REVIEW: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

She’s alive! She’s ALIIIIIIVE.

(If only I made my return to the blog two weeks ago, this GIF would have been more appropriate. Oh well.)

I am back after a long, long, long hiatus with a new review of a much anticipated read: Margaret Atwood’s THE TESTAMENTS. This one is going to be a bit lengthy, so buckle up, friends!

**Spoiler warning for TESTAMENTS and its prequel, THE HANDMAID’S TALE.**

THE TESTAMENTS by Margaret Atwood

RATING: ★★★★

GENRE: Dystopian

THEMES: Reproductive rights, personal freedom, gender equality, radical religion.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Suicide, violence, sexual assault, self-harm.

Admittedly, I came into THE TESTAMENTS with some reservations, mainly surrounding the fact that it is a sequel written 25 years after its predecessor, THE HANDMAID’S TALE, which carries its own cultural weight now, arguably, more than ever–protests against Trump’s administration often feature women in Handmaid uniforms, the Hulu show that has reinvigorated the interest in the original novel and has been so successful that it is now continuing past the book’s plot. I worried that THE TESTAMENTS was Atwood’s surrender to fan service in the midst of the show, but I will be the first person to admit that I was wrong.

THE TESTAMENTS is not a direct sequel to THE HANDMAID’S TALE. Where HANDMAID ends with protagonist Offred’s future dangling on the last page, THE TESTAMENTS only contributes to the mysterious, up-for-reader-interpretation ending by abandoning Offred as a narrator and instead focusing on three voices to color the Gilead that readers have been acquainted with: Aunt Lydia, one of the founding figures of the dystopian society; Agnes, a Gileadean girl who soon finds out that she is the daughter of a runaway Handmaid; and Daisy, a Canadian girl whose world is violently changed when her parents are killed in a car bombing. A major strength of THE TESTAMENTS is this split narrative, which allows for a more complex and well-rounded view of the world than the singularly-narrated prequel. I appreciated that the mystery that I was left with at the end of the first novel was not directly solved. Had it been neatly packaged up in its sequel, I may have lost interest.  It seems anti-Atwood to package everything up in a pretty bow and give clear solutions.

The split narrative also gives the reader three truly intriguing stories, the most Atwood-ian of them being Aunt Lydia’s. A judge on the onset of Gilead’s terrorist coup against the United States, Lydia is forced to not only abandon the rights she has worked to the bone for, but to make the decision to embrace the new regime or die. Lydia chooses the former, transforming into a cool and calculated figure that would continue on to forming the very tenants of Gilead’s educational system for women that formed them into Wives, Handmaids, Aunts, or Marthas. To prove herself as an Aunt, Lydia is tasked with executing a non-conforming woman in front of an arena full of imprisoned women (at the end of a chapter that reads not unlike the horror stories of border camps in the US where immigrants are being detained in heinous conditions). Knowing full well that this will test her moral integrity, Lydia shoots the woman kneeling in front of her anyway, prioritizing her success and survival in Gilead’s top tier:

This was Commander Judd’s test: fail it, and your commitment to the one true way would be voided. Pass it, and blood was on your hands. As someone once said, We must all hang together or we will hang separately. 

One of the targets was Anita [Lydia’s former co-worker]. Why had she been singled out to die? . . . Perhaps it was very simple: she was not considered useful to the regime, whereas I was. 

Lydia does regret this decision, and is repulsed by it, but concedes that it’s necessary. Her complexity is what makes her narrative so intriguing: it is a true show of what one must sacrifice in order to survive in a cruel world.

Ultimately, Lydia’s conformity is only a display, as she has been working behind the scenes with the Gileadean liberation group Mayday to tear down the very people and society that has elevated her, submitting intel and kompromat (thank you, Ian, for this term!) of the abuses and corruption that the male founders of Gilead commit on a daily basis via microdot technology. This plot line was easily the strongest of the three, and had echoes of the current whistleblower testimonies in the United States and White House leaks, following the theme that despotic governments can be torn down from within.

TESTAMENTS is not undeserving of criticism, however. While the split narrative structure is well-rounded and fascinating in new ways than HANDMAID offered, it has its weak spot in Daisy’s plot. A Canadian girl, Daisy is raised with virtually none of the oppressive restrictions placed on Gileadean girls like Agnes. A regular glimpse of life across the border comes regularly in the form of the Pearl Girls, missionaries sent to Canada and abroad to convert new Handmaids, Wives, and Aunts to bring back to Gilead. Daisy’s parents, running a thrift boutique in Toronto, appear to be entertaining the Pearl Girls who come to visit, accepting their brochures and generally being kind to the young women.

