Deep in this highly readable and entertaining first novel by Margaret Atwood is a statement that I take to be its thesis: A person doesn't live by principles; a person lives by adjustments. That is true of the protagonist, Marian, a young woman in Toronto on a path toward a "normal" life of marriage and children. Atwood subverts what could have been a dreary domestic novel with a text that is just slightly off-kilter and studded with oddities. The old social and sexual patterns are very much in evidence in this 1969 book, but they are straining to break the leash.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Monday, October 2, 2017
A Sketch of My Life
Written after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929, this short biographical sketch by Thomas Mann reveals both the person and the intellectual. Most rewarding are the sections on his youthful school days and the publication and reception of his 1901 novel, Buddenbrooks. His philosophical thoughts are somewhat dense and, I suspect, not made less so by the translator.
Footsucker
Geoff Nicholson's novel reads briskly and contains enough academic information on its subject, fetishism, that the reader is left with something beyond the improbable plot twists. It is a dispassionate, typically British, I suppose, look at a subject that could easily have handled emotively or erotically, and all the better for it.
Decline and Fall
Evelyn Waugh's first novel (and second book, after a biography of Rossetti) finds the hapless Paul Pennyfeather thrown this way and that by forces beyond his control. As such, he stands in for us all, but his story is specifically situated among the upper classes of England, which Waugh uses to great comic effect. Thus, a serious and very funny book.
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