Ruth Padel
A Wounded World
What makes reading Margaret Atwood such fun is her gift for enjoying herself so thoroughly as she writes. She makes you share her zest for words, people, jokes, sharp-edged description and endless inventiveness. After the dystopic futurism of Oryx and Crake, Moral Disorder brings back a heroine familiar from previous novels. She grows up (like Atwood) in Fifties Canada, experiences childhood in vivid intensity, gets put upon, survives. But the form we meet her in is new. Like Carlos Fuentes’s Crystal Frontier (nine stories which become one story at the end), Moral Disorder is a novel presented kaleidoscopically, through eleven discrete short stories.
The first, ‘Bad News’, set in a dystopic future, affects all the others. The speaker and her partner Tig wake up (‘For now, night is over’) in an unspecified country and time. Tig’s real name is Gilbert. (Atwood’s own partner is the nature writer Graeme Gibson.) But ‘it’s impossible’, she
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
The ruler of Gwalior ‘named his son George after the British king. His counterpart in Bahawalpur ... boasted a collection of six hundred dildos, which Pakistan’s generals solicitously buried when they deposed him’.
@pratinavanil on India’s Maharajahs.
Pratinav Anil - Midnight’s Playboys
Pratinav Anil: Midnight’s Playboys - Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States by John Zubrzycki
literaryreview.co.uk
Dec’s Silenced Voices section of @lit_review features the scandalous criminalization of prominent 🇲🇪 academic Boban Batrićević (Faculty of Montenegrin Language & Literature)
His hearing for writing about hateful narratives spread by the Serbian Orthodox Church is on Jan 22nd
⬇️
‘We know that Ballard was many things – novelist, fabulist, one-time assistant editor of “British Baker”, seer of Shepperton, poet laureate of airports. But, it seems, he was not a fan of Mrs Dalloway.’
Joanna Kavenna - Unlimited Dream Company
Joanna Kavenna: Unlimited Dream Company - Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 by J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
literaryreview.co.uk