Alias Grace in What's the Name of That Book???

May 13, 2018 El rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: hear-me-roar-and-gender, 20th-centurylit-late, re-read-mania, big-effing-books, 1001-books-list, true-crime, margaret-atwood

Oh, Margaret Atwood, I can't quit you.

I read Alias Grace in the late 1990s in college. The book was still relatively new at the time. It was unlike the other books by Atwood we had read in the class - this is historical fiction, as opposed to the speculative fiction of, say, The Handmaid's Tale. Based on a true story, Atwood takes readers to Canada for a bit of a literary murder mystery.

This is not your potboiler of a mystery. Grace Marks is a young servant woman who is accused of killing her em Oh, Margaret Atwood, I can't quit you.

I read Alias Grace in the late 1990s in college. The book was still relatively new at the time. It was unlike the other books by Atwood we had read in the class - this is historical fiction, as opposed to the speculative fiction of, say, The Handmaid's Tale. Based on a true story, Atwood takes readers to Canada for a bit of a literary murder mystery.

This is not your potboiler of a mystery. Grace Marks is a young servant woman who is accused of killing her employer and his housekeeper. The story is told through the course of her visits with Dr. Simon Jordan years later as he is studying her from the perspective of mental illness. She tells him about her family's arrival from Ireland to Canada (grueling and heartbreaking journey that it was) to what led her to become a maid in Thomas Kinnear's house to begin with. Dr. Jordan travels the labyrinth of Grace's recounted memories as he tries to determine what really happened in Mr. Kinnear's home.

I absolutely love the voice of Grace Marks. If you take the time to watch the CBC miniseries on Netflix, you will not likely be disappointed in Sarah Gadon, the lovely actress who plays Grace. She is absolutely perfect and nails Grace's voice exactly in my opinion. The miniseries also follows the course of Atwood's novel very closely and I had no complaints that I normally do that certain things were left out, embellished, or made ambiguous. Thank the baby jebus for Sarah Polley for making a wonderful adaptation of this book.

What is best to me about this book, besides the way Atwood makes me feel like I'm in 19th century Canada, is how I can read this more than once and find something new in it and still not be able to decide how much of Grace's story I believe. She has good fun talking with Dr. Jordan, and he takes it all in because he is bewitched by her (aren't we all?).

This is truly Atwood at her best, really, at least throughout most of this book. I feel the story is not as strong when told from Simon Jordan's perspective - his voice does not ring true for me upon this re-reading, but I can almost overlook that because Grace is so wonderfully portrayed. The rest of the storytelling, even, is rather masterful and I am constantly blown away by how great Atwood can be at times.

The heat of summer has come without warning. One day it was still cold spring, with gusting showers and chilly white clouds remote above the glacial blue of the lake; then suddenly the daffodils withered, the tulips burst open and turned inside out as if yawning, then dropped their petals. Cesspool vapours rise from back yards and gutters, and a mist of mosquitoes condenses around every pedestrian's head. At noon the air shimmers like the space above a heated griddle, and the lake glares, its margin stinking faintly of dead fish and frog spawn. At night Simon's lamp is besieged by moths, which flutter around him, the soft touch of their wings like the brushing of silken lips.
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This is the kind of book I like to curl up with and never leave. The ambiguity of Grace's story always has been thinking and questioning and investigating my own motives which is sort of fucked up since I've never killed anyone. But that's the artistry of this book. ...more

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Feb 18, 2016 Chrissie rated it really liked it

Page-turning historical fiction. Really interesting examination of a woman convicted of murder and the people (mostly men) who evaluate her and try to figure out "what" she is.

Thought provoking but also easy to read. ...more

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