Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Here is an excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale
I’ve read it since – many times – and I have to say it doesn’t really hold up, although there is much of it that does. But the book’s main impact is the one of first impression. I’ll never forget what it was like to read that book for the first time.
I am baffled by the “coda” at the end. Entire scholarly papers have been written about that coda – and I get the point, intellectually – It just so does not work for me. Like – not at ALL. In my opinion (and I remember talking about this with my brother way back when) – it completely weakens the entire book. Brendan had another view of it – he said, “Go back and read it again – and watch how they treat the chairwoman. It’s subtle – but it’s there. They treat her like an idiot.” And this is true. It’s very depressing, especially after the book you’ve just read – of a Saudi Arabian type world, only they’re Christians instead of Muslims, and women are either useless, or only valued for their wombs. The coda gives historical context … like: “let us study this world that is now gone away … ” But that, to me, was the problem. The book is so pessimistic, it’s one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read … and to have this coda tacked on, letting us know that the regime did fall and women were freed … It just didn’t work for me. The last line of the narrator’s part of the book – “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” … leaves you in a state of suspended animation, and hope – but hope that is so strong it is akin to despair. Does she get away?? What happens??? I think the book is far more powerful when it does NOT answer those questions. I just do not like the coda.
Atwood fans – I would LOVE to hear your responses to this. Did it work for you? And why?
The story is well-known. An extreme Christian fundamentalist group – very well-organized – has taken over America in what amounts to a military coup. Congress killed, the President killed – and a new regime installed. Women categorized as either useless (menopausal) – and those women are shuffled off to concentration camps to do manual labor – or useful (child-bearing age) – and the women who are useful are assigned to couples high up in the regime who are childless for whatever reason. The handmaid’s job is to sleep with the husband – and have a child. Many children. If it turns out that you are infertile – you will be sent off to a camp to die. It’s never the fault of the male … there is no such thing as sterile men. Only useless women.
The whole book is narrated by a nameless woman – women take the names of the man they are assigned to: Offred (of Fred), Ofjohn (of John) – and we never learn her name from before. She is in the transitional generation – she remembers the time before. She had a daughter – and a husband – but because it was his second marriage, their union is invalidated by the new regime. The daughter is taken away from them. He is hunted down and eventually disappears. They had tried to escape into Canada but they were trapped at the border. So now this woman – who has no idea what happened to her little girl, her husband – now lives with The Commander and his wife Serena Joy (who, in the time before, was a Tammy Faye type – an evangelical television personality) – and just tries to survive. She tries to keep her mind intact. She tries to remember who she is … even though the entire world has wiped her out. There are other plot-lines … her best friend from “before” was a hot-shit funny wise-cracking lesbian named Moira … what happened to Moira? Where is Moira? She eventually finds out … but it is a tragic story. To me, the story of Moira is the saddest in the book.
Women are separated from one another by design … you can be hauled off as a spy if you try to reach out, and complain to someone, or even if you just try to talk like a human being, and not a Christian automaton. There are accepted modes of behavior now – rigid – it’s a totalitarian world. The secret police are everywhere … and the ironic thing is that those who are “handmaid’s” are supposed to be grateful. Because they have been “allowed” to live. They are supposed to praise God every day for the chance to be of use.
Anyhoo, that’s Handmaid’s Tale. It’s what brought me to Atwood.
In terms of writing mastery – nothing can touch Cat’s Eye – which comes later – not only is it a great Atwood book, it’s a great book period. Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t have that complexity – but then again, it’s not meant to. This is a stripped-down world, a black and white world … where people, with all their grey areas, all their foibles, struggle to maintain their humanity.
