/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17920518]

On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you love Margaret Atwood?

[Anonymous No.17920537]

>The scare-stories with which Atwood frigs her readers are distinguished by their foolish irrelevance. Take this alleged masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale. A foolish book, it depicts Hell as imagined by an anglo-Canadian mandarin: America ruled by savage uncultured Christians who not only repress all intellectual freedoms but would probably cut funding for genteel novelists. Worst of all, women in this Republic of Gilead are valued solely for their ability to bear children, restricted to the house and excluded from economic activity.

>No one who knows anything about the way America works would ever really think that its rulers would want to let silly gender prejudices keep them from creating new consumers, much less let religion get in the way of productivity. The Baptist loonies are suckers to be wooed in election years, no more. They are useful as janitors in peacetime, cannon-fodder in war. Making them into the rulers of a nightmare vision of America is, by a charitable estimation, very naive. If we were to consider it less charitably, it might seem downright suspect. Atwood, who shares about 99.9% of her DNA with America’s real rulers, cannot see them at all, and so fails to notice their hegemony. As she confessed in boasting about her achievement in Handmaid’s Tale, she borrowed horror-stories about the treatment of women in loser countries like Iraq and applied them to the US. Apparently she could not see the horror which really does suffuse American life—a horror which has absolutely nothing to do with that losers’ club, Islam.

>Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive. Handmaid’s Tale is fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives. No one wants to force middle-class American women to have babies. In fact, it’s almost impossible for them to contemplate having kids, because they’re terrified that it might set them back in their careers, and their rivals in the adjacent cubicles would grab their parking spaces and health plans. Nobody wants to use their bodies. That’s precisely the horror with which they live: no one wants to mate with them because in their world, every single striver must fear every other, and the sort of joint action involved in mating and rearing one’s young is impossible—laughable, a thing which only those who have abandoned the hope of A Career can contemplate. So in their minds, mating and rearing children moves down in class, becoming a thing for rednecks and (though they’ll never say this part out loud) immigrants-of-color. The desire to have children gets bounced outside oneself, onto these lesser beings, and returns, courtesy of Atwood, in demonized form, as the tyranny of procreation, family values and the Patriarchy. It’s the horror they love to fear.

[Anonymous No.17920640]

>>17920537
sauce?

[Anonymous No.17921217]

>>17920518
1-2, only read handmaids tale and it's dogshit

[Anonymous No.17921231]

like a really violent 2

[Anonymous No.17921244]

>>17920518
Cat’s Eye and Oryx and Crake are great but most of her oeuvre sucks. So 3.

[Anonymous No.17921274]

>>17920537
Kind of based, though the guy who wrote it is probably a conservative retard who thinks the revulsion towards motherhood bad. It's not, and pregnancy is a horror story in and of itself more perverted and unsettling than any novel. The tendency to abolish motherhood is ethical.

[Anonymous No.17921327]

>>17921274
>pregnancy is a horror story in and of itself more perverted and unsettling than any novel
no.

[Anonymous No.17921339]

>>17921274
Just from this post I can tell you’re either canadian or a tranny, or both.

[Anonymous No.17921362]

>>17920537
very based and accurate

[Anonymous No.17921456]

>>17921327
The other day I was chopping up vegetables for a family dinner. When I sliced through one of the peppers - it had another fully formed pepper growing inside of it. I was so taken aback that I screamed and dropped the knife I had been using. It was as if the plant had been pregnant - but imagine, cutting open a carcass to find another grown human waiting inside, like some kind of homonculus. It horrifies me!
>>17921339
I'll accept being called a tranny, but you'll take that comment about being canadian back if you know what's good for you.

[Anonymous No.17921490]

>>17920537
Good read, gonna need the source.

[Anonymous No.17921496]

>>17920518
She's about a 7 for me. I do actually really love her poetry and short fiction, but her fiction is often rife with preachiness and not-so-great prose. I've read about 5 of her novels and the only one that really impressed me was Cat's Eye. I do recommend her poetry though.

[Anonymous No.17921506]

>>17920518
- 10

[Anonymous No.17921515]

>>17920537
>>17920640
>>17921362
>>17921490
Found the sauce: http://exiledonline.com/old-exile/vault/books/review103.html

[Anonymous No.17921520]

>>17920537
Based.

>>17921274
>this guy is right but not indoctrinated by antinatalist kikes let me tell you about it
Yawn.

[Anonymous No.17921604]

>>17921520
I'm not an anti-natalist/evil. I love life and all living things. It's motherhood I hate, demeaning contemtable motherhood..

[Anonymous No.17921632]

>>17921456
Call xim a canadian and watch as xe recoils “I’ve been found out!”

[Anonymous No.17921695]

>>17920537
Dear God I love John Dolan.