Contemporary Reads: Moral Disorder

Moral Disorder (2006) is a book by Margaret Atwood.

Modern Classics: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is a novel by Margaret Atwood.

Modern Classics: Surfacing

Surfacing (1972) is Margaret Atwood's second published novel. A nameless young woman returns to the small Quebec island where she was raised to search for her missing father. With her comes along her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David.
As the days pass, each characters' individuality is exposed. The protagonist begins to drift in and out of reality, remembering painful episodes of her past.
After her father is found dead (by drowing), she runs away from her friends and hides until they leave the island. She decides to stay there in communion with Nature.
This novel explores themes such as powerless of expression through language or the alienation of women (the protagonist/narrator has been married in the past and had a child whom she considers her husband's but not hers); and motifs such as the American expansion or Canadian national identity (the Québec setting is no accident).
This is a short but rich novel that has been hailed by critics as one of the major works in North American literature and probably one of the most canonical Canadian books.
Other books that I have read by the same author: Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin.

Modern Classics: Tempest-Tost

Tempest-Tost (1951) was the first novel by Robertson Davies. It eventually also became the first in his Salterton Trilogy together with Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties. They are all set in the fictional town of Salterton in Ontario, Canada.

This novel is about an amateur theatre group which is trying to put together a summer production of Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Maths teacher Hector Mackilwraith falls in love with the young and beautiful Griselda Webster. When Hector is absent half way through the play and passes out backstage, everyone thinks he has tried to commit suicide.

This novel attempts to be comical without quite managing to do so successfully. However, I do look forward to reading later works by Davies, particularly The Dertford Trilogy written two decades later.

Contemporary Reads: Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye (1988) was the ninth novel published by Margaret Atwood. It is a Bildungsroman charting the life of painter Elaine Risley.

This novel explores brilliantly the complex relationship between a bully, Cordelia, and her victim, Elaine. We also get to see how this relationship changes throughout the years from the victim's perspective. As with all books by Atwood I read to date, Cat's Eye does not fail to impress.

Other books I have read by this author: The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin.

Contemporary Reads: Life of Pi

Life of Pi (2002) by Yann Martel became an International publishing sensation after winning the Man Booker Prize. It tells the story of how an Indian teeneager, Piscine Molitor Patel or Pi, survived a shipwreck in the company of a Bengal tiger.

The book is divided in three parts:

- In Part I, we learn about Pi's upbringing in the Indian town of Pondicherry. His interest in religion will see him becoming a Christian and a Muslim while still remaining a Hindu. Aside from religion, his other main interest is animals (his family runs the local zoo). Later in life he'll major in religious studies and zoology.

- In Part II, the family decides to leave India to emigrate to Canada. They sail across the Pacific in a Japanese ship with most of the animals on board. Amid much confusion, before the ship sinks Pi is thrown into a boat and is, thus, the only survivor. The only human survivor, that is, since on the boat there are also a zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a tiger! Soon the hyena eats zebra and the orang-utan and the tiger eats the hyena. Both the Pi and the tiger hilariously known as Richard Parker survive for many months and after a brief sojour on a meerkat infested island they arrived to Mexico.

- In Part III, two members of the Japanese Ministry of Transport who find Pi's story unbelievable. So he changes it just by substituting the zebra by a Taiwanese salior, the orang-utan by his mother and the hyena by a French cook. Finally, the Japanese officials decide to stick to the story with animals and it is the one that 'sounds best'.

This is a highly imaginative and shocking novel.

Contemporary Reads: The Blind Assassin

After just a few pages, reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood turned into a near complusion. The prose just flows and this fantastic and unpredictable stroy of sisters Iris and Laura Chase is seems so effortlessly told.

There is a novel within the novel, entitled also The Blind Assassin about the secret relationship between a science-fiction writer and, we suspect, a married woman. For most of the book, I (and I'm sure most readers) thought this was an autobiographical accout of Laura's life.

The other parts of the book are made up by Iris's account on her life written for the benefit of her long lost grand-daughter, Sabrina, and by the contents of newspaper cuttings which illustrate perfectly what Iris is telling her and us readers.

We learn much about Iris and Laura's life from the upbringing in a rich family and their young adulthoods. How Laura becomes besotted with a young pinko, Alex Thomas, and hides him at the family mansion when he is accused of burning down their factory. We learn about how Iris marries Richard Griffen to solve her family's money troubles. Iris is only 18 at the time and Winifred, an old friend of Richard's, becomes a suffocating and controlling fixure in her life. She soons give her husband a daughter, Aimee. After the death of her father (suicide?), Laura comes to live with her sisters in Toronto. She is soon sent into an institution allegedly suffering from mental problems. She escapes and disappears for a few years.

All along, we sense their is something missing, Iris is keeping something from Sabrina and us. She reveals all, though, in the last sections of the book.

Only when Iris writes about her reunion with her Laura and her subsequent suicide (driving Iris's car off a bridge) on that same day do we find out the truth.

Laura had been living in Halifax all these years and had only come back to Toronto to await Alex's return from fighting in Europe. She explains that she had been pregnant when she was sectioned and had an abortion. All this had been orchestrated by Richard and Winifred. After hearing this, Iris reveals to her, that Alex died in Holland months ago and that she knows as she received a telegraph confirming this. She also reveals that she had been Alex's lover for a long time. At this point Laura makes off with Iris's car and ends up killing herself.

Before that, though, she manages to stop by Iris's house and leaves some note books. When Iris reads the notebooks she realises that Richard had beeded Laura and in fact the baby she had aborted was in fact Richard's. In turn, Iris's dauther Aimee was the issue of her relationship with Alex and not Richard.

Iris longs from her grand-daughter Sabrina to know all this. She has been brought up by Winifred as her mother Aimee was when she was taken away from Iris after her divorce from Richard.

A long family epic full of betrayal, secrets and longing excellently written by one of the most celebrated writers alive.

Other books I have read by the same author: The Robber Bride.