One of the things that is interesting here is that “the Commander” – the military dude she is assigned to – is a cold and frightening presence. She sleeps with him repeatedly – and it’s awful … and you never get to know him. Until ….. Late one night he summons her to his study. She goes. This is strictly forbidden. “Fraternizig” is forbidden. Her job is not to be a mistress, or to have a love affair, or to join the family she is assigned to. Her job is to sit in her room and wait until the ovulation period … not moving, not speaking, not reading, nothing … and then try to get pregnant. So anyway – The Commander summons her. It is about 2 in the morning. She is terrified. She goes into his study … and there he sits … and he asks if she would like to play Scrabble. This is such a shock, such an odd odd moment … The world she lives in is not a world that values leisure time. Also, all language has been wiped out. Signs are now in pictures. So to see a Scrabble board … it’s against the law … He asks her to play. Terrified, she obeys. But eventually … it becomes this nightly secret “date” they have. They barely talk – they just play Scrabble. Atwood describes the love of words … how voracious our narrator feels just seeing LETTERS again … the thrill of putting letters together … It’s almost sexual. Very moving. What’s interesting here is that even though the two of them barely speak … you get the sense that this world, this new world, where he is at the top of the heap, is no great shakes for him either. Male privilege is isolating – for both genders. He never says that … and she never comments on it … but just the fact that in the middle of the night this cold man, who holds her entire life in his hands – yearns to play a nice game of Scrabble … says it all.
Here’s an excerpt.
Excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale
Now there’s a space to be filled, in the too-warm air of my room, and a time also; a space-time, between here and now and there and then, punctuated by dinner. The arrival of the tray, carried up the stairs as if for an invalid. An invalid, one who has been invalidated. No valid passport. No exit.
That was what happened, the day we tried to cross at the border, with our fresh passports that said we were not who we were: that Luke, for instance, had never been divorced, that we were therefore lawful, under the law.
The man went inside with our passports, after we’d explained about the picnic and he’d glanced into the car and seen our daughter asleep, in her zoo of mangy animals. Luke patted my arm and got out of the car as if to stretch his legs and watched the man through the window of the immigration building. I stayed in the car. I lit a cigarette, to steady myself, and drew the smoke in, a long breath of counterfeit relaxation. I was watching two soldiers in the unfamiliar uniforms that were beginning, by then, to be familiar; they were standing idly beside the yellow-and-black-striped lift-up barrier. They weren’t doing much. One of them was watching a flock of birds, gulls, lifting and eddying and landing on the bridge railing beyond. Watching him, I watched them too. Everything was the color it usually is, only brighter.
It’s going to be all right, I said, prayed in my head. Oh let it. Let us cross, let us across. Just this once and I’ll do anything. What I thought I could do for whoever was listening that would be of the least use or even interest I’ll never know.
Then Luke got back into the car, too fast, and turned the key and reversed. He was picking up the phone, he said. And then he began to drive very quickly, and after that there was the dirt road and the woods and we jumped out of the car and began to run. A cottage, to hide in, a boat, I don’t know what we thought. He said the passports were foolproof, and we had so little time to plan. Maybe he had a plan, a map of some kind in his head. As for me, I was only running: away, away.
I don’t want to be telling this story.
I don’t have to tell it. I don’t have to tell anything, to myself or to anyone else. I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It’s possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Fat lot of good it did her.
Why fight?
That will never do.
* * *
Love? said the Commander.
That’s better. That’s something I know about. We can talk about that.
Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.
Or sometimes, even when you were still loving, still falling, you’d wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime, and you’d think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men? Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go? Who can tell what they really are? Under their daily-ness.
Likely you would think at those times: What if he doesn’t love me?
Or you’d remember stories you’d read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found – often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst – in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or not; at any rate killed. There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that you had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight. With that man you wanted it to work, to work out. Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for th eman. If you worked out enough, maybe the man woudl too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.
If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything was available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeter of our lives. I was like that too, I did that too. Luke was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last. If he hadn’t been frozen that way. Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.
In former times they would send you a little package, of the belongings: what he had with him when he died. That’s what they would do, in wartime, my mother said. How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute ot the loved one. And he was, the loved. One.
Is, I say. Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?
I wipe my sleeve across my face. Once I wouldn’t have done that, for fear of smearing, but now nothing comes off. Whatever expression is there, unseen by me, is real.
You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.
So. More waiting. Lady in waiting: that’s what they used to call those stores where you could buy maternity clothes. Woman in waiting sounds more like someone in a train station. Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it’s this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.
The knock comes at my door. Cora, with the tray.
But it isn’t Cora. “I’ve brought this for you,” sayus Serena Joy.
And then I look up and around, and get out of my chair and come towards her. She’s holding it, a Polaroid print, square and glossy. So they still make them, cameras like that. And there will be family albums, too, with all the children in them; no Handmaids though. From the point of view of future history, this kind, we’ll be invisible. But the children will be in them all right, something for the Wives to look at, downstairs, nibbling at the buffet and waiting for the Birth.
