What is Veeky Forums's opinions on Margaret Atwood and this book?

The premise is hilarious.

It makes you actually think about Patriarchy and the systematic disenfranchisement of women, and when you meet a neckbeard who thinks we're currently living "brave new world", you can bring it up and watch how they reject the premise as unrealistic SJW garbage

I enjoyed it but I remember there was an afterword which was actually part of the novel that was unnecessary.

also this scene gave me creeps when I was 15
youtube.com/watch?v=R-45xL7QLXc

My Uni's literary society had a feminist led book club and asked everyone to read it.

I couldn't get past the first chapter, its just embarressingly heavy handed science fiction

>after reading somewhere that it's actually a 1984-esque send-up but with Islamofascism instead of Soviet Russia.

You read wrong, its obviously based on fundamental Christianity

i meant the more general sense of a theocracy, not necessarily specifying a religion, happening in the US the same way theocracies are happening elsewhere. The only specific similarity, according to Atwood it seems, would be between the religious right's pro-life stance and Islam's literal patriarchy.

*the US religious right

she covers this in the afterward

It's like a big ironic joke
"Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she lived and made love with her husband, Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now..."

The Patriarchy is always offstage though. The actual men in the book barely register, it's mostly her, the dyke friend and Tammy Faye Baker.

I liked Offred as a character and the story, I just wish she had left out the flashbacks and the pollyanna ending.

She is an old Canadian woman author who wrote that book, pic related, and nothing else. When I walk down the isles of books in a store or maybe a library, I go "Oh look it's Margaret Atwood, the Canadian woman author who wrote that one book." Then I continue on my way.

Oryx & Crake is probably one of the most disturbing books I've read. I have to wonder what goes on in the minds of authors like Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates when they're spewing out one piece of disturbing fiction after the next.

lel you actually find Atwood disturbing?

Handmaiden's Tale less so because it reads like a spy thriller, but Oryx & Crake is an extremely disturbing book. The diseases, the protagonist's attitude, the genetic engineering and even the sex is creepy as hell.

I read Blind Assassin. It's actually really good. I wasn't expecting it to be. From what i understand she's pretty hit or miss and I've heard handmaids tale isn't one of her best although it's the most well known.

Neckbeards think we live in 1984 not brave new world

her best books are The Blind Assassin, Cat's Eye, and Oryx & Crake. She is a decent author, around Murakami-tier. literary fiction that is still accessible for most. not up there with her contemporaries Munro or Franzen or whoever else, though. She always comes across to me as a bit self-obsessed, and she's fallen off quite a bit in the past decade, her last few books being amongst her worst since around the beginning of her career. obviously very few people on this board are going to say anything positive at all because she is a woman, but I think Handmaid's Tale is pretty great and interesting. I enjoyed it way more than 1984 and Brave New World, etc, but I have a feeling most people here would get more out of her Oryx and Crake, which features a very Veeky Forums-tier protagonist.

Her early poetry wasn't half bad either. Seems like her best has already been produced. She wrote a novel for this time capsule project and it can only be read in 100 years.

mprnews.org/story/2015/05/29/books-thread-future-library

I don't think her being a woman is relevant. Le Guin is well liked and is even another feminist science fiction author. Flannery O'Connor is also pretty popular.

dibidibidis

it's honestly terrifyingly on the money considering how little this place cares for women, and how all of you will grow into adults. It's message isn't men hate women, men don't care about them enough to empathize when inconvenient which strips potential rights away over time we've worked for.

It's brutal, angering to many here I assume, but it's not innacurate. This was the not to distant past. Religious fundamentalism and cold uncaring PC but not calling itself PC secularism, could very well help the future become the fundamentalist hellscape of the novel.

Truth is always more disturbing than fiction, and unfortunately this book is no exception.

Oh Jesus Christ. You're getting the shitposters confused with the actual literature discussion that happens here. The people who really care about good literature don't care if the author is female. Yes there are trolls, just try to skim past them.

I didn't mean the shit posters here. I meant the internet in general, your "Sargon of Akkads", your "The Amazing Atheists".

People who have no authority on any subject but which are extremely influential to public consensus, pointing them in the sometimes the right, but often the wrong, direction in everything from argumentation to social science being in toto "wrong', when it has much valuable things to say.

Internet outrage is an incredibly dangerous thing, going down the line.

>these two cretins influential to the public consensus

They get hundreds of thousands of views.

They simply are.

>"Sargon of Akkads
You ever see the video where he debates a feminist academic? Pretty funny.

Did you see that one petition he made demanding "universities" listen to him and his fanbase? It's funnier.

My mom read this and The Blind Assassin. Later on when I informed her that both books were written by the same author, she said, "Oh. Does she ever write about anything else?"

If The Blind Assassin is one of her best I'm not touching anything else she wrote

the premise ridiculous? as in unbelievable? i sure that everything that had occurred had occurred at some point during history. those 200+ girls kidnapped and married off by boko haram would have experienced much worse.

my problem with it is that its so badly written.

everything is so heavy-handed, as if antwood despises all subtly and subtext.

i remember after the protagonista plays scrabble with the man they start speaking casually and - i shit you not - the narrator finds it necessary to write "you can tell from the way we were talking we were on different terms now" or something. furthermore, every so often there are chapters entitled "night" whose sole function is merely for the narrator to dissect all the events, characters and shifting social structures from the previous chapters.

and then - holy fuck - at the end of the book is an afterword merely there as a critique of the book itself. spoiler: at the end the narrator is freed by a man supposedly from the underground resistance. the afterword describes a group of academics explaining the ambiguity of whether she was really freed or rather captured by a secret police agent pretending to be resistance.

its as if she was trying to write a feminist book (not inherently wrong) and a book about that feminist book at the same time. it was sloppy and badly written. the only interesting character is janine and the commander.

She writes some really good short fiction, and like JG Ballard, the shorter the better.

meme author with heavy handed politics

numales pretend to like her garbage for femcred

>People who have no authority on any subject but which are extremely influential to public consensus, pointing them in the sometimes the right, but often the wrong, direction in everything from argumentation to social science being in toto "wrong', when it has much valuable things to say.

Considering that humanities departments are giant consensus-approved circlejerks, I'd say the change is a positive one. If honest debate is forbidden within a university context (or even a public one since you can easily get fired for saying anything), then it's only natural that it would find an outlet elsewhere.

>Internet outrage is an incredibly dangerous thing, going down the line.

Yes, how dare those unwashed plebs call bullshit on unfalsifiable critical theory scripture. They didn't even pay $200,000 for a social studies degree!

Not unbelievable, as you point out that example. It was that the main character is able to remember a time of normalcy and freedom, and I found it hard to believe that a mass of people would go along with what was happening to them, and not fight back to prevent it from happening in the first place. Which sadly probably would not have happened, but the way they were all so docile in the beginning despite their situation was off putting. I don't know any girls who would accept something like that lying down. But hey- it's fiction.

>I found it hard to believe that a mass of people would go along with what was happening to them, and not fight back to prevent it from happening in the first place.
see: europe

>I don't know any girls who would accept something like that lying down.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3802351/Calais-aid-workers-regularly-having-SEX-migrants-Jungle-camp-FEMALE-charity-helpers-likely-sleep-refugee.html

well in the middle east they became extremely fundementalist in a couple decades. of course its unbelievable how easily people go along with this, and how quickly it can occur - but a lesson from history is that it DOES occur.