An excellent book, the Booker Prize winner. I've read a lot of prize winners in the last two years, and this one is one of the best. It's imaginative and complex, something that I always like, and the plot propels us forward, something that is usually lacking in literary novels.
I won't give any anything here, but part of the complexity comes from multiple layered novels. The viewpoint character is writing her memoir. There is a character inside the memoir writing a novel, and inside that novel a character is writing science fiction stories. This is all wrapped in Atwood's novel. Very creative. The most compelling mystery is how the novel inside the memoir came about - no spoilers here.
Highly recommended.
[...] How long has it been since I got choked up reading a novel? It’s a powerful story, and expertly written. A novel within a novel, since the principal character is writing an account of what happened in the form of a novel in order to ease her own conscience. It concludes with an epilogue that brings things into the present and wraps up the story, one of the few epilogues I have ever read that was effective. In a sense it reminds me of another excellent novel with a similar form, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. [...]
ReplyDelete