“You can only have it for a minute,” Serena Joy says, her voice low and conspiratorial. “I have to return it, before they know it’s missing.”
It must have been a Martha who got it for her. There’s a network of the Marthas, then, with something in it for them. That’s nice to know.
I take it from her, turn it around so I can see it right-side-up. Is this her, is this what she’s like? My treasure.
So tall and changed. Smiling a little now, so soon, and in her white dress as if for an olden-days First Communion.
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.
But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn’t that a good thing? A blessing?
Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that. Better she’d brought me nothing.
I sit at the little table, eating creamed corn with a fork. I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife. When there’s meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I’m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That’s why I’m not allowed a knife.
I read that book in college. I can’t believe how much your post brought back about it. I remember it really wiped me out at the time…but I had this femi-nazi professor who was one of those bitter types that taught the book like “this could happen, like, next week.” That didn’t manage to spoil it for me, though. But that way Atwood kind of takes you to this nightmare world…I sort would like to hear a male reaction to reading that, because for me, it was just brutal to think about. Too personal to imagine myself being trapped in that kind of life.
My brother was the one who told me to read it – he loved it. So there’s a male response … just one, but still. That book tapped into a real fear for me – especially because I did not then, nor will I ever, live a conventional life. There are those who are threatened by that, who don’t get it, who think the Bible tells them how they should live – and I don’t fit into that. This THREATENS some people. I’m not persecuted for it – but that’s why this is “sci fi”, I guess – it’s not created out of thin air, it’s based on certian things that we would recognize. Like the people who truly believe: “To be a real woman you must be THIS, you must make THESE choices …” I never fit into that. I would be a handmaid if I lived in the book – or I would be like her friend Moira, wild, bohemian, and made to be a hooker – to completely crush her spirit. That would be my destiny.
To me, the book had a kind of Anne Frank-ish nightmare to it – the feeling of being totally TRAPPED in this society you had nothing to do with creating – but you, for whatever reason, have been chosen to be persecuted. Freaked me out.
Like I said, though – it doesn’t really hold up for me – I re-read it a couple years ago and while so much of it is good writing, evocative, scary – it didn’t give me that ice-cold rage like the first time. The themes still resonate (even more today, actually, than when it was published!) – but I really think it’s a “first impression” kind of book.
Cat’s Eye – now THAT is a great novel.
Have you read it??
Oh and Emily – do you remember the “epilogue”? Where there’s some kind of symposium even further in the future – discussing the found “tapes” of the Handmaid’s Tale? It makes it clear that the fundamentalist Christian regime passed – and women were freed …
Do you remember it?
I don’t know – it really didn’t work for me, but I am having a hard time saying why.
Vaguely, Sheila. I’ll have to check out Cat’s Eye. I’ve not read it.
I know what you mean about the rigid types — and it’s not only just the Bible…like, those kind of people that are terrified of not “fitting in” or being different from the neighbors. I never understood that, that mad desire to be just like everyone else and desperation for approval.
Emily – yeah, Cat’s Eye is something else. I love that book!
Emily – and yeah, I just CAN’T fit in to that stereotype of female-ness, I’ve tried and I always fail … I’m happy being eccentric (finally), I have no problem with being “weird”. The rigid types in general stay out of my way – so that’s fine with me. I don’t care what those people think. Took me years to be able to say that though!
Oh, definitely. I don’t want to come off like I’m “picking on the squares” or anything retarded like that. I lived with it for years from my step-mother, who’s completely one of those “must. be. like. everyone. else.” types. She’s finally learned to leave me alone about the weird stuff, but it took a few years of training.
This book hit me hard when I read it, also. I’ve read it a few times since then – once for a fem. lit. class, so I’ve even analyzed it… I too don’t handle that stereotype-femininity… and am also finally comfortable with it – even capitalize on it these days. (I work for a Computer Software company).
What has always struck me about the story is how logical everything was. (in a completely frightening way). There was a rash of infertility due to (nuclear war?), so fertility was prized. But the scariest was the handmaidens tearing the man apart in the stadium. Or maybe Offred seeing her mother in the films of women sent out to clean hot zones.
