"Moral disorder" Margaret Atwood

An audio book. 11 pieces.

A woman - or a few women - dealing with different stages in life. It begins with the PoV of an old woman with an old man. Likable stories.

In "My Last Duchess" a girl tries to help her science-oriented boyfriend with his poetry revising.

"The headless horseman" (my favourite) deals with the relationship between 2 sisters through time from the PoV of the elder sister. Her younger sister was always a bit different. “I couldn’t figure out who you were supposed to be,” says the younger sister, looking back to the days when the older sister made people. Once she made a head and the younger sister said it's "not his fault he has no body, it's just the way he is".

Some stories are about Nell and Tig. Una and Tig had 2 sons, which was the only reason they were still living together. Una encourages Nell and Tig to pair up. They do, and buy a farm. "Cows want to be with other cows. They're like shoppers" says Tig.

Other reviews

• Ursula LeGuin (Seven of the stories are told by an "I" who remains nameless, four from the third-person point of view of "Nell". It's easy to project Nell into all the stories, because they run in chronological order from childhood to age, the central figure is always female, and there are definite clues that Nell is the protagonist even when not named. Such clues are needed, for there isn't very much in the first-person stories of childhood and adolescence to connect the girl to the woman Nell. The last two stories concern a woman's experience with her father entering dementia, her mother in extreme old age. The daughter may well be Nell, the parents may be the parents of the child in the earlier stories, but I had no feeling of recognition, of rejoining the same people at a later stage of life. The book did not quite form a whole for me, an architecture, a life story however episodic.)
• Alice Truax (the linked stories “Monopoly,” “Moral Disorder” and “White Horse,” which open in the early 1970’s, are as much a portrait of an era as anything else)
• bookescapade

"In other worlds" by Margaret Atwood (Virago, 2011)

A pacy, informative and entertaining book about Dystopia, Utopias and soft SF - a mix of autobiography, articles, talk transcriptions and reviews, from the point of view of a reader, student and writer. Her reading seems patchy - she's read Northrop Frye, and as a child read many of the SF classics. Here are just a few quotes

• Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? ... Are we the slaves of our own stories - our family narratives and dramas, for instance ... Are they essential to us - part of the matrix of our shared humanity? (p.41)
• Marxism and its cousin, Christian socialism, were such neo-mythical structures. Their pattern was a linear one, like that of Christianity, but for God's grand plan they substituted History, a godlike entity that would enfold in an inevitable way and justify you id you were on the right side (p.53)
• So that's why Heaven and Hell - or at least some of the shapes their inhabitants have traditionally taken - have gone to Planet X. A lot of other gods and heroes have gone there as well. They've moved shop because they're acceptable to us there, whereas they wouldn't be here (p.65)
• Typically a romance begins with a break in ordinary consciousness, often - traditionally - signalled by a shipwreck, frequently linked with a kidnapping by pirates. Exotic climes are a feature, especially exotic desert islands; so are strange creatures (p.157)

Other reviews

• Kevin Barry
• Martin Petto (In Other Worlds, then, is a book about science fiction written by someone who doesn't know much about it for an audience that presumably knows nothing about it. Why on Earth should the science fiction reader continue? Many won't ... her 2002 New Yorker review of Le Guin's The Birthday of the World and Other Stories provides a dress rehearsal for the first section of this book: the clumsy taxonomy, the linking of SF with theological speculation, the idea that the Soviet Union put the nail in the coffin for utopia. At the same time, it continues to reveal how half-formed some of her views are.)

"The Door" by Margaret Atwood (Virago, 2007)

Over 100 pages of poetry, several poems coming from Poetry Ireland Review and Ontario Review.

Here's how "Year of the hen" (the third poem) begins -

This is the year of sorting, of throwing out, of giving back, of sifting through the heaps, the piles, the drifts, the dunes, the sediments, or less poetically, the shelves, the trunks, the closets, boxes, corners in the cellar, nooks and cupboards - the junk, in other words, that's blown in here, or else been saved

Too slow, surely. The start of "Mourning for cats" is no better -

We get sentimental over dead animals. We turn maudlin. But only those with fur, only those who look like us, at least a little. Those with big eyes, eyes that face front. Those with smallish noses or modest beaks. No one laments a spider

There are some poems that could be making fun of poets or their audience -

• "Go away, we say -/ and take your boring sadness./ You're not wanted here./ You've forgotten how to tell us/ how sublime we are./ How love is the answer:/ we always liked that one" - "The poets hang on"
• "he's doing our confessions for us ... you keep on watching, as he flays himself/ in an ecstasy of self-reproach ... But just as you're feeling tricked/ his voice cuts abruptly ... and you join in the applause" - "Poetry reading"
• "Despite my singed feathers/ and this tattered scroll I haul around,/ I'm not an angel./ I'm only a shadow,/ the shadow of your desires. I'm only a granter of wishes." - "enough of these discouragements"
• In "The singer of owls", an owl comforts a poet by pointing out that owls too sing out of necessity, when few others are awake to hear.
• "Boat song" is "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" plus "fiddling while Rome burns" applied none too subtly to poets.

