Title: Bluebeard's Egg
Author: Margaret Atwood
Date: 1983
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin / Ballantine
ISBN: 0-449-21417-6
Length: 323 pages
Quote: "Sally is in love with Ed because of his stupidity."
In the title story, there's more to Ed than Sally has let herself notice, or wants to know. However, Ed's depths aren't as slimy as those of Becka, whose ex-husband is compulsively promiscuous but still managed to fall in love, such as he can, with a woman worse than himself. Then there's Loulou, an earth-mother type who knows some people would think she's being exploited but finds that she'd rather go on being exploited than be liberated their way...one begins to trace, in this book, some echoes of Atwood's failure, as an intelligent and independent woman, to fit into the hive-mind that was 1970s left-wing feminism.
Different people relate to different literary forms; I like most people's nonfiction better than their fiction. Although Atwood has consistently been (about the only) exception to this rule, I like either her novels or her short-short pieces better than these mainstream short stories. All the main characters in these stories, including the teenagers, are actively heterosexual and we're told far too much about their sex lives in proportion to their cerebral, emotional, or spiritual lives to suit me. I feel as if I've been listening to the chatter of a lot of vulgar people I'd never want to talk to.
It's not that the sex in these stories is obscenely detailed, or that Atwood's novels are all about children, grandmothers, or nuns; it's a matter of proportion. These characters do things—they fall out of boats, they get lost on tours, they raise children—but mostly they rut. All the deciding moments when they choose between hope and despair, self-respect and self-destruction, good and evil, understanding and stupidity, seem to take place in beds. My feeling is that this is no way for human beings to live or to write. Also, less than halfway through the book, I'm totally grossed out by the evil of Becka (a cat hater).
As I scrolled through the Amazon reader reviews (actually I was looking for a form to use to notify Amazon that the link to the hardcover book was, for some reason, going to the Chinese translation) one phrase leaped out at me--"the vitriolic, man-hating feminism..." Say whaaaat? "Man-hating feminism" describes things like Andrea Dworkin's Mercy (no link, not recommended); it does not describe Atwood's work, which has a wry, snarky, self-critical sense of humor throughout. (Did the commenter even notice that all of Atwood's books have mentioned her partnership with Graeme Gibson
?) More than her other books I think Bluebeard's Egg contains man-hating feminist characters, but, considering that the most repulsive character is a woman and some of the men seem comparatively nice...Right, snowflakes: This is a collection of short stories basically about the 1970s, maybe 1960s. At this time in history a lot of man-hating feminists were growling and snarling about, just as a lot of people were (tremble!) losing their virginity before their eighteenth birthdays, and some people, although I don't remember a specimen in this book, were voting for Nixon. If you can't bear to think about that kind of thing, you can't bear to read anything true about an historical period reasonably close to your own, and the best thing for you to do might be just to melt now.
As I scrolled through the Amazon reader reviews (actually I was looking for a form to use to notify Amazon that the link to the hardcover book was, for some reason, going to the Chinese translation) one phrase leaped out at me--"the vitriolic, man-hating feminism..." Say whaaaat? "Man-hating feminism" describes things like Andrea Dworkin's Mercy (no link, not recommended); it does not describe Atwood's work, which has a wry, snarky, self-critical sense of humor throughout. (Did the commenter even notice that all of Atwood's books have mentioned her partnership with Graeme Gibson
?) More than her other books I think Bluebeard's Egg contains man-hating feminist characters, but, considering that the most repulsive character is a woman and some of the men seem comparatively nice...Right, snowflakes: This is a collection of short stories basically about the 1970s, maybe 1960s. At this time in history a lot of man-hating feminists were growling and snarling about, just as a lot of people were (tremble!) losing their virginity before their eighteenth birthdays, and some people, although I don't remember a specimen in this book, were voting for Nixon. If you can't bear to think about that kind of thing, you can't bear to read anything true about an historical period reasonably close to your own, and the best thing for you to do might be just to melt now.
However, many people whose sense of proportion may be different from mine have liked Bluebeard's Egg, so if you are not a revisionist snowflake type, perhaps you will too.
It's still possible to show respect to Margaret Atwood by buying the latest paperback reprint (shown above) as a new book. It's still possible to support this web site by buying (the early, cheaper paperback edition unless otherwise specified) as a Fair Trade Book, on the usual terms of $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment; at least seven more books of this size would fit into a $5 package, and for each one of them that was written by Margaret Atwood we'll send $1 to the charity of her choice. However, Amazon is nudging me to tell you that currently you can read Bluebeard's Egg free of charge if willing to download the latest version of Kindle. I like real books that don't blink or glow or plug into anything, myself...but if you can stand a little more eyestrain from your current blinking box, here is a book you can read just by clicking on the Amazon photo link a few more times and following the instructions that come up. (Don't say I didn't warn you.)
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