I think I was already cynical enough when I read it (I’ve been very cynical for a very long time…) to not be shocked and horrified by Moira, but more in the mindset that OF COURSE the men who publicly rail against the lewdness and indecency of clubs like that would be the people who attended the – and would have them no matter what.
I completely agree with you, Shelia, on the weirdness of the epilogue. (I do like the American Indian names in the epilogue, though).
Emily – Pickin on the squares, hahaha I would never think that of you.
You know, I’ve noticed (and this is just in myself and my own experience): there are different stages of development – all of which I went thru, as a person who will never “fit in” to the norm.
1. Trying to fit in. This was a disaster. A soul-crushing disaster that lasted many years.
2. Rage at everybody else. How DARE you tell me how to live my life? How DARE you judge my choices? (I still have moments of this – but I don’t LIVE there, thank God!!)
3. Rage at myself for having been unfaithful to my own personality – for selling myself out. “Why did I spend my early 20s trying to be like everybody else? What a waste of time!!!!” Sad about the wasted time, etc.
4. Finally – a blithe unconcern for what other people think of me. I know that strict fundamentalist Christians and folks like Osama bin Laden would think of me as a sinner. because, uhm, I drink. And have sex outside of marriage. And I wear fishnet stockings. And I have no children. (The list goes on and on) Whatever. It just doesn’t bother me that those people tsk-tsk about me – i don’t even hear the “tsk tsks” anymore, because I don’t care to fit in with those people. As long as they leave me alone, I don’t care if they judge me. Whatever. Judge away. I live my life my own way.
I think when you really NEED to see your own values reflected in the society at large … is when you get into real trouble.
I’m talking on a really personal level here – not values like “murder is wrong” or those kinds of values. I mean: “Marriage is better than being single.” Or: “A woman’s place is in the home”. That’s fine if you believe that – but when you become tormented that not everybody else believes that – that’s when you become a tiresome douschebag.
Melissa – the moment when she saw her mother was terrible. I remember that.
And I see what you’re saying about Moira. I was not at all cynical at the time that I read it (I’m much more now, thank God) … and I just had this fantasy that maybe Moira got out! After her spectacular escape from the re-education camp! Maybe she became a revolutionary! etc. etc.
To see her – the radical lesbian – reduced to a plaything of men … Bah. It was horrible.
I think my favorite parts of the book are her rambling “Night” monologues – this excerpt is one of them. She sits up at night, by herself, and just rambles, stream of consciousness … I really like those sections.
The stages! Hahaha. I can’t believe you broke them down, but yeah…that’s the perfect description. I’m with you – people can be rigid in their own lives, make their own choices to be that way, whatever. Living in Los Angeles has its benefits, and one of them is that you can totally get away with being eccentric without very many people really being buggered to notice. The only time I really collide with the judgemental, I’m better than you types is on the internet, which is great, because it’s a place that makes them totally easy to ignore.
Emily – hahahaha yeah, living in a big city does have its advantages. I can weep on the subway and nobody even notices. Which is also rather dysfunctional, if you think about it. But the pressure of fitting in to something that I find personally soul-destroying is not there at all.
Sheila, I just wanted to say that I LOVE how you write about books. I just read a book (The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver) that affected me deeply but I’m tongue-tied as to how to write about it without giving too much away and spoiling it for anyone who plans to read it, or erring on the other side and not revealing enough and boring people to death.
When I read your “writings about your readings” I feel like I’m right there with you, reading and feeling the book. And you make this look easy but I know it’s not, or at least it’s not for me!
But this entry especially inspired me.
(And I loved The Handmaid’s Tale , btw, and also had that visceral reaction to it. It chilled me. And while I see your points about the epilogue, one thing it did for me was remind me how everything is history, how the “now” that is so immediate to us will one day be removed and studied and slapped with some label. Which was chilling in its own way, too.)
I remember being baffled by the epilogue too – like, “There’s something there that we’re not being told.” I think I read that three times and still was kind of “WTF?”
Oh, gosh, I had forgotten the stadium scene until someone brought that up. Not unlike some of the things the Taliban allegedly did; the public stonings and stuff where the bystanders were called upon to exert their moral purity by being a part of the execution.
The other thing that creeped me out (that I remember now) were all the bodies of the executed “criminals against the state” with the white bags over their head and the short description of their crime….like, that’s ALL that person ever was. (Wasn’t there one person who promoted Darwin’s Theory of Evolution? I kind of remember that…and being a biologist-in-training, that kind of made me shudder).
