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A review by saltygalreads
Old Babes in the Wood: Stories by Margaret Atwood
5.0
Old Babes in the Wood
This is a collection of short stories from our first lady of literature, Margaret Atwood. Part I and III focus on a couple named Tig and Nell, which the reader quickly ascertains is the fictional version of Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood. Part II is a fascinating collection of stories about the challenging, exhilarating, frightening, violent and ridiculous experience of going through life as a human.
There are seven stories in total about Tig and Nell, chronicling their joyful misadventures in their younger, more agile years through to Tig’s increasing frailness and eventual death. There are so many beautiful turns of phrase in these stories, as only Atwood can do, and just when you feel a stab of sadness, Atwood impishly pokes fun at her own sentimentality. “Tennyson was very skillful at that kind of thing. Aloneness. Forlornness. Tears from the depths of some divine despair…Sugary woo-woo trash.”
Then there are moments of such poignancy, such as in the “Wooden Box” when Nell is cleaning and organizing and finds old random possessions belonged to Tig. “Similarly the shaving brush. No vestige of Tig remains on it, unlike his hairbrush, which still evokes him. She has tucked the hairbrush away into a little shrine in a night table drawer, surrounded by a small flashlight, a couple of pencils, half a box of cough drops.” This made my breath catch in my throat, remembering after my mother-in-law’s death, when I went up to her room to look for something and found her hairbrush with her hair still in it, along with her favourite well-used red lipstick. In these ordinary items, grief can surprise us.
Part II consists of an eclectic collection of stories written over some years, including a story about a young woman who believes her mother to be a witch, a hilarious interview with George Orwell conducted through a medium, and a dreamy little story of a snail who is reincarnated into the body of a banking service representative, with an alpha-male specimen of a boyfriend named Tyler. “How crude are the sexual procedures of humans compared with those of snails! How precipitous!” And my favourite, “Death by Clamshell” about Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer who was viciously murdered by a mob in 415 AD.
A wonderful collection and so enjoyable to read. Many thanks to Penguin Random House Canada for my copy.
This is a collection of short stories from our first lady of literature, Margaret Atwood. Part I and III focus on a couple named Tig and Nell, which the reader quickly ascertains is the fictional version of Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood. Part II is a fascinating collection of stories about the challenging, exhilarating, frightening, violent and ridiculous experience of going through life as a human.
There are seven stories in total about Tig and Nell, chronicling their joyful misadventures in their younger, more agile years through to Tig’s increasing frailness and eventual death. There are so many beautiful turns of phrase in these stories, as only Atwood can do, and just when you feel a stab of sadness, Atwood impishly pokes fun at her own sentimentality. “Tennyson was very skillful at that kind of thing. Aloneness. Forlornness. Tears from the depths of some divine despair…Sugary woo-woo trash.”
Then there are moments of such poignancy, such as in the “Wooden Box” when Nell is cleaning and organizing and finds old random possessions belonged to Tig. “Similarly the shaving brush. No vestige of Tig remains on it, unlike his hairbrush, which still evokes him. She has tucked the hairbrush away into a little shrine in a night table drawer, surrounded by a small flashlight, a couple of pencils, half a box of cough drops.” This made my breath catch in my throat, remembering after my mother-in-law’s death, when I went up to her room to look for something and found her hairbrush with her hair still in it, along with her favourite well-used red lipstick. In these ordinary items, grief can surprise us.
Part II consists of an eclectic collection of stories written over some years, including a story about a young woman who believes her mother to be a witch, a hilarious interview with George Orwell conducted through a medium, and a dreamy little story of a snail who is reincarnated into the body of a banking service representative, with an alpha-male specimen of a boyfriend named Tyler. “How crude are the sexual procedures of humans compared with those of snails! How precipitous!” And my favourite, “Death by Clamshell” about Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer who was viciously murdered by a mob in 415 AD.
A wonderful collection and so enjoyable to read. Many thanks to Penguin Random House Canada for my copy.