Why is this book considered a modern masterpiece? It's awful

why is this book considered a modern masterpiece? It's awful

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Yeah, I found the prose really clunky. I have a theory as to why it's considered a modern masterpiece:

>It gets a fair amount of praise on release, as most dystopian novels do, and one by a female author will probably get even more
>Brainlets try to read it, can't because the prose is clunky, assume that's because it's too difficult/complex for them
>Instant classic

What are you, some sort of regressive Rethuglican misogynist?

>Thinks a book that happens to have a female author is awful
>He must be a misogynist

hmmmmmm

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It's above Anna Karenina.

Bell curve. More people read it and its at a level they can understand so they rate it higher. Don't ever use Goodreads as a mark of quality; it is a mark of likability.

>giving genre fiction enough credence to bother trashing it
you need to go back

How is it awful? I thought it was pretty good.

Example of the clunky prose?

>Muh wymims
>muh envegelicals
> muh evil mens

every dystopian novel is
>muh [insert societal evil if taken to the extreme]

>Twilight
>unfinished
Where would Handmaid's Tale rate among these? I'd say below P&P and To Kill a Mockingbird, above the rest.

>Bell curve
>mark of likability
>pick one

I would never even go on Goodreads, because any group of people that puts Hunger Games, Harry Potter and Twilight in their collective top 5 isn't a group that goes too deep when they read.

So it's a mark of likability. Great. It's #68; that's pretty damn high on a list of over 50,000 books. Also, plenty of people talk about this book on here, and I like to think that Veeky Forums is a couple steps above Goodreads.

First page:

"A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair."

Aside from being a run-on sentence, it's also a structural mess. Commas can get tricky if they're used for clause separation and listing within a single sentence. Reading a book that's wordy and grammatically incorrect is not fun for me. And Atwood is guilty of this in a couple other of her books (I don't have any others on me, but it's honestly her biggest problem, imo).

only the plebby ones

goodreads is a huge worldwide website and there are many different groups and communities within

Actually, now you mention it I do remember noticing grammatical oddities in there. I'm fine with that sentence though- I quite like the way it runs rapidly through the past generations to the point of losing control at the end.

Atwood can't write to save her life

It's funny because she looks down on Science Fiction but guys like Jack Vance and Ray Bradbury shit all over her prose

...also, I should add that while I like The Handmaid's Tale, I thought The Blind Assassin was feckin' awful.

And I bet you frequent all of them, you strumpet.


Funny, I feel the opposite, I feel that sentence really drags. I don't mind run-ons so much when there's a lack of punctuation, like in a stream-of-consciousness narrative by Joyce, or even McCarthy. Those, to me, do flow very rapidly. This one kind of meanders, and gives me plenty of time to reflect on the fact that it is a grammatical mess.


Handmaid's Tale definitely has a much better premise than anything else she's written.


Reminds me of Dean Koontz and Stephen King. As much as we razz King on here, he's got his merits. Koontz is pretty much pure trash.

When interviewers asked them about each other, King was a bro--said he thought Koontz wrote very good horror.

Koontz, meanwhile, looks down on King, and makes no secret of it whenever asked.

It's not awful, nor a masterpiece, and it was written specifically for the Reagan years. It's a decent book in its way, but Atwood is never amazing, she just ranges from very enjoyable to very dull (I've read more than a dozen of her novels). I'm reading Hag-Seed right now, her Hogarth Shakespeare run at The Tempest transmitted through Robertson Davies, and it's hilarious so far.

>I've read more than a dozen of her novels
What are her top 3, excluding Handmaid's Tale if it's in the top 3.

>women
Meme gender

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The Penelopiad is fun, like Hag-Seed, and her MaddAddam trilogy is low on action, but interesting, but for straight novels, her best three are probably Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Robber Bride. They're less transparently feminist parables than her early work, and more careful and involved than her recent work.

i think that book would´ve been more legitimate if intead of a christian theocracy, the government was an islamic caliphate, makes more sense to me that way

Why call it fiction at that point?

But that would be hateful and Islamophobic, you bigot.

With the way radical Christianity can be, what's the difference?

Because there is no radical Christian country that behaves the same way as typical Islamic countries.

Remember that the book was written in USA 1985, radical Christianity makes way more sense. Especially since the government pushed for religion to counter the atheism of the Soviet Union during the cold war.

If it were written today I'd probably agree with you.

>walk into bookstore
>literally several full shelves of all the different publications of this fucking book

The worst thing is how in Trump's america this book is no longer fiction but an actual documentary. Ironic really.

Because women are in control over modern literature. Men for the most part quit reading a long time ago

low quality bait

>tfw studying this book for coursework
>tfw have to compare it to the trial

Honestly Atwood's prose in this book is garbage, and the book's weak grasp on themes of dystopia and completely boring, obvious dystopian setting really doesn't help.

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>Has autism

Because you're not capable of enjoying things by women. Prove me wrong.
You cant.

the worst shitpost in a long time

Canada has an annoying habit of taking slight above-average artists (writers, bands, actors, whatever) and putting them on a pedestal as if they're they're the best ever.

It's actually great relative to other political tracts. Don't blame the writer, blame the medium. You just don't have a taste for propaganda. Or maybe you do, it's just the fact that you don't agree with it that makes this example awful for you.

Rush IS the best ever, though.

Reading these paragraphs give me hope for my own writing. We're all gonna make it Veeky Forums

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>two books differ widely in themes, execution and quality
>oh wew how do I compare them
The absolute state of Veeky Forums.

>makes unbelievable society to spoof 80s Evangelical Christians who are irrelevant
>turns out to be a more accurate satire of Middle Eastern states such as Iran
>nobody wants to acknowledge

Tbh read the book in hs, was ok

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>muh vagina

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The first 100 or so pages were very entertaining but then it seemed like she needed to write 300 to get published. Instead of meaningfully extending the story or thought, everything after that first third is an absolute waste of time.

Why would you write about a female dystopia a f t e r the feminism movement, when women live happier than ever? I could understand an anti-muslim one, but anti-christian is ridicilous.

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I enjoy their vaginas, is that a thing by a woman