⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ -Library Book

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”



I'm sure I've read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale at least four times. After writing a review for The Testaments a few days ago, I wanted to write down a few thoughts about its predecessor. To say that The Handmaid's Tale is a groundbreaking novel is just scratching the surface. Atwood presents a dystopian future that seems, unfortunately, more and more plausible with each passing day.

Reading the story is an immersion into a world that places restrictions, especially on women, on freedoms we too often take for granted. The enforcement of these restrictions by a religious state, the Republic of Gilead (formerly a part of the United States that includes Maine), is chilling. I love the symposium on Gilead Studies as well. The skepticism by some in the symposium on whether the events in the book could have happened provided the perfect frame. This is a powerful book I would not hesitate to recommend!

What a perfect time to be scared to death by this novel. It doesn't feel dated or far-fetched at all, thanks to President Trump.

Claire Danes is a pretty good match for this narrative.

Original review
Imagine the near future where power is overtaken by the religious right under the guise of protection from Islamic terrorism. Imagine the future where the roles of the women reduced to those assigned to them in Old Testament - they are no longer allowed to read, work, own property, or handle money. Imagine that due to the pollution and man-created viruses, the fertility rates are so low that the few fertile women (the Handmaids) are now a communal property and are moved from house to house to be inseminated by men of power under the watchful eye of their wives. Imagine the future where women can only be the Wives, domestics (the Marthas), sexual toys (the Jezebels), female prison guards (the Aunts), wombs (the Handmaids), or, if they are unsuited for any of these roles, Unwomen who are sent off to the Colonies where they harvest cotton if they are lucky or clean out radioactive waste if they aren't.

Well, after you've imagined that, you can imagine very easily how much I was terrified by this book. As a modern woman, I am horrified by the notion that at some point in time I can become nothing more than a servant, a toy, a reproductive organ. The world created by Atwood seems too much of a stretch of imagination at a first glance, but if the current climate, how implausible this feminist dystopia really is?

To say I am impressed by this novel is to say nothing, really. This book is one of those that stays in your brain and you keep coming back to it over and over again.

Having said that, I have to note, that this is definitely not an easy read. Offred (the protagonist Handmaid) is in many ways a frustrating narrator: she is broken, she is passive, she is desperate and her only goal is to make it through another day. The ending is ambiguous. The narration is complex with constant switching from present to past and back. But it all worked perfectly for me. For me, "The Handmaid's Tale" is a powerful novel that is in my mind next to Saramago's "Blindness," another book that left me sleepless.

Reading challenge: #22

n  "Nolite te bastardes carborundum."n
n  (Don't let the bastards grind you down.)n

Because so many of my esteemed Goodreads friends have sung in praise of this novel, I felt that I was destined to join their burgeoning ranks. Instead, I was left scratching my head, wondering if I'd even read the same book!

I was that rarity - an Atwood virgin - and I was knee-tremblingly keen to pop my cherry. I would love to say that I was enthralled and that I am now a fan, but I can't. I simply can't.
I'm not a polemicist; it pains me to do this but, aaaghh, I shall be putting my head above the parapet.

First, the positives:
The concept is venerable, following the tradition of dystopian classics, such as Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World.
This is a cautionary tale of what *might* happen were we to ignore the erosion of democratic and social freedoms, thereby enabling a right-wing Christian theocracy to take over.
The author perfectly captures the resigned bleakness of such a subjugated existence.
There were instances of genius and some moments where I could clearly see certain scenes playing out in the cinema of my mind (the illicit Scrabble games, for example).

Now, the negatives:
(Apologies to all you Atwood fans; I am actually cringing as I type this).
My read got off to an inauspicious start.
Almost immediately, I encountered a post-modernist (imagine me doing air quotes) sentence that was so-o long it straddled different time zones.
Here it is:
>>A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.<<

So, please convince me, Atwood fans. Tell me honestly that this is not a clumsily-written sentence. And there are ten commas, for crying out loud! TEN. Count them!
If you arranged the little buggers together in a line, you could almost simulate the legs of a millipede!

I'm clearly of the opinion that metafiction belongs in the same orbit as conceptual art, along with the collective denial that causes people to gush over the aesthetic beauty of a pile of bricks in an art gallery. Go to a building site, I say. There's no entrance fee! : )

I so wanted to like this book. I would have loved to join the legion of Atwood devotees and be here, right now, singing her praises.
But, for me, her dictation prose is perfunctory, the similes are decidedly clunky, the syntax is dissonant, and the story just plodded along like an emphysemic tortoise. Were it not for the endorsements of my Goodreads friends rattling about in my mind, I would have abandoned it.