When her parents’ car is destroyed in a bombing, killing both of her parents, Daisy learns that her parents are Mayday agents collecting reconnaissance from Gilead through the Pearl Girls brochures. As if this is not a staggering reality in and of itself, Daisy also learns that she is actually a fugitive from Gilead: the famed Baby Nicole, an infant who was taken from the country by Mayday forces and a symbol of scorned virtue. Gilead has been looking for Daisy for years, and she now must use her identity to get one last piece of incriminating evidence from Aunt Lydia.

Daisy is crass, blunt, and stubborn, but ready to accept the task, trained in martial arts and Gileadean customs by Mayday in the hasty days before she is to be sent on her mission. Daisy becomes nearly insufferable at this point: despite the very present dangers that she faces if she does not conform to certain societal constructs for women–like not cursing, speaking politely, and generally being submissive to authority–she adamantly continues to act in a way that would deem her nonconforming. This is something that should have had an actual impact on the narrative because we have been told that it would, but instead her behavior is dismissed by those around her as a symptom of her “sinful” Canadian upbringing. Juxtaposed against the very dire consequences of nonconformity in Aunt Lydia and Offred’s respective narratives, this feels inauthentic: Daisy has a shining set of plot armor that allows her to glide past the strict rules that had women executed by gunshot mere chapters earlier and hanged on the Wall in this narrative’s prequel.

A lack of risk, especially when the intrigue of Offred and Lydia’s narratives is based on the risk of being discovered and killed, is what ultimately makes Daisy’s plot fall incredibly flat.

There are also some predictable elements in Agnes and Daisy’s plots that are pretty easily discovered at a first glance: when both girls are revealed to not be the biological children of their parents, a thread between them can be easily drawn. Agnes’ childhood memories of being run through a wood by a woman and ultimately recovered by who she assumes to be her biological mother is assumedly a sly reference to Offred’s escape to Canada. Likewise, Daisy’s fixation on Baby Nicole before learning of her true identity is a heavy handed toss to the reader, an element that, again, feels very anti-Atwood.

THE TESTAMENTS’ chapters are split into titles implying testimonies and documents in what I initially assumed would result in a court case or arrest, but ultimately results in a historical forum set after the fall of Gilead. After the blackmail delivery cache embedded into a tattoo on Daisy’s arm–a genius tactic–is delivered to Mayday, there is an unsatisfying leap to a conference set in Maine after the United States has been rebuilt, with women academics and studies on the totalitarian regime.

While the historical view offered a clean way to tie up the end of the three plot lines, it was wholly blasé to read when the lead-up to the end of the novel left me expecting a glimpse into a dramatic, epic, Earth-shattering toppling of Commander Judd and the founding fathers of Gilead. Instead, readers were left with a cold synopsis that had no sense of time or pacing: how long after the fall of Gilead did the symposium occur? When did society begin granting women the rights they had eras earlier? On that note, when did the events of the narrative take place? Atwood has a flair for mystery, yes, but these questions seem more like plot holes than details that can be left to a readers’ interpretation.

I appreciate that THE TESTAMENTS is a standalone book from THE HANDMAID’S TALE. It certainly reads like a cousin to the gargantuan classic: where HANDMAID’S is a bleak political horror and cautionary tale, THE TESTAMENTS is a brighter, espionage-riddled science fiction dystopian that reads closer to THE HUNGER GAMES or other similarly-successful YA dystopians (which is no insult!).

I’ve said in my review of VOX by Christina Dalcher, another tale of women losing their rights to a misogynistic government, that HANDMAID played on the fears of contemporary women readers in the 80s, and that’s what makes some of the elements of the classic novel feel a bit farther away from a 2019 reader. THE TESTAMENTS has clearly caught up to some sentiments amongst the current administration in the United States, the most salient of them being the importance of making corruption and other morally wrong doings of political figures visible. While we wait for the whistleblower testimony to unravel and impeachment proceedings to begin, THE TESTAMENTS offers a hopeful glance of what’s possible when brave people raise their voices.

 

 

 

 

You do not have to be good.

