Handmaid's Tale, The (The Classic Collection) MP3 CD – Unabridged, July 22, 2014

I will admit - Over the years, 'Handmaid' was one of those books everyone had told me just HAD to be read - but with the clear discomfort they'd show in saying that, I always thought - Nope; not for me. I'm just not one for the whole dystopian thing; I need to see some light at the end of the tunnel.Fast forward to last week - this book being required for my daughter's Eng Lit class, and sitting available while I was at loose ends in a Starbucks for several hours - I thought, Why not?... and how glad I am, that I had those few hours. Wow. I was gone, hook line and sinker, from the first page on.Handmaid is set in, yes, a dystopian future in which women's place in the world has been subverted, through various events which resonate awfully closely with current times. The story picks up at the moment when Offred (a concatenation of her "owner's" name and her position in this society) is assigned to a new home in a city in America, for reasons that become all too clear within a few short pages. Her experiences within this new environment, interwoven with her recollection of her past before this societal apocalypse, unveil themselves like the layers of an onion - a never-ending interweaving of recollections and current experiences which, in their close parallels with so much that seems to be happening in our current world, make it not just an uncomfortable read, as so many other reviewers have said; but an eerily prescient one for these times.I could go on about that aspect of what makes this such a valuable read for any person over the age of 10 years old, but I'm quite sure many of the 1,000 + prior reviewers will have spoken to that far more effectively than I ever could. But for me, what makes this book so great is the Voice that the protagonist gains as she struggles in such a harsh, unforgiving, and shockingly cruel environment - the brutal honesty with which that voice speaks to the horrors and impossible personal choices that any of us would have to make, faced with such a savagely misogynistic society. There is no turning away from those realities in this book; Offred is, clearly, no better than any of us; but, she is, perhaps, more honest about her choices than any of us would ever manage to be. She has no roads but dead ends; no feelings but pain, isolation, and tragic loss; in a society which both reviles her and yet absolutely, completely, stunningly, needs her.And yet. There is compassion - much compassion - in this book not just for Offred but for each of her persecutors; and a perfectly clear view, of each person in Offred's life, from the patriarchy which dictates every aspect of the lives of the Americans; to the women with whom she is forced to share the household; to the man who runs their lives - and in theory owns Offred, body and soul. Margaret Atwood has managed to capture the complete horror of this situation and yet the complete spectrum of needs and innate humanness - warts and all - of each of the players in this world, speaking with true sight not only about what they each do, but the real WHY of it, like a series of ornate but utterly constrained chess pieces moved about in a deadly game by unseen hands.Atwood's brilliance with the written word, the layers of meaning she assigns to so many individual words, is a both a challenge and a complete delight, no matter how difficult the topics she makes us consider. Each page is like unwrapping a gift of many layers of brightly colored paper, never knowing what you will ultimately find inside: something to treasure, or something to fear. Offred's voice and her observations of self, other, and society are so clear and beautiful, so bleak, sad and yet hopeful - so compelling - in making us see these people. There are many phrases and visions Atwood has generated that will stay with me, now, for life. I cannot say I am in all cases glad of that - but I know i am richer for it. And in reading many of the current, more negative responses of the Amazon reading community, I cannot help but wonder if their dislike of the book is in many cases driven precisely from Atwood's artistry with words. She holds up not a picture for us to view, but a mirror to reflect realities that in many cases no one in their right mind would want to see - they are far too close, too personal, too true. And yet - we MUST look.I do not see, as some others do, a depressing endgame in this book; quite the opposite. Offred's determination to survive no matter what the cost and her slow but relentless growth to her own form of power and eventual rebellion, is not so much a story as a roadmap. We could all do well by, like Offred, looking with clear eyes at this dystopian imagining. If, at the end of the day, this book leaves you uncomfortable or depressed or angry - good, if at the same time it also manages to leave you unsettled. Atwood's intent was never to entertain you but to inform you - and that, she does with a master's deft hand.Three days and counting. What will we learn in Atwood's new book? I look forward, with a perfectly uncomfortable blend of anticipation and anxiety, dread and hope, to the answer to that question.

