I have not read much of Margaret Atwood and was thrilled when Pallavi gifted me this book a year ago on my birthday. It is a collection of 14 short stories and each one 'explores the politics of sex and heterosexual relationships'. Some made sense, some did not. It's the kind of writing that to me seems vague and unfinished. But maybe I did not read it carefully enough. Atwood is a literary giant though who won two Booker prizes and has written 18 novels, 18 books of poetry and much more.
A person in an unhappy marriage recalling her first love affair, a family that goes to see a rare flower in a leaky boat (the leak plugged by a fat woman's arse), a lady called Loulou who supports a bunch of artists and poets who use and abuse her and she seems to like it until she has an affair with an accountant (wonder what will happen to her if she has an affair with an engineer or a doctor), an amiably separated couple each with a new lover, a woman who stalks men and gets them to come to her place to paint them until she finds one stranger who turns out to be violent (she earlier had a controversy over her painting of men's penises and then stopped that exhibition) and a few stories I do not and will not ever remember. Even these I remember mainly because of some help from the stuff on the internet - the title of the story rings no bell at all. Except Loulou (who i thin I would like to know) and the artist who stalks men and paints penises (who is so creepy I would not like to know her at all).
But its an interesting style of writing and sometimes I feel I have missed something, a line, a word, that actually explains it all. Its almost like she has planted that keyword so carefully in the text. Thanks to Pallavi for exposing me to Margaret Atwood.
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