IT'S NOT OFTEN YOU GET TO EXPERIENCE TWO SUPERB AUTUMNS IN ONE YEAR...
Cant get much better than a Melbourne Autumn and then a Tuscan Autumn 3 months later, so Ive skipped over Winter reading, I will launch into Autumnal Reading (2) 2014.
I have decided that Margaret Atwood is my all-time favourite author...I keep re-reading her books and still find that I am just as engrossed in the second or third read as I am on the first read. Her style of writing s so beautifully flowing, quirky
and somehow dramatic, with plots that twist and turn, so that you are never quite sure what is going on or how it will end.
Her Bio is found on wiki or Goodreads.
We were very fortunate to be able to spend three months in Tuscany,
in the town of Scandicci, just 8 km from Florence, from September to December last year. I joined the local library, because firstly, I love libraries and only had e.books to read. The library had a very small English section of whom the main attractions were
Paolo Coelho, Steven King and Margaret Atwood.
I found a book I had read around 30 years ago, when I was a young mum with a one year old.
I remember I used to bribe myself by reasoning that if I did the dishes first, then the washing and swept
the floor, I could read her book for an hour.....
LADY ORACLE (1976)
The narrator is Joan Foster who somehow becomes a Gothic style romantic novelist, inspired by a Polish Count who she meets in London when she is very young.
She is running away from primarily her mother. The novel is written in the form of flashbacks and the present. Her childhood was marred by constant bullying, her need to be accepted, and she has a love-hate relationship with food, hating her body and yet overeating
in defiance of her mother. She is plagued with body dysmorphia all through her life.
She has her first affair with the Polish Count, then marries Arthur the activist, who she discovers is bipolar, and looks for adventure with the eccentric performance
artist, The Royal Porcupine. After a series of unexplained musings, she stumbles into a rocketing career as a feminist poet, and much to her bewilderment becomes an overnight success. However a critic researches her past and tries to blackmail her, so she
fakes her own death and flees to Italy.
The plot is very eccentric, yet Atwood can write in a way that makes it all seem rather normal, because we occupy Joan's headspace, and realise that this is her on-going pattern of coping with her life.
I love her description of Tivoli, a gorgeous town outside of Rome and how Joan reflects on its fountains and sculptures, remind her of herself.
THE BLIND ASSASSIN (2000) Booker Prize Winner
It's amazing how many literary
critics are so off the track. This novel was pretty well canned by the New York Times, the critic even suggested that she needn't have bothered writing it.
Yet this was Atwood's Booker Prize winner after being short-listed several times.
It is
a wonderful book, a story within a story narrated by an aging Iris, now 82 years old who writes her memoirs about her own and her sister, Laura's life.
At the beginning of the novel we learn that Laura at the young age of 25 years had drowned
after driving off a bridge.
Iris had always been the sensible one, while Laura was a naive dreamer. At the age of 18 years Iris is married off to a politically prominent industrialist, but is now poor and living back in the town of her once prosperous
family. Her memoirs reflect on her far from exemplary life and her sister's mysterious tragic death. Again this book is written in a series of flash-backs, from being young to growing old and reflective.
Threaded throughout the book is the mysterious
story-teller who enters Laura's life before her death. Laura is spell-bound with his on-going stories, set in a far away kingdom, where blind assassins, once young carpet weavers gradually become blind after years of toiling over their beautiful intricate
carpets. When no longer of use, they are discarded and brutally treated, but many use their other developed skills to become useful well-paid assassins. I found this intriguing reading in itself.
The first time I read this book I was travelling
from Adelaide to Alice Springs on the Ghan. The trip took three days and passed through some of the most stunning Australian desert landscape.
It was bliss watching the scenery go by and being carried away by the words in this book. This time I was
in the wonderful countryside around Florence, sitting in the warm sun.
I have also read "The Robber Bride", Alias Grace and her very famous The Handmaidens Tale.
MARGARET ATWOOD HAS WRITTEN WELL OVER 40 BOOKS AND IS ALSO A WELL
KNOWN POET AND ACTIVIST. HER LATEST BOOK IS "STONE MATTRESS " WHICH I CANT WAIT TO READ