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Richard Derus's Reviews > The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)
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After the somewhat bittersweet experience of reading The Testaments earlier this month, I e-borrowed The Ur-text from the library. This was an experience I absolutely LOATHED from giddy-up to whoa. I will not do it again unless there is no conceivable means of buying the ebook or borrowing the tree-book ever again in the annals of civilization. I will say no more about it unless I am under subpoena.
While there is no way to recapture the frisson of reading this horrific dystopian warning cry for the first time, it is instructive to compare Author Atwood's peak-of-powers prose to the newer book's less deft, more thudding verbiage. This book is urgent and unexpectedly pleading, begging its readers to STOP AND THINK, to look at each instinctive flinch attendant on Offred's systematic and outrageous disassembly as a whole, discrete, thinking being; perhaps more appalling is her reassembly into Offred, a uterus with legs, a creature of the powers who need and thus abhor her. It is telling that the sections of the 2019 book that come close to this level of power and passion are those told by Aunt Lydia...a horrible, vile being much more complete in my mind after The Testaments than it could ever hope to have evoked on my first reading of this book.
The intellectual Author Atwood, the one who beat me senseless with her current book, is decidedly less present in this book. In her place is terrified, outraged Mother-of-Daughter Margaret, begging me to THINK about the world; I listened then, I listen now, caught in Mother's howling anxiety for her daughter, whose horrorshow is here spread out, because it is deeply personal. That feat isn't replicable. That's why reading this book is an irreplaceable experience; re-reading it is, with the best will in the world, never going to live up to that.
But damn me for a fool if it wasn't worth every awful moment.
While there is no way to recapture the frisson of reading this horrific dystopian warning cry for the first time, it is instructive to compare Author Atwood's peak-of-powers prose to the newer book's less deft, more thudding verbiage. This book is urgent and unexpectedly pleading, begging its readers to STOP AND THINK, to look at each instinctive flinch attendant on Offred's systematic and outrageous disassembly as a whole, discrete, thinking being; perhaps more appalling is her reassembly into Offred, a uterus with legs, a creature of the powers who need and thus abhor her. It is telling that the sections of the 2019 book that come close to this level of power and passion are those told by Aunt Lydia...a horrible, vile being much more complete in my mind after The Testaments than it could ever hope to have evoked on my first reading of this book.
The intellectual Author Atwood, the one who beat me senseless with her current book, is decidedly less present in this book. In her place is terrified, outraged Mother-of-Daughter Margaret, begging me to THINK about the world; I listened then, I listen now, caught in Mother's howling anxiety for her daughter, whose horrorshow is here spread out, because it is deeply personal. That feat isn't replicable. That's why reading this book is an irreplaceable experience; re-reading it is, with the best will in the world, never going to live up to that.
But damn me for a fool if it wasn't worth every awful moment.
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Manuel wrote: "This is why I love book reviewing. I didn't like the book but I can appreciate a review like yours."I myownself learn more from reviews I don't agree with, or that praise books I don't like, than ones stroking my readerly ego with soft and silky praises for stories that I do.
The Book Report, I call that. It isn't what I'm looking for in a reader-response review. Any time one ventures an opinion, however, the hammering shrieks of naysayers "don't tell me what to think" and "that's *just* YOUR opinion" will fall. Of course it's my opinion, I wrote it. Drop the "just" and, here's a novel idea!, scroll on if you don't agree with my opinion. No need to say a single word about it, especially not an angry or rude word.
Eeek.Tremble.
*sigh* It's this attitude of fearful silence that seems to please so many echo-chamber residents. "I only want to encounter words *I* in my Sacred Me-ness like, so don't dare to speak ones *I* in my Sacred Me-ness do not wish to hear."
What a good way to compare this with The Testaments. (I did think Aunt Lydia's narration in The Testaments came close to this, not in urgency, but in power. The other two, though, not.)
Cecily wrote: "What a good way to compare this with The Testaments. (I did think Aunt Lydia's narration in The Testaments came close to this, not in urgency, but in power. The other two, though, not.)"Thank you, Cecily, and the (I will say it aloud for the first time) Mary-Sue-ness of Daisy in particular was nigh on unendurable compared to this book!
Thank you most kindly!