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Weems
, September 01, 2021
(view all comments by Weems)
It's hard for me to come to a Classic with only the mindset of This Must Be Read. Perhaps it's obstinance, or just a need for difference, I don't know. But I'm glad I came to this book simply wanting to read it, because I dug through it with relish. This is one of those books that exudes such talent, especially in the way that Atwood finds a concise situation that examines misogyny in such depth: the rhetoric of protection to not only provide an excuse to strip women of all their rights but that generates in a severe distrust of women, and of course the patriarchal attitude that men are bad but are free to have the power to do as they will and that women must carry the brunt of a system that supposedly forces men to be good. And of course the recruitment of women to help subjugate women. Atwood's novel links itself to Camus's best work for me, in the way that there is a strong social metaphor at play, but the story itself is still very real, very palpable and not relegating itself to be simply Symbolic, because the issues at stake are real, which is probably all the more weighty in this book, since, come 2021, it seems we only narrowly skirted from becoming a Gilead (and more!) ourselves.
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