Krishna
We have reviewed some of this author’s works before : See Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin for a few examples.
This is a collection of short stories. For Attwood, though, you need the length of a full length novels to really create an immersive experience and so the short story format – for me – did not really work. Margaret Attwood does not do short fiction very well.
The first story is called Significant Events In The Life Of My Mother. In it, the narrator is a girl, living with her brother and her parents in her teenage years. Her grandfather was a doctor in the days before electricity. The mother had a habit of narrating amazing things and since she was ‘very interested’ in dancing and skiing, her father considered her frivolous and refused to fund her college education. Undaunted, she saved the money herself and put herself through college. She talked about how the mother tricked the grandfather into agreeing to cut her long hair short, how at several times when their life was in danger, it was miraculously saved. She tells really salacious scandals with her lady friends but keeps quiet in front of mixed company – men do not have the strength of mind to cope with such things. She also recounts the only time when the father swore in front of her.
The second story is Hurricane Hazel. Again about a young girl, again living with her wildish mother who married a frontier man, and lived in a secluded spot inside wilderness. She is shy and not interested in boys. However, her friend Trish and her boyfriend Charlie want to go out and engage in sex and as a protective cover, wants this girl to come with her. So they find her a boy called Buddy: her first boyfriend. After rebuffing several of his advances beyond kissing and polite necking (while in a car with the other two going at it like rabbits right there in the back sear) she breaks up with him.
The third story is a weird one called Loulou. I am only talking relatively as all of the stories – or most of them – seem weird in this collection. Loulou is a a pottery maker who is in serial love with a whole bunch of poets, who hang around her studio making fun of her in their high faulting English while eating her food and one of them sharing her bed – at a time. She goes and finds herself an accountant and also sleeps with him. She continues to let the poets leech off her.
The next story is called Uglypuss, which turns out to be the name of a cat. Incidentally, this is the only story that even has a semblance of a story. The owner of the cat is Joel, who is vilified by fellow Jews for daring to criticize the policies of Israel and being critical of some Jews but who has sex as easily as you would shake hands. Even after his steady girlfriend Becka is in his life, he continues blithely with one-night stands, which causes her to leave. And she, feeling rebuffed and guilty, comes back and has sex whenever she wants to make up. When he angers her once too often (by walking away to get a girl to sleep with after accepting Becka’s offer to come over), she trashes his living room and kidnaps Uglypuss to put him in a random garbage can in the city, with a note to Joel so that he could wander around town looking for his pet cat.
Next Story is Betty. Fred and Betty are neighbours to a family of two sisters, Catherine and the narrator. Everyone in the neighborhood seems to be in love with Fred who is a kind of a humorous but ungrateful man. Betty, who is sweet and nice, does not get attention. When Catherine makes friends with another kid called Nan and goes to ‘the Store’ the only grocery place in that wilderness spot (Sault St Marie), mother makes her take the sister too. When he finally runs away with a woman, Betty goes to pieces. She then dies of brain tumor. Yes, I know, pretty insipid, right?
The next is Bluebeard’s Egg, the titular story so to speak. Sally and Ed are married. Ed is handsome, is a heart doctor but also, in Sally’s opinion, stupid – endearingly so. She worries about someone stealing him off. Marylynn, her friend, felt she was a nobody until she divorced her uncaring husband and now has established herself as a successful interior decorator. Now, Sally is taking writing courses and is expected to rewrite a fairy tale, that of Bluebeard the Wizard, who takes young girls and gives them a test. He hands them an egg and a basket and asks them not to go to one small room at the top of the house. Of course they fail and the egg tells the wizard that they have failed. A third girl (in fact the sister of the first two) is too clever and foils wizard’s plan. Sally chooses – as directed for her assignment – to retell the story from the point of view of the egg. It is a metaphor for her life as the husband Ed, whom she thought stupid/ colourless was possibly flirting with her best friend, like the egg that looked bland could be hiding something sinister within it.
Next comes Spring Song of the Frogs. In it, Will has married and divorced Diane and his kid Cynthia is gone into anorexia. Will does not know how to help her or pull her out of the vicious cycle. Abruptly ends with them listening to frog sounds when she comes to visit him. What the hell?
The next one, Scarlet Ibis, Don and Christine go to Trinidad with their child Lilian. Her husband, another non communicative and glum one, accompanies them. They find that the boat they went in sprung a leak and the (East) Indians who manage the boat are nonchalant in the face of high odds that the boat will sink. A strange lady decides to plug the whole with her ass (by sitting on it).
The Salt Garden is even more strange than usual. Alma is married to Mort but he is seeing Fran and sneaks back to her for sex occasionally. Alma herself is having an affair with Theo. The title has to do with a science experiment Alma helped out her daughter Lilian with but has nothing to do with the story, which just ends abruptly. Oh God.
The Sin Eater is the next one. Joseph, who is a psychiatrist of narrator talks of Sin Eaters in Africa who can be hired to symbolically eat the sins of a dead person (by eating food placed on a plate on the body) and thereby cleanse them. Joseph has had three wives (the last one being current) and when he really dies, they all are in attendance. No point to this one.
The Sunrise fares little better. Yvonne, an artist, follows strange men and requests that they pose for a drawing by her. Most say yes. She draws them and (predictably, given the stories in this collection) has sex with them if they ask for the ‘right reasons’. She then wonders if it is all ‘worth it’. Exhausting to read.
The last story in that collection is Unearthing Suite. In it, there is a dad and mom to the narrator who seem to live by no accepted code, just moving in and out of their home at will, starting projects (and not finishing them if it is dad). Mom likes to ‘move’ – travel, skate, ski, run, dance, you name it. Also ends totally abruptly.
2/10
– – Krishna (September 2019)