Despite its Chaucerian title, the book is set in an unspecified future where America has been hijacked by Christian Fundamentalists who treat enslaved fertile women as wombs on legs (an Old Testament-style version of the Taliban, I guess).
It's told in the first-person narrative, from the POV of Offred, one such fem-slave, whose sole purpose in life is to endure loveless copulation in the hope of successful fertilisation.
She remembers life before servitude and secretly wishes to be valued. "It's only the insides of our bodies that are important."

It gives me no pleasure to write this; I fully realise that I am swimming against the tide of popular opinion here. I feel like the mutinous child in Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes.
I know Margaret Atwood to be a kind, thoughtful and altruistic lady; her book is prescient and has topical relevance, but so does 1984 and Brave New World. Each is far better (in my humble opinion).

I am so sorry, Atwood addicts.
I must be missing something.

It's not you, dahhlings, it's me.

That´s just a fictional novel if one lives in one of the privileged, rich countries. In many areas of the world, these are, a little better or worse, still the real living conditions for many women.

Flexing social sci fi muscles like no man could, at least until now.
It´s a milestone of both feministic and Sci-Fi writing, a social Sci-Fi masterpiece that goes deep under the skin and lets the reader alone after finishing the book, reflecting on society and how often circumstances like that have been and still are a reality, although most people prefer to suppress those thinkings because of the implications. And if it´s not because of the inner discomfort, there are social conventions, small talk rules, and political correctness that prohibit talking about things like female genital mutilation, killing baby girls or letting them die, and all other manifestations of patriarchy and misogyny camouflaged as ideology and faith. In civilized societies, all of these are serious crimes with felons ending in supermax prisons or institutions for the criminally insane, sadly not always forever.

Could escalate backlashing backward too
What can go unnoticed are the different increments and degrees of severity behind the fiction. That can be just a little bit of discrimination and sexism, "funny" jokes, to restrictions regarding education, sexual freedom, and contraception( especially the US is amazingly degenerating towards conservative bible belt faith fueled disenfranchisement of women )until finally, again, reaching the ideal, real stone age image of women. With polygamy and harems, no rights, infanticide, etc. Luckily still just an exaggeration, but each step backward on the sociocultural evolutionary ladder has the potential to cause chain reactions, especially if a black swan event like a global catastrophe, war, or economic meltdown lets society fall into pieces.

Divide and rule
An already fragile, cracked, and deliberately weakened foundation of emancipation, equality, and human rights, as in many US and European states thanks to crazy neoliberal Friedman fewer dreams becoming cyberpunk realities, would make it much easier to enslave females again. The poverty, suffering, and stultification generated by lacking distributional justice breed the population susceptible to demagogues and extremists making it possible.

Big history reading at schools
Once again a novel that should be reflected and discussed in schools, because many other topics, as mentioned before, could be included too. Probably in combination with Big History, to do critical analyses of the way history shaped and shapes the conditions we live in. The impact of media and trends on girls and young women, the still-unsolved problem of how to deal with domestic and sexual violence, the gender gap, the income gap, etc.

Luck and coincidence of where one is born as what
Probably one should start asking how it could come so far that little girls grow into young women who are rightless slaves in one area of the world, and conditioned to be mindless, superficial dressing dolls without any real chance against sexual harassment and less payment in so-called high developed countries, while the state is caring more about the right, political correct phrasing of male and female job descriptions and female quotas, instead of digging deeper to the ground of the problem that consists of patriarchic power structures with integrated misogyny. Just whitewashed and hidden to be in better line with corporate responsibility.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this, yuck, ugh, boo, completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_His...

If you are looking for a science or speculative fiction book that deals with the scary rise of patriarchy 'The Women Could Fly' by Megan Giddings is a much superior novel to The Handmaid's Tale and actually a feminist book.

