother-daughter relationships are probably one of the hardest things to write about. It’s such a complex, nuanced rapport – writing about it means walking such a very fine line and I think that Janet Finch did an incredible job of illustrating a particularly intricate and flawed relationship with “White Oleander”. Of course, no one has the same family baggage, which makes the interpretation of a story like Astrid’s tricky: no one will feel the same about it. In my family, mother-daughter relationships have almost always been strained (and not just for me and my mom: this is a multi-generational problem), so when I first read this book and saw how Astrid went from adoring her mother to wanting to distance herself from her as much as she could, I thought “yep, I get it.”
I loved the prose, the motif of every foster home being its own little universe, its own learning experience for Astrid. No matter where she goes, she is an outsider looking in on an unfamiliar world. The view of foster homes is very bleak: they are all deeply dysfunctional in one way or another, and when Astrid begins to actively seek living in a messed-up environment, I wasn’t surprised; after everything that she had been through, this is a rather classic coping mechanism. The foster mothers can feel cliché at times, but I saw them as gates that Astrid had to get through to understand how to survive by herself. Ingrid is a fascinating creation: so complex, showing a cold surface that hides it’s fair share of secret suffering. I loved how Astrid tries to define herself as more than just her mother’s daughter, even when she sees her influence in the way she behaves.
The lack of stability and of reliable emotional support in her life forces Astrid to grow up much too fast, become aware of some things some adults don’t even understand, and it is a heartbreaking journey. I think of this book more as a survival tale than as a coming-of-age story, really. Her strength and endurance are remarkable: she somehow never lets herself be beaten down by all the tragedies she had to face, and even when she is weary and feeling completely at the end of her rope, she soldiers on. I rooted for her the whole way and just wished she would find a place that really felt like home.
I must say that Finch perfectly captures the strange mix of love, anger, yearning, hatred, hope and self-doubt that one experiences when a relationship with a parent becomes toxic. The need to find someone to attach yourself to because you feel abandoned, and the despair of finding yourself having to start from scratch when you end up on your own yet again is also heartbreakingly spot on. Add to that some very evocative prose and clever use of symbolism: even when this book gets depressing and disturbing, it is impossible to put down very long.
Obviously, this book strikes a particularly sensitive nerve for me, and I can see how some people would be horrified by it or simply not understand it. I’d recommend you give it a shot anyway: just as with every character this book contains, there is more to it than meets the eye. The movie is great, but it really doesn't do the book justice because it fails to capture Astrid's inner world. In this case, the book wins hands down....more
This is still one of my favorite books, and while I can’t tell you if its my third or fourth time reading it (plus an audiobook listen 2022 comments :
This is still one of my favorite books, and while I can’t tell you if its my third or fourth time reading it (plus an audiobook listen on a road trip with my husband a few years ago), I always notice small new things in there that delight me, little details Mr. Gaiman snuck in there to reward mythology nerds, music fans and people who have driven around a bit in the US of A.
I appreciate his perspective, as someone who was, like him, not born in America: he noticed things most Americans would not have given much thought to, because of how familiar they were, and made them matter. Since my first time reading it, I married an American, so my familiarity with the often baffling (from a Canadian perspective) country has grown expodentially, and it has affected my enjoyment of this book, as I can now contextualize so much more of it than I could have on previous reads. In fact, I think this is the most fun I’ve had reading “American Gods”!
I still believe this book to be an absolute masterpiece of whatever genre you think it fits into, but I will concede that it does help to be familiar with Norse mythology – and other myths and legends to fully grasp the essence of the characters and their purpose. But even if you are not, it deserves to be read.
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Full disclosure: I love Neil Gaiman. I’m the weird kind of girl who gets crushes on writers instead of movie stars, and Neil is in a category all of his own in my eyes. I struggle to even find a genre to describe him, and I was happy to see I’m not the only one who struggles to label his work. Gaimanesque. There.
When I first bought a copy of “American Gods”, I think I spent an entire rainy spring weekend alone in my dingy apartment, leaving my pile of reading cushions and blankets only when I had to eat or pee. I just didn’t want to stop reading for even a minute.
This book is a sprawling epic with an intriguing premise: what if our belief and sacrifice was what kept gods alive? What if immigrants had brought a version of their gods with them to America through the strength of their believes? And what if the gods created by our “modern” way of life and worship of money, television and so on - wanted the continent for themselves and had plotted to destroy the old gods?
That sounded weird and fascinating to me, and boy, did Gaiman deliver! Of course, this requires a suspense of disbelief: some reviewers were quick to point out an inconsistency here and there… I can’t say that it bothered me in the least, to be honest. I don’t tend to read urban fantasy expecting rock-solid scientific explanations of all the surreal stuff going on. The staggering amount of research that went into this alternate world-building was too impressive for me to start nitpicking. “American Gods” is not a light read, and at time, it can be challenging to keep everything straight, but that is something I really enjoy. I love books that make me work a bit.