I knew nothing about this book when I bought and read it. I wish there were some way to review it without telling anything about it. The story definitely works better if you allow Atwood to bring you slowly up to speed. Stepping into the story with a knowledge of its setting and basic plot is bound to cause frustration, because Atwood parcels her secrets with great patience. So, if you want to enjoy this book as much as possible, and if you truly know nothing about it, then stop reading this review (and any others) and start reading THE HANDMAID'S TALE.Still reading? Fair enough.Atwood's story takes place in an alternate future where America (at least large portions of it) has been taken over by radical religious groups. The narrator of the tale lives in Gilead (in what we would call Maine), and she performs the functions of a concubine for a top-ranking political leader of this new, brutal regime. Everything in Gilead is (ostensibly) based on a religious (Christian) precedence, and so women's rights have been vastly curtailed. They are not even allowed to read.Told in the first person, the novel's prose is beautifully done, although it does begin to drone near the middle of the novel. Other reviewers have complained about the odd punctuation, fragmented sentences, and stilted structure, but if you make it to the end of the book, the narrator's strange approach to storytelling is fully explained. I found it rather poetic and insightful. Others (people who seem wedded to traditional novel structure) complain that it is insufferable. If you absolutely must have quotation marks, or if you can't stand run-on sentences, then step aside and read some Dan Brown or something.The book doesn't appear to have much in the way of a plot until you hit the middle point. The handmaid (her name is Offred, which is a title that indicates she is owned by her patron, a powerful man named "Fred;" the name is also a clever symbolic twist on the fact that all handmaids are required to wear bright red dresses) mostly just observes the world she is in for the first half of the novel, and her passivity gets a bit redundant by the halfway point. Atwood, seeming to know this, then sends the novel into more exploratory areas, and Offred is given a chance to witness other, less religiously pure, aspects of Gilead's society. Interesting still, although, again, little can be said to happen.I enjoyed this novel because, more than anything else, it is a excellently drawn portrayal of where religious fundamentalism and political fascism are rather easily intertwined. As a pastiche of moments/images that paint a picture of a world built on hypocrisy and the less-holy tenets of the Bible, the book works quite well. It is more a "imagine this world" kind of story, and if you are a reader who enjoys being submersed in new ideas and environments, the novel offers a lot of philosophical/political/sociological ideas to muse over. If you want action, cause and effect, intrigue, and conflicts leading to complications leading to resolutions, well, this is not the book for you.Because the book is so relentlessly symbolic as well as political, it is bound to bore some and insult others. The story is most obviously about women's rights and religious fanaticism, but it is also about humanity's self-destructive tendencies, the nature of fear and oppression, and the different shapes that insanity can take. It is a textbook more than a storybook, and this is hammered home in the final section of the novel. I won't tell you what happens, other than to say that the book, at a key moment in the story, takes a radical shift in its story-telling.For 95% of the novel, you are intimately involved, inside the head of poor Offred, witnessing and hearing and experiencing her world first hand (and usually in the present tense). For the last 5% of the book, you are so far removed from the contents of the handmaid's tale that it is a rude and (for me) somewhat unpleasant shock. The final moments of the book felt like Atwood trying to both ameliorate the reader's desire for clarification but also remain tantalizingly withdrawn; she spoon-feeds the readers some key data, while purposefully leaving vague the information that readers really want to know (let's just say that the Handmaid's Tale, like the Canterbury Tales from which the title was drawn, isn't exactly finished). I suppose this is just a final confirmation that this book is less about the handmaid herself, and more about the world she inhabited.It would have been nice for Atwood to craft a better end point for the story, or to at least offer a meager reward for the readers who were following Offred's story with patience and focus. But books like these are meant to be cautionary and theoretical rather than literary treats. This is not a fun story, nor is it exciting or clever. It is scary, dark, and unforgiving. For readers who enjoy theory, ideas, and the thought that there might be a meaning to life, this novel is a kind of beautiful punishment. You might not deserve punishment (Offred certainly didn't), but I think that's kinda the point.