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The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1)

Margaret Atwood

Why we're reading this: Well written, requires thought and it can relate to our society
[close] Well written, requires thought and it can relate to our society

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Mar 12, 2008 Terri rated it it was amazing

I have actually read this book multiple times. The first itme in college. I think it is excellent and very thought provoking.

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Aug 15, 2010 Bill rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, clifi-ecofiction, favorite-books-re-read, prize-winners

I read this after reading Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood: A Novel both modern, prophetic dystopian novels which made Atwood a new favorite author.

The Handmaid's Tale, IMO, is a greater work. It works on several levels, the most obvious being the slavery of women. While I suspect this level is what many moderns will concentrate on, I find the prophetic vision of the novel most compelling and topical for today's Western civilization, the US in particular.

The environmental concerns are I read this after reading Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood: A Novel both modern, prophetic dystopian novels which made Atwood a new favorite author.

The Handmaid's Tale, IMO, is a greater work. It works on several levels, the most obvious being the slavery of women. While I suspect this level is what many moderns will concentrate on, I find the prophetic vision of the novel most compelling and topical for today's Western civilization, the US in particular.

The environmental concerns are explored much more deeply in Oryx and Flood, but stand in the background of Handmaids. It is the creeping fascism I see in the the US today, the increasing power of fundamentalism and extreme conservatism in US politics that I found sibylline in The Handmaid's Tale. It could happen here and is now, if more subtly than in the novel. Consider the tea-party and their compulsion to control behavior. Their concern with right thinking. Their division of classes into those with and those without. Their obsessive Christianity. Consider their recent paralysis of Congress concerning the debt ceiling. And it is not just the tea-party. 911 gave horrifying powers to the enforcement industry. They have become the Eyes in the sense of the novel.

I have long felt that the current freedom women enjoy to actualize their lives, depends on liberalism, freedom of behavior and thought, perhaps democracy. If our civilization collapses or were to become totalitarian, the place of women would probably revert back to their being subject to male masters, to breed and take care of children and their males. Granted this is arguable and exceptions would exist. But, the physically strong will band and dominate. We Queers would likely be in the same situation.

The Handmaid's Tale implies environmental disasters partly underlying the sudden rise of a totalitarian state. More developed in her later books, the massive climate changes that are occurring, droughts and floods and extreme weather, dying oceans, the Northern movement of arable land, sea-level rise, if they continue as most all models predict, will result in mass human migrations, massive death and a need to rigorously control the behavior of surviving humans. If severe enough I can visualize a return to feudal or even tribal cultures as civilization fragments.

I found the Historical Notes fascinating, if a bit satirical of academics. It also suggest that "this too shall pass". The historical perspective underscores that all civilizations grow old and die, new ones arising from their ashes after varying periods of discord. As Atwood prophesied in 1985, we are entering a period of such discord. ...more

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May 19, 2008 Kathleen Dunn rated it it was amazing

Even scarier on this read with a woman-hating dictator in office.

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Oct 22, 2012 pianogal rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-in-2012, sb-book-club

I'm kinda tired of reading books that I'm supposed to like, but that I hate. I've wanted to read Margaret Atwood for a while, so when this was picked for Nashville's city-wide read, I was excited. However, I felt like I was 2 steps behind everyone the whole time. Also, I intensely dislike books that are misogynistic.

And don't even get me started on the ending...sigh... ...more

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