Of my deep and abiding love for Margaret Atwood.

Where should I even begin? I have loved Margaret Atwood passionately (sometimes even borderline obsessively) since I first picked up The Handmaid's Tale my freshman year. I read it straight through in one sitting because it was so gripping and, more to the point, so incredibly and heartbreakingly beautiful. Atwood's writing always reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov's - both write with such careful and meticulous attention to detail that every sentence feels as though it has been labored over endlessly to make it as beautiful as possible. That sounds like it might drag on a bit, and sometimes it does - some of what I consider to be Atwood's "weaker" works (Alias Grace and Surfacing come to mind) are almost too heavy and come dangerously close to suffocating beneath all that figurative language. But Atwood at her best (The Handmaid's Tale, Blind Assassin, and almost all of her short stories) is what I wish I could spend my whole life reading. One reviewer wrote about Life Before Man that "sentences are spare, kept under enormous compression, like a bent bow", and I think that is what I love most about her. I am amazed by such beautiful imagery, written so cleanly and with such clarity and all of it tied together into a narrative so tightly crafted I am almost afraid it will break or blow up in my hands (I never know which to fear more).

My favorite of all of her books, though, is without question Oryx and Crake, which made me cry and also scared the hell out of me. I've always really liked dystopian fiction (except 1984, which I read too many times when I was younger and which I now find incredibly tedious), but this takes my love to a whole new level. It's way more apocalyptic and depressing than Handmaid's Tale and probably about four times as good because you just have no idea what's coming EXCEPT YOU KNOW IT'S GOING TO BE HORRIFIC. I love this book. I love it so much. After I finished it I didn't stop thinking (or dreaming) about it for days. It definitely makes my top five favorite books of all time list (which I am going to write about later! because I have given it a lot of thought!). Even top three. It's that good.

So the moral of this blog entry is that I really, really like Margaret Atwood. I forgive her for having sometimes ponderous plots because she always makes it up to me by being amazing. I hate to describe her in superlatives, but nothing else would do her justice. I love her! I adore her! I want to be her when I grow up!

Jesi