Before you go on further, I would like to issue a trigger warning: I mention some things about trauma and abuse, and while there aren’t any specific details, if these topics make you uncomfortable, please take care.

You do not have to be good.

In my first year of high school, at the age of 14, I came to the conclusion that I had been holding onto a secret for far too long.

And so, on a relatively normal night, after dinner had been eaten and the table cleared, I ran into my room, sitting alone for an amount of time that felt, all at once, like a few minutes and a few hours, fleeting and endless. I was frantic, yet a calm, steady voice whispered past the pounding heart in my chest: tell them.

And then I did: I told my family about how I endured sexual abuse at the hands of a family member for years in silence.

I can’t make out the details, truthfully, about how it all started, what my first day was like with this truth out in the world–traumatic events have a way of blurring your days together–but one day I was in therapy, sitting on a couch in front of a bubbly, vibrant, hippie-ish (in the most loving way possible) woman who took my dark truths from me, set them aside, and let me leave them there.

She asked me what I liked to do, and I listed off my hobbies: I like reading; I always have. I love musical theatre, and I can’t help but sing along to music, as if I’m part of it. I like to draw and paint.I write poetry.

That seemed to strike a chord: one day, she handed me a sheet of paper and asked me to read what was on it.

You do not have to be good. It felt like an affirmation. A command–gentle, but firm. I continued:

You do not have to walk on your knees 

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

I fell in love instantly, even if I didn’t understand it all at first.

Wild Geese became the safety blanket I clung to when I felt the trauma creeping in like a dark fog, cutting through it like a beam from a lighthouse. I would trace the words over and over in my mind until I nearly memorized the whole poem.

When I could no longer stand in a crowded room without it spinning: You do not have to be good.

When the rage burned through my stomach: You do not have to be good.

When I was asked, too early, far too early, if I could learn what forgiveness felt like: You do not have to be good.

When my body was confused and feeling something that wasn’t there. When I couldn’t sleep. You do not have to be good.

Mary Oliver and I, as I’ve come to learn, have gone through some very similar experiences in life. Mary Oliver knew what it felt to be trapped in a body–and knew how words and the gentle hum of nature continuing its work in spite of constant suffering could make freedom feel possible. She knew what rage felt like.

She carried trauma, heavy, dark, ugly trauma, and yet continued to fall in love in many ways: with the romantic poets who inspired her to put pen to paper, with the brutal world around her, with her lover Molly Malone Cook.

When Mary Oliver passed away a few months ago, I found a rare clip of her reading her work aloud and played it on my drive home.

As I turned onto my road, she began, in her steady voice, to read Wild Geese, and I began to weep in the way one does when they hear something so deeply beautiful that they miss it as soon as it starts.

Friday night, I made my favorite poem an indelible part of me, and I couldn’t be happier.

Thank you, Mary, for giving me Wild Geese.

Comic Books vs. “Traditional” Books–Are We Reading Too Much Into This?!

Hello, fellow readers!

Today, I want to talk about a semi-controversial topic in the book community: should comic books (and/or graphic novels) be considered reading in the same way that traditional books are?

Let me preface this with a little bit of my own background in the comic/graphic novel-reading world: I’ve always been interested in them, and my first experience reading comics was in my pre-teens when I started reading the W.I.T.C.H. graphic novel series by Elisabetta Gnone. I devoured them, and I loved how multi-layered the world of this series was. It felt wholly built and established, and the friendships and individual personalities of the girls in W.I.T.C.H. group were explored so well.

That was my first and last graphic novel experience for a while…then, my friend Leah (you can find her on Instagram here!), who is suuuuper into comics of all kinds, recommended that I read the Saga series and lent me a few volumes. It’s an incredible fantasy/sci-fi series that’s an adult version of Romeo and Juliet meets an action-packed, often-explicit (sex, gore, etc.) space adventure. I couldn’t get enough, and now, I’m waiting for the newest issue to come out after a particularly intense cliff hanger in the last issue that may have actually ripped my heart out and stomped on it–

–but I digress.

I have a weird hangup with comic books, mostly self-imposed. I am a quick reader. Always have been! I’m able to knock out multiple volumes of comic books in a few hours–and, recently, I read both volumes of Bitch Planet in under two hours because I just couldn’t put it down–because I just kind of naturally go through text pretty quickly, and obviously, comics have a lot less text than books do. For some reason, I internalize this as not “actually” reading, even though it very much is.