It's mostly poetry for non-poets, though the odd phrase puzzles - e.g. "the grassblades whispering like ions" p.30. "Heart" isn't bad. "You children cut their hand .." is better, though the punchline is telegraphed. "Owl and pussycat, some years later" might be my favourite, were it shorter than 6 pages. In "Ten o'clock news", "The shot bird topples from the air, the others note it: they need to know what's going on. Tree leaves rustle, deer twitch their tails, rabbits swivel their ears. The grass-eaters crouch, the scavengers lick their teeth" which sets us up for "What alerts us? What are we feeding on?" I like following her train of thought in "The weather" ("We used to watch the birds; now we watch the weather"). "Ice Palace" is a pleasant read, comparing a hotel to a fairy-tale castle - secret rooms, etc. I like "War photo 2", "The nature of Gothic" ("I show you a girl running at night/ among trees that do not love her/ and the shadow of many fathers"), "Reindeer moss on granite" and "The door".

Other reviews

• Jay Parini (There is a pleasing consistency in these poems, which are always written in a fluent free verse, in robust, clear language. ... A fair number of these poems are confessional. )
• Rebecca Reid (Section 1 of the volume has poems that are a reflection on childhood memories and connections ... Section 2 is a reflection on a literary career. This was by far my favorite section ... Section 3 is a reflection on the tragedies of life. ... Section 4 is the hardest section for me to place. In fact, I didn’t understand some of the poems in it.)
• Elizabeth Bachner (One or two poems are vintage Atwood, like “Heart,” about a heart that gets sold literally, passed around, tasted and dropped, “and you stand listening to all this/ in the corner/ like a newly hired waiter,/ your diffident, skillful hand on the wound hidden/deep in your shirt and chest,/shyly, heartless.” Unfortunately, there are poems in The Door that read like the kind of cluttered, ordinary work a great poet writes to clear out her system)

"The Tent" by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury, 2006)

It's copyrighted to O.W. Toad - an anagram of her surname. There are 35 short pieces (articles, etc) occupying 155 small pages, at least 20 of those without text. I could have done without Atwood's drawings. And but for a few fragments (below) I could have done without section I as well.

• Some routine chores. Inhale some smoke, chew selected plant materials, tell a couple of riddles, write things on leaves. Do the odd incantation; lead a few sightseeing tours of hell. Keep up the tone of the establishment. (p.10)

• Here you come, descending in our pinkish cloud, glowing like a low-waatage light bulb or an aquarium in a chintzy car. Feathers sprout from your shoulders, rays of light shoot out from you, silver-and-gold confetti wafts down from you like metallic dandruff. It does not occur to you that your dress is covered with tiny fish hooks. On some of them scraps of bait are still hanging: cricket wings, worm torsos, old bank deposit slips (p.15)

• vi) On the other hand how sad, to make your way like a snail, a very fast snail but a snail nonetheless, with no home but the one on your back, and that home an empty shell. A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness. (from "Orphan Stories", the best of section I's pieces)

Section II has much more to like - "Resources of the Ikarians" (in desperation they try to make money by producing artists who suffered in childhood and die early), "Our cat enters heaven", "Three novels I won't write soon", "Post-Colonial" and "Heritage House". In section III I like "The Tent". "Warlords" began well - "To be a warlord - that's a boy's dream everywhere. Point a finger, say Bang, and thousands die. Most of these sharpshooters grow up to become dentists" - but like too many other pieces, it requires editing.

Other reviews

• Savidge reads (If you haven’t read any Atwood then this is actually a rather wonderful collection of hers to start with as you really do get a flavour of what a versatile author she is)
• Vegan daemon (Perfect for: hardcore Atwood fans, or lovers of feminist poetry and eclectic short fiction)
• Anita Sethi (Observer) (The Tent exposes the nuts and bolts of the tortuous creative process, but Atwood's talent struggles to breathe inside these claustrophobic prisons.)
• Hermione Lee (Guardian) (The Tent is a book about endings, old age and deaths.)
• Michelle Roberts (Independent) (Her updated versions of Salome and Helen of Troy, however, seem a little dull and stale.)