I find that I strongly dislike Offred. I can't identify with her, I find her empty and vapid.
It bothers me tremendously that the author steals the narrative of Black women who lived under chattel slavery, my ancestors, and never once in the narrative includes a singular Black character or even a historical reference to chattel slavery.
My ancestors worked 16 hrs a day, 7 days a week, regularly had their children and spouses stolen while being sexually assaulted regularly and horribly.
For those who are unaware 'children of ham' is the biblical designation that made chattel race-based slavery possible in the 'land of the free and home of the brave' and across white 'christian' europe.
Offred casually mentions when she is watching a news program while waiting on the commander that all the 'children of ham' in Gilead have been moved to an area and she guesses it's to grow food. So a return to chattel slavery for the direct descendants of enslaved West Africans. Offred has no feelings about this, it triggers no flashbacks. Offred quickly returns to worrying about herself and those who look like her.
Her mom is clearly a white feminist, and that's not really a reference to her race. White Feminism is feminism for white supremacists. Traditionally feminism, first/second/third/current (anything that fails to operate from an intersectional basis) offers white women opportunities by replacing their labor in the home with underpaid black and brown marginalized genders labor. White men don't do more around the house, the family simply oppresses by under paying Black and Brown folks. All while pretending that progress for white women at the expense of all other marginalized genders is an advantage to all women.
White women aren't the norm or standard. They aren't reflective of society at large, their experiences are specific to white women. So I find this narrative grating.
White women oppress and so their oppression can only be sympathetic if they remove all other oppression they engage in so they can be the victim.
Then and only then is it a horror.
Why not explore when this really happened in history and deal with the gleeful participation of white women? Why create a whole new dystopian to explore what still exists in society today.
Shit a Republican senator in the GOP just got arrested in 2019 for running a 'baby mill' with WOC. Literally holding these women in chattel slavery to steal and sell their babies. This happened to kids in Vietnam and children are regularly being stolen from loving parents in various African nations and being put up for adoption as if they were orphans. Surely this was happening when the book was written.
So why not explore the current realities of real women who were already living a version of this nightmare????
Because it's only sympathetic and a 'horror' or a 'statement' if the victims are white.
Even if the narrative is stolen from WOC.
Even if all of those real life, lived experiences have to be silenced so white women can be victims and not perpetrator or collaborators.
As shit is happening politically liberals continually harp about 'real life Handmaid's tale' as if that wasn't always real life for oppressed women of color since Columbus got lost on his way to steal from India

n  We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.n

Set in the not-so-distant future, Offred is designated as a Handmaid. Meaning her fertile womb "allows" her to stay in the house of Fred as his legal consort.

(Hence the name "Of Fred" and the not-so-subtle foreshadowing "offered".)

Her alternative? Working in the radioactive wastelands (which would undoubtedly lead to her death within 2-3 years).

So, she stays on as a "handmaid" in the hopes of producing a child by Fred to be raised by him and his wife.

Once she fulfills her duties, she'd be passed on to the next man and his wife.

As a result, we are forced to read as she is systematically raped by Fred on her fertile nights.

Even she accepted it as a part of life - we see a bit of the conditioning and training (brain washing) done on new Handmaids.

It's a wonder they all weren't more screwed up.

According to the introduction, Margaret Atwood did not create any of the rules, regulations and punishments forced upon these women.

What she did was take all of the real terrors that women have suffered throughout the ages and force them to happen all at once.

Thus creating a single eye-opening dystopian novel.

This was a difficult novel to read and while I am glad to have read it once, I plan to never (never) look at it again.

n  Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

Don't let the bastards grind you down.n

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This dystopian book was definitely terrifying. Simply because it was very realistic. It's not difficult to imagine how close to reality it could be to live in this post-war, misogynistic, highly religious society.

The pacing was incredibly slow (especially for the first half) and it wasn't a "fun" read but this book will leave you thinking!

Everyone seems to like getting scared from time to time. We sometimes like to read, or watch movies and shows about natural disasters, psychopaths, monsters, zombies, and vampires. However, we like our scary stuff to be fictional and temporary.
Watching "The Walking Dead"? Awesome!
Watching the news about a real murderous dictator on CNN? Not awesome... but just as scary.

"The Handmaid's Tale" is guaranteed to terrify you—both in a fun, entertaining way and in a viscerally upsetting, too-close-to-home way. In this book, characters have no voice in their dystopian government and no control over their lives. Margaret Atwood herself describes it as:

"A study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime."

And when you put it like that, it seems like the book's implications are pretty universal. Although our world isn't as totalitarian and frightening as Atwood's futuristic vision of the United States, it's still not as good a place as it could be.

We still live in scary times. There's censorship aplenty. There are public executions. There are people who are taken away in vans, never to be seen again. The same stuff that makes Gilead so freaky is very much part of the world in which we live now. Even the main issue that "The Handmaid's Tale" tackles, the total subjugation of women, is hardly a stretch of the imagination. Today there are places in the world where women don't have the right to choose what clothes they wear or whom they marry, and they can be stoned to death for committing adultery. There are more places where women are grouped into categories that are almost as degrading as those seen in this novel: a woman may be branded as a "slut", "easy", "prude".. the list could go on, and it's no different from Gilead's "wife", "handmaid", "martha", and "unwoman".

