Handmaid's tale

Margaret Atwood, 1985
Vintage, 2010

The first time I came across with her name was on a headline about a famous Canadian writer who was annoying many prominent figures of the meToo movement and in doing so she was tagged as bad feminist. I have a fondness for beautiful oxymorons, so I couldn’t help empathizing with her without even reading the article. Although her name didn’t ring any bell in my head, her most famous novel did. Most blogs about TV shows had highly praised the series based on her book: The Handmaid’s tale. Both, the fame of the show and the personality of the author, were pulling my mind apart. What joy to choose: reading the book or watching the show? I did what I always do when I cannot make up my mind. Do nothing. 

Summer came spreading flowers in the gardens, stifling heat in the streets and spare time enough to cut any excuse. Something inside me drove one day to one of the big bookshops in Zaragoza and I ended indulging myself with 3 readings for the beach I was not visiting, Atwood’s work included.

A year to make a decision, a minute to start reading the first sentence and get the first impression, an old compulsion of mine.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium

While reading it I couldn’t stop wondering What gymnasium? Who sleeps in a gymnasium? One page more and I didn’t even know when the action was taking place. From the very beginning the author shows the reader the difficulties it is going to face along the book, as if to make it get used to it. Neither the action is described along a defined timeline, nor the information abound every page. It is more like pieces of a broken mirror scattered on the floor and it is to the reader to join them and make the most of them. But there is not only one surface where the pieces of information are located, but three: there is the time when she lived in a free world, with her family; the time she spend in the Rachel and Leah Center, unofficially known as the Red Center because of the colour of their robes, to learn how to be a handmaid; and the time of her scooped up in the house of the man, the Commander, she has to bear child to.  

As a reader I found myself longing for more details about the Aunts, the econowives, the Gileadean regime… but describing that world is not the aim of the book. Maybe that is why the author states hers is not a science fiction novel. The nitty gritty is the feelings and experiences of the main character, Offred, belonging to a caste of fertile women charged with the only responsibility of breeding. What is it like to be fired from your job, to get rid off your economic autonomy, to get split from your husband, your daughter and be sent to a detention center to be rewired into a loyal reproductive soldier, emptied of willingness, of purpose, of joy, of love, of freedom? She is no longer a person with her different tastes, likes, hates, she is a well cared of, well fed and protected valuable recipient, and object, a means.

Offred feels like a refugee of the past, of a time past. A time she hardly could imagine would end, would ever become a past, or even worse, would ever be forgotten. Try as she may, she has difficulty remembering her husband face, her daughter’s warmth, her own freedom. 

Those memories, as blurry and distorted as they may be, work as a counterweight for the reader to bear the crude, brutal, severe life of her.  A claustrophobic, suffocating world for women, extremely coded, like the XIXth century victorian society. A world with no hopes, just grey, dull rutinary chores. A world with no luxuries, where the ruling taste is not for tech, but for homemade, women-made things, a return to traditional values like an Amish community but without the appealing presence of Harrison Ford.

Sometimes the omnipresent, introspective point of view of Offred hampers the rhythm of the reading, especially at the middle of it.  But most of the time it is the beauty of it. Lain on the bed, sit by the window, been fucked by the Commander, she reflects on every simple thing, she finds the most modest event remarkable, a dandelion on the lawn, glimpses of the sequins of her garment, the touch of the token of a Scrabble game, the plaster figures of the ceiling of her room, the forgotten smell of sex. 

This style is only broken at the end, in the appendix called Historical notes. The first person personal, closed narrative is turned into a third person objective explanation of some of the points the book failed to do. A clumsy and dispensable device that smudges the witty style of the book.