I was a little older when I read it and I never really had the sense of “This could happen tomorrow” but it was still a chilling book.
and sheila: you wear fishnet stockings? How DARE you, you heathen! ;)
Diana – thank you SO much for the nice comment!! It’s so fun to talk about books – especially with others who have read the same books.
Interesting thoughts about the epilogue. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Yes – because there’s something “not right” in that future-future world, too – know what I mean? It’s not like, “Yay, that regime fell … and now we’re in a bright new world!” I remember there being sexual innuendoes in the epilogue – jokey nudge nudge wink wink jokes about being a handmaid – that seemed totally inappropriate, especially after the wrenching experience of seeing the book. It made me feel like: Well. The persecution may not be overt anymore, but the same bullshit is still going on.
I’d be interested to hear more of your thoughts on it.
ricki – The hanging bodies were horrible. I feel the same way you did – The kind of open executions – reminds me of the photos of the horrifying soccer stadium-turned execution coliseum in Kabul – with a burqa-ed woman kneeling, being executed – with a huge audience in the stands. Or kneeling men, with blindfolds on, guns pointed at their heads. The coarse-ness of it – the feeling of “The State” over all.
And hahahaha fishnets. I love them. I wish I could wear them every day, with every outfit. But I have to TRY to be practical.
And the wordless sexual affair that Offred has with Nick, the chauffeur – risking their lives for these stolen encounters. They don’t even speak, if I’m remembering correctly … it’s just lovemaking – for pleasure, not pro-creation – which has basically become an illegal act.
I loved those sections because it points up the loneliness and isolation of HIM, too – even though it seems like he has it much better – since he doesn’t have a womb, and doesn’t have to worry about all that female stuff … but still. He needs to touch her jsut as much as she needs to touch him. You know – human connection, remembering what it was like to be free, and loving … all that.
I may be remembering it wrong … not sure if Nick is part of a conspiracy – something very bad happens with him … or no … maybe he’s the one who helps connect her with the “underground railroad” people.
It seems to me that Nick winds up as one of the ones “on the fence” with a bag over his head? I don’t know, there’s some kind of horrible thing that I remember associated with him – either he sells her out, or he gets sold out himself.
I think that’s the really horrifying thing for me, of the book – that there’s no one you can really trust, that you might have a friendship with someone and they could totally sell you out, either because they’re so brainwashed by the State, or because they’re corrupt and are offered some kind of perk that’s worth more to them than your life….it’s just a very pessimistic view of human nature. (Or maybe that’s just what human nature tends to become under totalitarian regimes, people like Elie Weisel and Bonhoffer notwithstanding)
Diana – I hadn’t thought of the ending like that either. I have to think on that for a while.
Ricki – I’m going to take your comment one step further. The horrible, sad, terrible part of the book (for me, at least today) is that the commander et. al. fought very hard to make a world where there was everyone had a place, their roles were defined, and rigid, and Christian. And the world they created was not what they wanted. Be careful what you ask for..
I pity (and am horribly frustrated by) Serena Joy. She fought, campaigned for the life she is now leading… and is desparately unhappy. Having to cradle Offred while her husband has clinical sex with her in their bed (a horrible image). Really, going from being Serena Joy, a celebrity of sorts, to a Wife. That’s it. A Wife. I always thought she thought she would be able to ask for this, but have an escape (like the Commanders have their escapes), but she is just as trapped as Offred, or Moira, or Offred’s mother.
I think of the executions as more of a bread and circuses thing… (kinda like today’s media push of celebrtiy lives as news.)
You give a group a target to vent at, a distraction from what’s going on around them and you can do all sorts of things.
The Commanders knew they needed to allow the Handmaids to vent their anger on something. Something male. The bodies become surrogates for the Commanders – and the Commanders are safer thereby.
I read it about twenty years ago. I had pretty much the same reaction to the coda. Actually, the “we can’t judge” bit (or whatever the specific wording was) pissed me off royally. The hell we can’t, I thought.
I haven’t read it again, but it was interesting that you said it doesn’t hold up in some ways. I suspect most dystopian fiction (of any stripe) doesn’t. You read it again, and realize that much of what makes a good story was sacrificed to the polemic. It’s cathartic the first time, and disappointing after.
