Poignant! I have been waiting a long time to use this word in a review. I really liked this collection and it comes as no surprise considering I am AtPoignant! I have been waiting a long time to use this word in a review. I really liked this collection and it comes as no surprise considering I am Atwood’s fangirl and have been for a long time. I feel everyone will something else to speak to them in these stories. Some people might like the descriptions of the changes in Toronto over decades. Some might find this mood of melancholy particularly moving.
To me it was the summer camps which play an important in two of the stories: True Trash and Death by Landscape. As a child who spent all her summers at various camps by forests and lakes this was something I could somehow relate to. In True Trash all the boys from the camp are fascinated by the waitresses who serve them food, they spy on them when they’re sunbathing and fantasise about the sort of things teenage boys are prone to fantasising about. It reminded me of one camp I went to many years ago. It was a camp ran by army people and our ‘waiters’ were 19 year old boys in uniforms who were doing their military service (obligatory in Poland back then). Essentially the camp was full of 14 year old city girls and 19 year old tanned farm boys with crew cuts and uniforms. I will leave you with that picture.
The most powerful story in the collection is undoubtedly the rather grisly ‘Hairball’, best emphasising the loss of trust which seems to be the theme of the collection. Although I did enjoy the whole book I felt that in some of the other stories Atwood was pulling her punches. I also liked her observations on class in the UK:
“She had an advantage over the English women, though: she was of no class. She had no class. She was in a class of her own. She could roll around among the English men, all different kinds of them, secure in the knowledge that she was not being measured against the class yardsticks and accent-detectors they carried around in their back pockets, was not subject to the petty snobberies and resentments that lent such richness to their inner lives.”
How can you take such an interesting, excited and complicated world with so many conflict possibilities and write such a crap book about it? It’s rathHow can you take such an interesting, excited and complicated world with so many conflict possibilities and write such a crap book about it? It’s rather amazing.
I haven’t read a proper fantasy novel since my early high school days. Back then I used chain-read Andre Norton but I can tell you very little about as it has been mostly eradicated from my memory to make room for all the plotlines of Grey’s Anatomy. Therefore I can’t tell you if C.S Friedman writes badly or whether she is in line with other fantasy writers and what is considered the norm in the genre.
“She kneed her unhorse gently into motion again and tried to lose herself in memories of her family, as a means of combating the uneasiness that had been growing in her since she left the Bellamy household nearly an hour earlier. Her daughter Alix, barely five, had already [...]. Tory, nine, had […]. Eric, the oldest […]”
This is not a very sophisticated way to introduce characters (very minor ones as well), almost as bad as having the characters look in the mirror to describe their looks. So there is this sort of lazy writing and there are characters who say every other page ‘God help us’ or ‘gods help us’, depending on which denomination they belong to.
But that’s nothing, it could still be a four star read because the world, in which the nature produces currents which respond to psychic stimulus and can take a physical form, is a fascinating and intricate one. There is an outline of a religious conflict between the old religion (based possibly on Christianity brought to the planet by its colonisers from Earth) which rejects any use of those magic-like currents and all the new religions invented on the planet which pretty much base themselves on the fae – the currents. But instead of this fascinating story of high politics, religion and magic, we have a lame tale of a girl, Chiani, who lost her special powers and a group of men who, for god (or gods) know what reason decide to help her get them back, even if it means risking their lives.
We have the priest who has a bit of a crush on Chiani, which is why he decides to ruin his career and go against everything he believes in just to help her, while still acting like a self-righteous prick when he is forced to accept help from someone who seems to be not a very good person at all (we will call him the Lesser Evil). The Lesser Evil puts up with the self-righteousness of the Self-Righteous prick and generally acts in a very honourable way and is the most interesting and three-dimensional character, which is quite funny because he is supposed have no human soul left in him. I don’t know how Friedman managed to make her inhuman character the most human of them all but it probably wasn’t intentional.
Oh, and there is this one more character, so superfluous that you can’t help but wonder if he is going to be killed off somewhere along the way.
The four of them set off to get Chiani her magicks back. Chiani’s motivation is obvious but the rest of them follow because of some peculiar mix of honour debt, loyalty, and simply having hots for her. The fact that they are actually saving the world (and therefore themselves) at the same time seems to constantly escape them, when focusing on that would just make a lot more sense and make their motives logical.
In the end it’s a fairly enjoyable read but you are left thinking that there is a better story happening somewhere else in that world. ...more
I went to bed after reading the first twenty pages of it and I dreamt about chasing an antelope with a broken horThis book almost broke me and ate me.
I went to bed after reading the first twenty pages of it and I dreamt about chasing an antelope with a broken horn which jumped out the window. I, in turn, was being chased by a wild boar covered in blood which spoke in a human voice. There was also a flying carpet.
I don't really like magical realism but this book didn't care. I was gonna have it whether I liked it or not. It swept me away before I knew it. By the end of it I would read about a man who slept for two months and not bat an eye. Only a little later I would think: wait a minute, people can't sleep for two months straight! That's not possible, they have to eat and stuff!
As any other book of magical realism "The Famished Road" is elliptical. The characters go through a never-ending cycles of death and rebirth. It suits so well the postcolonial literature of Africa and Latin America because it represents the hopelessness and desperation of poverty and mirrors the situation of these fairly new countries that always seem to be going back to square one. It's a never-ending struggle of the same eternal forces that always seems to end in a draw.
This is really the story that Azaro, the so called 'spirit child' tells us. He is a child who doesn't want to stay on this Earth and longs for death. He constantly fights the desire to join his companions from the spirit world. It's only the love of his mother that keeps him fighting back this temptation. It takes him about 500 pages to finally develop a hunger for life even in this miserable postcolonial reality.
The book is full of symbolism as you would expect but there is also a lot of humour, some political satire and vibrant characters like the powerful bar owner Madame Koto.
It's beautifully written and it is hypnotic. It is also heart-breaking and devastating. And yes, it could be easily at least 200 pages shorter, but I enjoyed reading it even if it left me drained and hallucinating. I wanted it to end and I didn't want it to end.
I realise it is a love it or hate it kind of book and frankly I don't mind if you hate it. I feel very possessive and jealous about it.
The only reason I haven't given it five stars is because I don't see myself rereading it. It would probably drive me mad....more
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