Gaiman has a way with words: he is dry yet tender and funny, and very, very clever! Just the name of “Shadow” for his main, rather (deliberately?) bland character, can be interpreted in many different ways: he is, after all a witness and a pawn, more than an actual player, in the great game of divine chess being played out through the book. A literal shadow…
I could gush about a lot of other things in this amazing novel, but I don’t think I would be doing it justice. I recommend you pick it up if you are a fan of books that will stay with you, that don’t fit easily into any category and that will make you think about folk stories your grandparents told you a little differently.
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Thoughts on the doomed Starz TV series:
I was so damn excited about this. Bryan Fuller is one of those guys whose vision and aesthetic amazes me so much, and I knew he’d do something amazing with this material! And frankly, the first season is absolute solid gold: the casting is so flawless that even re-reading the book, I can’t imagine the characters differently. Shadow will always look like Ricky Whittle now, and Mr. Nancy could never be anyone but Orlando Jones; Wednesday has Ian McShane’s amazing voice and intense eyes and Pablo Schreiber did what I thought was impossible: he made Mad Sweeney hot as fuck (the fight scene in Jack’s Crocodile bar, ermahgurd, why is it so sexy?!). So season 1: awesome, weird as hell, gorgeous, total home run. Then Bryan Fuller left, Gillian Anderson followed and things got… a bit meh. While the evolution of Media’s character made sense in a 2017 context, and giving Laura a more developed storyline also works quite well with the television format, the magic touch was visibly waning. As I read the book in 2022 I re-watched the whole thing and realized I had stopped halfway through season 2 and hadn’t bothered finishing it. I’m nothing if not a completist, so I pushed on a bit and finished the final season as well. It is still beautiful, and flawlessly cast, but it is slower. It explores some of the characters, like Technical Boy, deeper than the book had, and it’s a very interesting speculative exercise. For all my love for the book, it shows its age with that character, picturing him as a fat nerd who lives in his parents’ basement, but the more contemporary tech sharks are slick, often well-dressed and predatory in a different ways. Laura’s redemption arc and her relationship with Mad Sweeney are another brilliant extension of the original story – as is the conflict between the Ifrit and Salim due to their respective visions of faith. Season 3, sans my two favorite dashing side-characters, continued to unravel, despite the inspired casting of Julia Sweeney as Hinzelmann and the interesting turn Laura’s journey took, something was just not gelling right, and the few moments of brilliance were not strong enough to rescues the sinking clunker. It’s a bummer because the final episode sets up tantalizing things to come, but the off-book bits were not enough to salvage the series.
I simply feel that this series was a “lightning in a bottle” situation, and that Fuller was a big part of that lightning – but they tried hard and made the best with what they had. I wish he had stayed on to run the show from beginning to end because I would have loved to see his full vision, but alas… It’s still brilliant, and updated some elements of Gaiman’s work perfectly, but the shit show that happened behind the camera ended up sinking it, which is a real shame. The show does make one thing very obvious: this book is a folklorist’s story about immigration and about the fact that America kinda sucks. It can be gory and brutal, it’s also beautiful and thought-provoking and managed to distil important ideas into a great feast for the eyes. It’s also a huge bummer the spinoff series about Mr. Nancy starring the amazing Orlando Jones will never happen; I wanted that so badly…
Re-read for the fourth or fifth time, because I watched the beautifully shot and terrifying television adaptation with my husband - who hadn't read thRe-read for the fourth or fifth time, because I watched the beautifully shot and terrifying television adaptation with my husband - who hadn't read the book before. I had chills watching the show, the bad kind. The kind that brought tears to my eyes.
Jason was impressed by a dystopia that is more social than technological: it had never occurred to me to think of the "Handmaid's Tale"'s setting like that before, but he has a point: this isn't robots or climate change fucking us up, it's good old-fashioned religious fanaticism and the brainwashing that comes along with it. We talked about how familiar it sounded, how much it creeped us out that it all felt so real. People who think we have come too far in terms of human and women's right to regress need to remember what happened when the Roman Empire crumbled: a civilization where intellectual pursuits, science and philosophy used to thrive got plunged straight into the Dark Ages, where most of the technological and scientific advancements were forgotten for hundreds of years.
I watched the show, re-read the book and I thought about how fear and pain can break someone's character. How most people don't feel a need to resist oppression until things get really, really fucking bad. How sexism hurts everyone, not just women. I thought about the clever use of colors in the narrative, the rich and subtle power of Atwood's prose, that was rendered so well on screen.
It also occurred to me during this re-read that part of the re-programming women go through in "Handmaid's Tale" includes distrusting and scorning each other. Divide and conquer, put to practical use: but this is not something Atwood invented. I feel like women not trusting and supporting each other is a real and major problem. I read a completely surreal article about what Hillary Clinton has been up to since the election, and the double-standards of judgements she's had to face (throughout the campaign and since) baffled and gutted me.
