β Scribed by Margaret Atwood
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
With the publication of the best-selling The Handmaid's Tale in 1986, Margaret Atwood's place in North American letters was reconfirmed. Poet, short story writer, and novelist, she was acclaimed "one of the most intelligent and talented writers to set herself the task of deciphering life in the late twentieth century."*
Of Atwood's first collection of short fiction, Dancing Girls, Anne Tyler wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "Her narrative style is as precise as cut glass; entire plots appear to balance upon a choice phrase, and clearly she writes with an ear cocked for the way her words will sound when read back."
With Bluebeard's Egg, her second short story collection, Atwood covers a dramatic range of storytelling, her scope encompassing the many moods of her characters, from the desolate to the hilarious.
The stories are set in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s and concern themselves with relationships of various sorts. There is the bond between a political activist and his kidnapped cat, a woman and her dead psychiatrist, a potter and the group of poets who live with her and mythologize her, an artist and the strange men she picks up to use as models. There is a man who finds himself surrounded by women who are literally shrinking, and a woman whose life is dominated by a fear of nuclear warfare; there are telling relationships among parents and children.
By turns humorous and warm, stark and frightening, Bluebeard's Egg explores and illuminates both the outer world in which we all live and the inner world that each of us creates.
*Le Anne Schreiber, Vogue
**
"Conversations in our family were not about feelings," recalls the teenage narrator of "Hurricane Hazel"about her breakup with a boyfriend who "meant what is usually called absolutely nothing to me"in Atwood's (The Handmaid's Tale, etc.) second collection of shortfiction. Unfortunately, the author's arch cleverness and cool understatementanesthetize the impact of the stories' conversations and gloomy relationshipsbetween parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Symbols abound and some, reminiscent of Atwood's "edible woman" cake in the book of the same title, are strained. In "Uglypuss," the discordant lovers are political activists; at one point they plan to picket a sock company and dramatize the crucifixion, portraying Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes. But the collection is somewhat redeemed by the affecting title story, where an egga deceptively innocuous object that, according to the legend, ultimately marks as disobedient two of Bluebeard's unfortunate wivesaptly symbolizes the protagonist's premonitions of doom about her marriage to a man she is desperately afraid of losing, although she describes him as obtuse, blundering and predictable.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In this delightful collection of short stories, Atwood (The Blind Assassin) explores relationships between men and women, parents and children, and people and pets. She also touches on anorexia and adult children of elderly parents. In typical Atwood fashion, the characters and locations are described in detail. Bonnie Hurren transports the listener into the author's world with her excellent pronunciation and slow, well-paced intonation. Each cassette stops at a convenient point in the story rather than whenever the tape ends. While this requires the listener to fast-forward each tape before changing sides, it makes it easier to follow the story line. Recommended for popular fiction collections and any library serving Atwood fans. Laurie Selwyn, San Antonio P.L.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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