DANCING GIRLS And Other Stories. By Margaret Atwood. New York: Simon & Schuster. MARGARET ATWOOD the prose writer has always seemed closely informed by Margaret Atwood the poet. Her narrative style is as precise as cut glass; entire plots appear to balance upon a choice phrase, and clearly she writes with an ear cocked for the way her words will sound when read back. A poet's sense of fine-tuning has shown itself in each of her novels - not only in the powerful 'Surfacing' but also in, say, 'Life Before Man' and 'Bodily Harm,' both flatter in content but still beautiful to listen to. Nowhere, though, is that sense put to better use than in her short stories, which tend to combine superb control and selectivity with an almost rambunctious vitality.
It may be that she feels freer to take chances with short stories. On the theory that she has less to lose, she may allow her mind to range more widely, to play with more possibilities. Whatever the reason, 'Dancing Girls' is a stunning collection, mostly written within the last decade. Of its 14 stories, 7 are likely to linger in your mind for weeks afterward.One, 'The Man from Mars,' lingers for years, as I happen to know from having read it long ago in The Ontario Review. Another is arresting because it creates, in effect, a brand new verb tense, a sort of future-turning-imperceptibly-in to-present.
Even the slightest stories set up some vivid images. They are, at the very least, works of integrity. 'The Man from Mars' describes a foreign student - bespectacled, ugly, hopelessly obtuse and persistent, a citizen of a deliberately unnamed Far Eastern country in which eventually North starts fighting South. This student develops an attachment to an overweight American girl, and his unwelcome attentions are infuriating and pathetic, but memorable. You want to kick him; you ache for him; you could weep for the unfortunate girl; but in spite of it all, you have to laugh. What an adroit, sly comic gift Margaret Atwood has! Here's her description of the girl's besiegement: 'As the weekdays passed and he showed no signs of letting up, she began to jog-trot between classes, finally to run.
He was tireless, and had an amazing wind for one who smoked so heavily: he would speed along behind her, keeping the distance between them the same, as though he were a pull-toy attached to her by a string. She was aware of the ridiculous spectacle they must make, galloping across campus, something out of a cartoon short, a lumbering elephant stampeded by a smiling, emaciated mouse, both of them locked in the classic pattern of comic pursuit and flight.'
' Close kin to the galloping elephant girl is the narrator of 'Hair Jewellery' - a young woman who buys all her bargain clothes too big and practically swims in a long black coat, plastic rain boots and a 'garter belt which, being too large, is travelling around my waist, causing the seams at the backs of my legs to spiral like barbers' poles.' ' The story is a rueful account of the attraction that tragedy and despair hold for the very young. Even before beginning a love affair, the narrator enjoys imagining its demise.
'I visualized (our parting) as sad, tender, inevitable and final. I rehearsed it in every conceivable location: doorways, ferry-boat docks, train, plane and subway stations, park benches. I would be wearing a trench coat, not yet purchased, though I had seen the kind of thing I wanted in Filene's Basement the previous autumn.' ' As with 'The Man from Mars,' we laugh, but we're touched by the story's conclusion, which in this case finds the heroine grown up and successful, wearing a stylish red pants suit that fits her perfectly. IN 'Polarities,' the brutal, dead cold of a far northern city is so pervasive that it's almost a character in its own right, and recognition of a woman's insanity creeps up on her friends - and on us - so gradually that for several pages we can actually follow her logic. In fact, 'Polarities' could be the title of several of these stories, for Margaret Atwood's special concern is how certain innately unlike characters interact with each other, grate against each other, envy and resent each other's differences.
'Betty' features a cheery, domesticated woman who does not interest the child narrator half as much as does Betty's charming husband. By the time the narrator is grown, however, her perceptions have changed. The husband no longer intrigues her. 'It is the Bettys who are mysterious.' ' 'Giving Birth' considers the polarity between the happy motherto-be, diligently attending her natural-childbirth classes, and the mother-to-be who reluctantly hangs back -both women, as it happens, inhabiting the same body. When the first woman, in the early stages of labor, rides off to the hospital with her husband, she imagines that the second woman accompanies them, having been picked up on a street corner carrying a brown paper bag. While the first woman waits calmly for a room, the second is shrieking with pain.
While the first is taken past the check-in desk in a wheelchair, the second rolls by on a table with her eyes closed and an IV in her arm, something having gone very wrong. In 'A Travel Piece,' the polarity is between a woman who has always lived at one remove from her world - a travel writer coolly determined to be charmed by every trip - and the inescapable horrors of a plane crash at sea. In 'The Sin Eater,' the polarity is between a passionate, life-affirming man and the thin despair all around him. The stories that seem to me less successful are those that exhibit a narrow-eyed bitterness about the relations between men and women.
In these, men are generally infantile, demanding, self-centered; women are either purely wronged or they have retaliated with their own kind of meanness. Luckily, examples of this are few. In most of her stories Margaret Atwood gives full attention to the multiple facets of any situation.
With a deft turn of phrase, a poet's delicate pounce upon just the right word, she manages to convey the complexities and contradictions of ordinary life. Illustrations: Cartoon.
Atwood The Man From Mars Pdf Merger
This story was the first work of any kind I read from Atwood beyond Handmaid’s Tale, which I thought was OK in a blunt-force pc sort of way. But “The Man From Mars” was a pleasant (to me) revelation.
The Man From Mars Atwood
It's themes were standard fodder for short stories – overweight and undersized college girl’s self image takes a roller coaster ride when she’s stalked, sort of, but an oddball guy. But the writing is brilliant and original and deftly mixes creepy, funny, pathetic, mysterious and some other things. This story was the first work of any kind I read from Atwood beyond Handmaid’s Tale, which I thought was OK in a blunt-force pc sort of way. But “The Man From Mars” was a pleasant (to me) revelation.
It's themes were standard fodder for short stories – overweight and undersized college girl’s self image takes a roller coaster ride when she’s stalked, sort of, but an oddball guy. But the writing is brilliant and original and deftly mixes creepy, funny, pathetic, mysterious and some other things.
I need to check out more from Atwood. This story was okay and it really puts into light about women who have self esteem issues. It's seems really weird to others how Christina would not call the police and how she was actually glad it was 'someone else who called them' but it shows how low her self-esteem and body image was. It's like catcalling; you know it's really bad and that you shouldn't stand for that sort of stuff but at the same time for females or males who don't have good self-esteem at all they might relish it because i This story was okay and it really puts into light about women who have self esteem issues. It's seems really weird to others how Christina would not call the police and how she was actually glad it was 'someone else who called them' but it shows how low her self-esteem and body image was. It's like catcalling; you know it's really bad and that you shouldn't stand for that sort of stuff but at the same time for females or males who don't have good self-esteem at all they might relish it because it seems like a compliment they never had before.
Catcalling is terrible and not a good thing to relish in but those who have terrible body image it just can't be helped. It's really interesting how the mother used the excuse that 'you don't know if it's polite or rude in other cultures'; if it seems weird you should probably ask them. When someone is asked a question about their culture they usually answer it with enthusiasm or that's how I am.
This story was okay but not the best. Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College. Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, childr Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
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Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007.
Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM. Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International.
Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.