I think comics have been getting a bad rep by the book community based on this same reason. Where literature can have lengthy descriptions of places, characters, and events, comics have illustrations and dialogue, but this doesn’t mean that the stories aren’t as incredibly well written, enveloping, and enthralling as the ones in traditional books, especially when there are so many comic books, Bitch Planet and Saga especially, that explore heavy themes like misogyny, war, sexual assault, and racism, and are still able to tap into those themes through a different method of storytelling and even include allusions to similar stories, like this little Handmaid’s Tale reference in Bitch Planet:

I know this has been a bit rambly, so I want to end on this note: a lot of us see reading through one singular lens, without realizing that there are so many other ways of taking in stories. I’m a big advocate for reading often, but I don’t like limiting that to books. Reading the news, reading short stories, reading magazine articles, and reading anything else that grips you is just as important as cracking open a classic work of literature. So read on, friends, in whatever way you like. 🙂

REVIEW: AWAYLAND, stories by Ramona Ausubel

Hello, readers!

This week, I all but tore through a highly anticipated read of mine: AWAYLAND, a collection of short stories by Ramona Ausubel.

AWAYLAND, stories by Ramona Ausubel

RATING: ★★★★☆

SIMILAR READS: ALL THE NAMES THEY USED FOR GOD by Anjali Sachdeva, HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES by Carmen Maria Machado.

There are storms beginning to twist in the warm oceans to the south, and maybe they will whip this way, tearing the houses like paper. The ferry could sink beneath them; poisoned gases could leak into the air at any time. The melted ice caps are washing toward them. They’re both dying- everyone is. The schedule of death is not made public. Love’s job is to make a safe place. Not to deny that the spiny forest exists, but to live hidden inside it, tunneled into the soft undergrass.

I have been on a real short stories kick this year, more than I ever really have before. I really love the ability to read a bunch of different narratives packed into one collection, especially as a bit of a palate cleanser between longer, singular books. Most of the collections I’ve read have fit into some very unexpected genres, and AWAYLAND certainly fits that mold: if I had to really nail it down, it would definitely fit the magical realism genre. It has some elements of sci-fi and fantasy, but mainly, it retains a realistic view of the world itself while adding fantastical and supernatural elements. Ausubel writes with a beautifully melancholic, yet wry voice, tackling some darker themes, but adding some dry humor here and there to keep the collection from going over the edge.

Most of the stories in the collection deal with a balance of the tangible and the intangible. “Fresh Water from the Sea” illustrates an older woman who has begun to, literally, disappear: her daughter comes to visit her, knowing that this is a death of sorts, but it is a kind that she, her mother, and various doctors have never seen before. In a way, the connection can be drawn between this “disappearing” and other diseases that settle in later in life, like dementia or cancer–things that rob a person’s sense of self and connectedness to the world.

Motherhood (whether anticipated, realized, or unattained) is another strong theme throughout the collection, and “Departure Lounge” is one of my favorites: a woman set to be a cook on the first ever mission to Mars meets up with a former classmate, Peter, who wants a child. He is gay and she is not looking for romance–but the desire to share this bond drives them to make a pact to have a child together.

The largest overlapping theme in the collection is death–or, more specifically, the ways that we try to preserve ourselves or our memories after death. In “Remedy,” Summer convinces herself that she is dying after bringing her fears to a hack doctor. One day, she comes to the conclusion that she would like to have her lover Kit’s hands surgically swapped with hers so that she may carry a piece with him even in death. Once Kit learns about this plan, he impersonates a surgeon who is willing to perform the surgery, beginning an email correspondence that takes the pair from their home in Nantucket to a foreign country.

One of the more comically written stories, “The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following” is told from the perspective of mummified animals in a museum, cataloguing their disappointment in their afterlife being reduced from the paradise they were promised to, literally, shelf life; a nice break from the mainly melancholy collection, with internal narratives of long-dead mummified cats, voles, and dogs musing about the guests that press their faces up against the glass, their origins in Egypt, the rude awakening that was their tombs being raided, and their reserved hope that one day they will pass through this strange purgatory.

The collection does an amazing job of leading the reader one way and pulling them another in the middle of a story. If you had any predictions of where each tale was going, you may be surprised to find that they’ve nearly led you there only to turn in the last few paragraphs.

AWAYLAND is a collection that does not disappoint, with beautifully lyrical prose and compelling, original concepts. Highly recommend.