Yup, this is a scary book on a whole bunch of levels. But hey, at least we're not in Gilead. We're allowed to read. And that might be the single biggest reason you should read this book-- because you can!

I may be a little late getting to the party, but when I crafted the topic for my reading challenge that handled books that have an associated movie/television programme, I knew this would be the perfect fit. I chose to binge watch the first two seasons of the show and then dive into the book. It opens that age-old dilemma of comparative medium, but permitted me to draw stronger parallels between them, as well as offer a book review as soon as I turned the final page. Margaret Atwood’s novel has been resurrected (pun intended) over the last few years, particularly because of the television programme, but also some of her cultural foreboding with the rise of an America under the auspices of a power-hungry group of men who would write and interpret the rules as they saw fit. As the reader discovers early on, the book is a perspective piece written by Offred, a handmaid, one of the new classes of women in Gilead. This country is the dystopian near-future America after a second Civil War, whose laws are strongly tied to biblical teachings. The upper echelon is a male collective, known as Commanders, who rule each household and meet as a council to make decisions for the larger community. Each commander has a wife, though these women are either barren or past the stage of fertility, thus introducing the importance of the handmaid. She is, for lack of a better word, a fertile vessel to ensure that future generations can be born within the country. Offred sheds light on the horrid act of attempted conception, which is lost in the written narrative, but the television show makes all the more graphic. Offred describes how each girl was stripped of her name before being taken in as a handmaid and given a moniker that speaks of her dependence to the commander of her household. They are denoted by their long, red dresses and ‘winged headgear’, quite puritanical, particularly when seen on-screen. As the story progresses, the reader learns of the inculcation these women receive to be the best possible handmaids and not to stray from the teachings of the Council, which suppresses women and their rights to the point of making any reading by a woman to be an ultimate sin. These teachings are primarily led by a steel-willed matron, Aunt Lydia. Many handmaids seek to flee, looking North to Canada, but those who are unsuccessful face brutal punishment at the hands of those responsible for keeping the girls in line. Life in Gilead is anything but bucolic, though Offred does offer a glimpse of hope that somehow, some way, she will escape and try to build a life safely away from the country that metamorphosed before her. A brilliant piece of social commentary by Atwood years before things began going extremely sour, it is surely a must-read for those who are curious about all the hype. I’d strongly recommend reading the book and watching the programme, which branches off into new and interesting pathways, furthering the thought processes.

There is so much that could be said about the book and television interpretation, though I wish not to spoil it for anyone who remains on the outside, as I did for too long. I admit, it is difficult for me to divorce this book from the television programme that continues to build, as well as from the puritanical and punitive measures being taken in the modern America, though I readily admit that Atwood’s novel stands well on its own. It seeks to depict a world that is both forward moving and yet reaching backwards to right itself, as though the leaders of Gilead joined in a chorus of ‘Make America Great Again’, much before they could Tweet on their pocket computers. Exploring the characters of this novel, Atwood places Offred front and centre, depicting the world that she sees while offering flashbacks to a world that existed before much of the dramatic overhaul, including memories of her family. Offred, a woman of thirty-three, has much insight and backstory, as well as development while ‘caged’ in her red dress and winged headgear. She, as well as many of the other handmaids, put a new flavour of teenage rebellion into the piece, offering up a mind that is strong enough to know they do not like what is happening but not fully able to push back and forge a unique path. Atwood creates many symbols for her handmaids, tying them inextricably to their commanders, but also to one another and the household, as if the are an essential cog in the wheel. While I am not one to dig for symbolism in all that I read, I could not ignore the narrator’s moniker serving two purposes: Of-fred , denoting her tie to Commander Fred Waterford, and Off-red, speaking of her desire to push away from the role (read: red dress) she is forced to master. Other characters within the novel offer up interesting glimpses into the larger Gilead, as well as some personal struggles faced by those who live in this newly washed land. Be they serving a role or preaching new truths, Atwood places each one in a spot of prominence to give the reader something to digest with each turned page. Perhaps the most curious of character interactions can be said to be that of Offred and Commander Waterford, seen from many angles and with various emotional results. The story is hard to explore, as it is both a journey and a personal collective of thoughts and sentiments. As Offred discusses mid-way through the book, these are her depictions of events and told through a storyteller’s eyes, whereby facts and circumstances are omitted, while delivering a version of events. For those who have seen the television programme, much more detail is offered and the story’s thread is stronger with tangential happenings. However, as a baseline, Atwood gives the readers enough on which to chew so as to pass their own judgment about Gilead and its dystopic existence. The narrative tells a true story and one that each reader can interpret themselves. I found the mix of book and television programme to be the ultimate treat to better seeing the new America in all its glory. I admit, had Atwood written a series of novels about this, I would likely read them all, but I am just as happy to indulge in the on-screen interpretations of events and branch-offs to deliver the knockout punch that I so enjoy at the end of each hour. One final thought on the subject. Has Atwood offered strong foreboding about what is to come in America? Likely not, at least in its current state of affairs. While there surely has been some verbal and physical beating back of opposition, current American leadership (even donning their Russian marionette strings) could never execute a plan as thoroughly conniving as depicted in here. It takes a lot more than two typing thumbs and radical racism to bring about a revolution at the top. From the bottom... let’s see what 2020 has in store!