Ken – I think, though, that Atwood (judging by the book she had just written) also thought “The hell we can’t judge! – and maybe that was her point … but it just didn’t work for me.
I think you’re right about the futuristic books losing their power – 1984 being a notable exception, and of course there are many others- but I would say judging from the Taliban’s treatment of women that she was right on the money, in some respects. The rights of women to just be free is still a huge issue in vast swaths of the globe. Well, and also men – I mean look what happened to Luke. He was killed – and his wife sold into handmaid-slavery. Not great shakes for him either – and that was just because he didn’t fit into the Christian worldview. It was his second marriage. Therefore invalid.
So men suffer too – and I’m glad that that is such a huge part of the book. It wouldn’t be the same without it.
Melissa – EXCELLENT thoughts about Serena Joy. Yes, yes, be careful what you wish for. There’s also that moment where Offred is thinking about her mother – who was a radical man-hating feminist – who dreamed of a matriarchal paradise. I think Offred says, in her mind, those exact words: Mother, you wanted a woman’s world … and you got one. It’s not the one you expected, but still.
Melissa – I actually just read a great book about Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban (well, it’s just a part of the book – the book is called The Carpet Wars – and it’s about the making of Persian rugs, and the business thereof – and the author, a carpet FREAK, was in Afghanistan during the rise of the Taliban – he got a front-row seat for all of this) – and once the Taliban banned all forms of entertainment (all video stores closed, no more beauty pageants, or music recitals – all things that had become very commonplace, at least in Kabul and Mazar e-Sharif) – they knew they had to replace it with something – so on come the public executions. So I guess that’s a version of “bread and circuses”, right?
Oh, and Diana – back to your first comment: I personally would love to hear what you had to say about the Lionel Shriver book – which I have not read. I think if you try to convey your passion for it – and what it tapped into in you … it could be a wonderful post. From my own personal experience, with doing this daily book excerpt thing (which has been going on for 2 years now – that’s scary … considering that I live in a studio apartment … so please picture how many books that means … hahahahaha) but anyway – some books are easy to write about, because – in general – they didn’t touch that deep core of me. When I get to a book that really means something to me personally – I get tongue tied at first, scared … nervous about how I will even WRITE about this. Like the “Emily” books by LM Montgomery – I almost wanted to put off writing about them, because they are so important to me … and HOW would I get that across?? It’s hard! But still, I would love to hear your thoughts about the book you mentioned … Passion begets passion. When someone writes about something they feel passionately about – it totally is catching. :)
Shelia – another book for my booklist! Carpet Wars. Sounds facinating!
Sheila, I just can’t stop thinking about this!
I’ve been reading your blog for years, and I have never seen anyone write with as much passion as you do. The reader just gets sucked in!
I mostly write about my everyday life. My blog is my journal. But when I do write about the books I’m reading I have not been able to find my “voice.” It feels too book-report-ish. And part of the problem has been that I just can’t write in that academic tone that most people write about books in. Not only can I not write about books that way, I can hardly read about books that way.
And then I come here and read one of your book entries and am blown away because you don’t seem to “just read” the books as much as “live” them. You know? And I can relate to that, because when I like a book it was because it got under my skin, not because I analyzed it or appreciated its postmodernist blah-blah.
On another note, I don’t know how you remember so much of what you read, either. I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time a long time ago, shortly after it came out. But then my book club just read it so I read it for the second time. Three. Months. Ago. And STILL, it’s not vivid enough in my mind to be able to write about it like you did here.
I’m still wrestling with the Shriver entry but I’ll finish it soon and post the link. I’m really trying to put a little bit more of “myself” in this and yes, it’s hard! I’d love to let my inner Sheila loose. :)
Gah. I stayed up late and finished it:
More Post-Birthday
Thanks for humoring my gushing admiration, Sheila. And thanks for putting yourself out there every day in your writing. You really do inspire. :)
Diana – I just read your piece. Incredible!! Your thoughts about how the book impacted how you treated your husband … like you wanted to counter-balance the book with your own behavior … Beautiful! I think I need to read it – and also the “Kevin” book which I remember flagging as something I wanted to read when I first heard about it … but then I forgot about it, until now. Thanks for the reminder!
Good work, by the way – loved the writing.