Ebook Evaluation
Ebook of Lives: A Memoir of Types
By Margaret Atwood
Doubleday: 624 pages, $35
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Margaret Atwood is an indefatigable time traveler. The prolific Canadian creator, maybe finest identified for “The Handmaid’s Tale” and its phenomenally profitable Hulu sequence adaptation, has written 17 novels, 11 nonfiction titles, 9 quick fiction collections, 17 volumes of poetry, a number of graphic novels and kids’s books; she gained Booker prizes for “Blind Assassin” and “The Testaments.” Briefly, she has had many lives — private and non-private — and shows all of them, her personal and others, within the hefty 624-page tour de drive “Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts,” recounting the difficult symbiotic relationship between life and artwork.
In her light-spirited introduction, Atwood notes how a “sinister alter ego” nudged her to “spill some beans … dish some tea” and to “thank my benefactors, reward my friends, trash my enemies” to be able to transcend what she phrases a “witchy reputation.” It additionally establishes the first thematic premise of how time serves the twin personalities of an actual and a writing life.
At most e-book signings, somebody inevitably asks her, “Where do you get your ideas or material?” Atwood posits that “every question-and-answer session” is an phantasm the place there are “at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes.” The one doing the dwelling, not the one doing the writing, is current on such events the place “no writing is being done at that moment,” she notes. Moderately, like “Jekyll and Hyde, the two share a memory and even a wardrobe.” Additionally they share different constraints.
Atwood asserts, “I move through time, and, when I write, time moves through me. It’s the same for everyone. You can’t stop time, nor can you seize it; it slips away like the Liffey in Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’ Memories can be vivid though unreliable, diaries can distort. Nevertheless, each life has its own particular flavours and textures, and I will attempt to evoke those of mine.”
For Atwood, actual time begins along with her beginning in Ottawa Common Hospital on Nov. 18, 1939. She has a eager leisure curiosity in astrology, palmistry, and different occult and paranormal topics that typically enter her writing, and her natal chart — decided, in fact, by time and area — means that she could possibly be an implacable enemy, Atwood notes. She would additionally make a “good detective, spy, and criminal mastermind. And undertaker.” Or, as she writes later, mix investigative expertise with con artistry (with “at least two stories being told at once”) to grow to be a novelist.
The creator was born into a standard nuclear household: father Carl was an entomologist and mom Margaret a dietitian/nutritionist; her brother Harold preceded her, and sister Ruth arrived a dozen years later. Her father’s analysis led to an unconventional nomadic childhood (winters in Ottawa; summers tenting in Canada’s wilderness, lumber cities, Defend nation), which generated an curiosity in science (“Every time you look at a piece of a rock, you’re looking at a time machine. Everyone’s life is shaped by geology.”) She recollects looking for bugs, accumulating snakes, “manufacturing poison,” dwelling in a cabin within the bush with no electrical energy, water, or phone, constructing a “board and batten” home. It was a life that inspired resourcefulness and resiliency.
The trail to publication began round age 6. Impressed by a Little Golden Ebook titled “The Lively Little Rabbit,” she started to put in writing. Her first self-described opus was a set of poems, “Rhyming Cats,” earlier than she moved on to a morality puppet play that includes a ghost and an “expose of false narratives.” It’s not shocking then that her first revealed e-book was a set of poems, “The Circle Game,” which gained her Canada’s 1966 Governor Common’s award.
Within the memoir, Atwood describes the inception of her novels. Her debut novel, “The Edible Woman” (1969), drew its setting from an deserted clay pit and a aspect curiosity in cake adorning, for instance, whereas “Alias Grace” (1996) started with a couple of phrases on stationery in a Zurich resort. She continuously strikes her authentic opening scenes elsewhere as her novels take form. “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her prescient novel of totalitarian dictatorship, started with the group hanging scene, which was shifted to the again of the e-book. All of the Aunts within the novel, written in Berlin in 1984, had been “named after products aimed at women.”
It’s just about inconceivable — even in a prolonged long-form overview — to cowl all the fabric in Atwood’s life and books. However one title that have to be included from her actual life is Graeme Gibson. An irascible Canadian author, he was her life associate after her 1973 divorce from Jim Polk till he died in London in 2019. Gibson dominates her life — and far of the memoir. She dedicates the e-book to him. Grief haunts her, invades the quick tales in “Old Babes in the Woods” (2023) whereas “no story or novel could ever contain the total complexity of another human being.”
Neither can most memoirs, however, at 85 years, Atwood’s valediction to readers shares “many strange happenings, incidents of malice, odd dreams, conversations, joyful moments, ghosts, stupid mistakes, and catastrophes.” She sprinkles “Life Lessons” all through: “During public appearances, any humiliation can be overcome unless you throw up or die”; “You can make anything talk, including your sleeve and the salt and pepper shakers. Novelists do it all the time”; “There are some things you can’t fix”; “Governments, such as Communist ones, that claim to be ‘helping the people’ can do terrible things … So could your own government. Nobody is immune”; “If you’ve got a megaphone, hang on to it.”
“Book of Lives” may as nicely be one among Atwood’s novels (with the addition of photographs and illustrations). It’s a exceptional learn. She makes area for everybody. Her participating voice is populated by a big solid of beguiling characters, settings are enriched with vivid particulars, all of it grounded by a compelling story line. It incorporates multitudes, conflates life and artwork, and, evoking Jim Croce, efficiently places time in a bottle.
Papinchak, a former English professor, is an award-winning freelance critic within the Los Angeles space.