The book is haunting me again, and so is the show. If you haven’t read it yet, read it. If you have, re-read it. --- Original review:
One of the things that fascinate me the most about “The Handmaid’s Tale” is that the character of Offred used to be the kind of woman you see walking around in the street every day: a woman with a job, independent finances, a husband she chose, a child she wanted. All these things Western women take for granted in our day and age. All these things she never thought to defend until they were taken away from her. Even her name. What frightens me the most is that she remembers all of it and remembers what it was like to lose it.
When I first read this book, I had no idea it had been written in 1986. I figured that it must have been more recent than that, given the terrifyingly relevant topic of women’s reproductive rights (for instance, I love that birth control is not always covered by medical insurance, but now fertility treatments are, at least in Quebec and in other parts of Canada… the subtlety of the message seems to be lost on a lot of people…), the nuclear crisis, the political and religious extremism in the United-States in a post 9/11 world… But nope! Atwood saw that coming somehow, like the Canadian Aldous Huxley that she is… Some people compare “The Handmaid’s Tale” to “1984”, but I think it is also very much like “Brave New World”; but this is a dystopian novels and they all end up having a strong common message: please do something about the world or we are screwed!
Inspired by the sort of extreme violation of women’s rights seen in places like Saudi Arabia, Atwood wrote a plausible cautionary tale: if we let things reach their logical conclusion, we might just end up in a world where fertile women are precious property and where control over every aspect of their lives is justified by a load of hypocritical religious principles. Of course, this is greatly exaggerated, but that’s the point of speculative fiction: to ask “what if”. What if a country already inclined towards extremism used a terrorist attack on their government to justify putting the country under martial law (does anyone else remember the Patriot Act?)? What if one of the side-effects of nuclear war meant a massive infertility crisis in that country’s female population? What if instead of empowering the still-fertile women, they were turned into important men’s proprieties to make sure that the elite –and only the elite - could keep having children?
Women treated as baby factories – or if they can’t have babies, as sexual objects – is a feminist nightmare (which politician was it that said only whores used birth control?). It is a complete denial of women’s humanity, and it twists women’s power to give life into chains with which to control them. To make this more acceptable for them, all sources of intellectual stimulation must be removed, exposure to anything else than the reality of their function is strictly forbidden. And don’t even think about giving them the choice of their partners, in this baby-making process… I think women are already tricked in many ways by society into thinking they are much more free than they actually are, but that’s a whole other conversation. My point is that while such a premise is shocking, it is not that hard to imagine.
A successful dystopian novel should scare the crap out of you and “The Handmaid’s Tale” scares me. The bleak beauty of the writing hooked me and then the morbid need to know what happened to Offred kept me reading. But most importantly, a good dystopian novel should make you think. Think long and hard about the world you live in, and the world you want to live in. And this book will certainly make you think. Not about pleasant things, granted, but about things that are worth everyone’s attention.
Poor Charlie… Not only is he an awkward beta male who lost his wife, but he also has insubordinate employees, an unhelpful sister and sewer « Kitty! »
Poor Charlie… Not only is he an awkward beta male who lost his wife, but he also has insubordinate employees, an unhelpful sister and sewer harpies to deal with! To cap it all off, his infant daughter can kill people with an innocuous word and he thinks he’s Death…
This book made me laugh. It also made me cry way more than I expected a Chris Moore book ever could, which either means that he is a genius or that I am, in fact, a weep-bag. “A Dirty Job” is set in Moore’s San Francisco universe, the one with the Emperor, the vampires and the goth teenagers you might have encountered if you read “Bloodsucking Fiends” and “You Suck: A Love Story”. Moore is deeply deranged, in the best way a human being can be, and it’s wonderful. Don’t be fooled by the irreverence and blow job jokes: under that layer of crassness, there’s a compassionate story. Death is a part of life. A painful, and often terrifying part of life, but Moore somehow took that core subject and wrote a beautiful story about grief, the reasons we go on living and how we deal with the inevitable. It’s a surprisingly comforting novel, given all the weird sex jokes…
I loved all the characters in the book: even the dumbest ones were still somehow endearing, in that way that makes me wonder what the Hell is wrong with me. The dialogues are surprising and hilarious, the situations quirky but realistic… somehow (expect maybe the hellhounds); it often feels like Moore listens to the deranged conversations I have with my really weird friends. Or perhaps my brain is now so saturated with his words that I channel him when I have a drink? Honestly, it’s hard to tell.
If you have a gross sense of humor and enjoy funny but deeply touching stories about living, dying, surviving loss, spirituality, absurd word play, the possible oncoming take-over of the world by the forces of darkness and taxidermy, I strongly recommend you get a copy of this book....more
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