Kudos, Madam Atwood, for this thought-provoking piece. I hope many who, like me, have not taken the time to read and/or watch what you laid out so effectively will do so and add fuel to the discussion about all topics on offer.

This book fulfills Topic #4: Gateway Reading for the Equinox #4 Reading Challenge.

Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/

A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

This was my first adult dystopian novel and also the most realistic one I've read. Scary realistic even. I doubt that the future is ever going to look like this, but Margaret Atwood painted a multi-layered and thought-provoking picture that is going to stay with me for quite a while.

I've never read a Margaret Atwood book before, but I have been eyeing her works for a while now. I just didn't know where to start. The reasons I finally picked this up are firstly Emma Watson, who picked this book for the Our Shared Shelf book club and secondly, the TV show that just aired a few weeks ago that I am anxious to see.

I've never read a book like this before. The writing is impeccable, detailed and ultimately beautiful. The way Atwood shaped this world with her words went under my skin, and it was a pleasure to read this. The simplicity of the Handmaid's tale is captivating, especially because it draws you in so easily.
Other than that it is a deeply feminist book, eye-opening and shocking. I recommed this to everyone and I can't wait to read more of Atwood's books.

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n  Don't let the bastards grind you down.n

There's a lot of talk about women's rights these days. There were times where I thought: enough already. You girls got it good. I looked around me and saw women with strong voices and a million choices. If they wished to go for a career, they could go for it. If they didn't, no biggie. Their liberty seemed greater than men's in a lot of respects. The power they wield over men is magnificent and often described as the greatest humanity is capable of: a woman's love. They can choose to give it or withhold it. Men's political and physical powers look puny and artificial in contrast, as their strings are constantly pulled by forces they can't resist. Somewhere deep inside me I had a hard time believing things could really be so bad for women, with their majority in numbers and all this strenght at their disposal.

But then you turn on the news or you open a history book. You look outside your own country. You look at a presidential candidate talking about women as animals, as goods to be acquired, as territories to be conquered. You see people making excuses for it, making light of it, you see in their eyes they assume that it's normal. You see laws that tell women what to do with their own bodies, in the name of religion or the greater good. You hear of households where tiny kings use their physical power to terrorise their tiny kingdoms. And then you see all the machinations that have gone into trying to rob women of their mystical, almost holy, powers in greater kingdoms, machinations that often seem on the verge of systematising in the blink of an eye.

So, having accepted that the Woman's struggle is real, I was reading The Handmaid's Tale that paints a picture of how things would look like if circumstance and evil succeeded in stripping women of all the agency they have. When they have succesfully been ground down by the bastards. Bastards aren't Men, per se. Or all men. Or only men. This isn't so much a story about women versus men. It's a story of the artificial power against the real one, a story where the former won.

It's a bleak picture. Atwood uses the very claustrophobic perspective of Offred to great effect. Offred is the eponymous handmaid who find herself in a dystopia where her only societal value is also a curse: her fertility. Her world consists of her room, a stroll down the stairs, a garden, a walk to the butcher and her one and only societal mission: to get pregnant. She has to wear a cape that allows her to only look directly in front of her. She's isolated and stripped of her identity. Even her memories are slowly disappearing and losing relevance in a surrounding that offers nothing to link them to. Through this narrative Margaret Atwood succeeds in donning that same vision-confining cape on her readers' heads, immersing them in that same claustrophobic atmosphere.

This books does very well what it set out to do and that also explains why I didn't thoroughly enjoy it. I wanted more background. I wanted more explanations. I wanted more adventure. I wanted more action by the protagonist. I wanted her spirit, still apparent in the secretly hoarding of butter and the plotting of small thefts, to break free and wreak havoc among the bastards. Make them lose without losing herself. I wanted more direction. I wanted the flashes of hope to last. In short: the author succeeded in making me want what the protagonist wanted. She showed me what it is we should all strive to avoid actively.

An important book, and a good one to boot.