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/lit/ - Literature


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16053260 No.16053260 [Reply] [Original]

Is it good or shit? I have some interest in it but if it's all about empowerment or whatever I don't think I'll bother

>> No.16053277

>woman writer

Do we need to spoon feed you?

>> No.16053291

>>16053277
Only women are worth reading nowadays.

>> No.16053320

>>16053260
im not going to be a faggot and say its bad just because. ive never read it. however the overveiws i saw were meh and that it was hamfisted more than most good dystopias, but ill give it the benifit of the doubt.

however, if you want a good book about a women persecuted again in a puratin like society that delves into the actual nuance and mindset of it from someone who is from that society that i can full heartedly recommend, id say read Scarlet Letter. also good if you like extistentialist stuff.

>> No.16053321

>>16053260
i've never read it but some truly awful people really like it so it's probably about as bad as they are

>> No.16053327

You have to know the context of the book to understand it
On the surface, it might seem as though it were a view at the dangers organised religion, on what flimsy ground women's rights stand and how men struggle to get over the end of their history of domination on women
If you actually pay attention though, you'll realise that the female author must have been masturbating while writing for a sizeable portion of the book. While she tries to retain a serious, critical demeanor throughout the book, she keeps making slip-ups and reveals that this is in fact, a fantasy that turns her crazy. Through the author's personal experience with composing this work, we see one of the deepest explorations of the often ignored female human nature (the only other people to really investigate it were Homer and the Tragedians)

>> No.16053328

>>16053321
Nome one

>> No.16053340

It's literally >this is what liberals actually believe.txt

>> No.16053352

>>16053277
>>16053291
Lies, I haven't seen anything especially worthwhile by a woman in the past lifetime but of course, I read a field women do not normally delve into, or if they do it's with this wacky, new amazing, innovative, breathtaking, stunning, subversive, triggering, groundbreaking/ shaking, inspiring and part of the Avant Gard resistance conglomerate (TM) subsidiary of literature.inc. I imagine they exist of course but nothing interests me, but of course, I might just be mentally retarded and not have good taste in books

>> No.16053376

>>16053352
Sappho is a really good poet
Even in the few fragments we have and even if you are bound by translation, you can still feel the passion blazing through
Unfortunately, no other woman was able to match her though

>> No.16053387

>Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive.
john dolan, in his review of the book.
the whole thing is worth a read:
http://exiledonline.com/old-exile/vault/books/review103.html

>> No.16053435

>>16053376
sappho was a trans women so doesnt count.

>> No.16053452

It’s decent. I didn’t care for the writing and the world felt pretty unbelievable, but following the main character and seeing her deal with it was fairly interesting. From what I’ve heard it’s far from Atwood’s best work, can anyone confirm?

>> No.16053457

>>16053328
everyone i don't like, for starters

>> No.16053469

>>16053260
Decent sci-fi, maybe a bit on the nose but an enjoyable read anyway

>> No.16053485

>>16053327
Now this is a contribution.

>> No.16053493

>>16053435
Wat

>> No.16053502 [SPOILER] 
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16053502

>>16053435
Wait what?

>> No.16053504

Obvious to anyone not afflicted with a high measure of autism, any "cool wine aunt" will have earned a gnarled & gruesome snatch so scarified & prolapsed that her drooping leathered labia appear as the glistening russet or tawny or ruddy colored heads of turtles or large-lipped freshwater fish or like the strange proboscis of an eyeless subterranean mammal adapted to gulping silt or high-sand ratio marsh mud in either its search for tiny arthopod-derived calories or else burrowing some sort of nesting cavern to rest its cock-weary scabbard flaps. Make no mistake, any cool wine aunt has been dicked-down & split apart & evidently pulverized open by long prying motions from exceptionally lengthy & pharmaceutically enhanced erections, slickly & snappily pistoning in & out of her roastie snapper the same as her dong-beaten brapper, their veiny & thick tumescences disappearing into the given cool wine aunt with the metronomic cadence born solely of great cardio-pulmonary conditioning, slap, slap, slap, pummeling cunt & cloaca with great steady vigor. Simultaneous penetrations, public perversions, emictions & eliminations upon the sweaty faces of paying wide-mouthed clients, the cool wine aunt becomes worldly of all high & low slutty things, cruising correctional facilities public parking lots for previously incarcerated males receptive to the rippling petals of her gaping beef flower as a welcome-back-to-society gift, or else descending into chemsex-fueled benders of nut butter-aided beastiality, emptying kennels of yet-tainted pups before hurling the once unclean creatures tumbling over the sides of bridges, overpasses & anywhere with a cliff face long enough to relinquish to nature the dogs that had so scandalously tasted the cool wine aunt's vaginal victuals, lapping & schlopping the high calorie treat all the while the writhing cool wine aunt's brapper & snapper are each firing their climactic flatus like tolling bells.

>> No.16053508

>>16053260
Do you enjoy Ayn Rand's writings post-1940? You'll love this.

>> No.16053519

>>16053260
It's not about empowerment. The main character bumbles around for a while, hears rumors of a 'resistance,' but loses interest in it when she gets to fuck the hunky bodyguard. It's extremely depressing.

>> No.16053582

>>16053452
I studied both the Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake as part of my essay for my A Level English coursework, as well as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four (we got to choose our own topic and I decided to do it on literary dystopias).

The Handmaid's Tale is babby's first dystopia. Nothing about the world is remotely well thought out and there is nothing subtle about very clear political agenda behind the narrative. As a novel it's alright, in that the character's journey is moderately interesting, but still - it's a mediocre portrait with a background filled in with crayon.

I liked Oryx and Crake when I was 18, but I came back to it a few years later and I was amazed by how much my opinion on it had changed. Even the first time round I found Crake annoying; he seemed like a stupid person's idea of a smart person. But on second reading I realised just how much of it was someone with a shallow understanding of both science and society borrowing stuff she'd seen in the headlines of the New Scientist, the Economist and the New Yorker without actually reading beyond the first paragraph. I couldn't read it without cringing. And I *still* think Oryx and Crake is better than the Handmaid's Tale.

Nineteen Eighty-Four stands head and shoulders above any of Margaret Atwood's work. I am far from uncritical of it, but it is both a more interesting, more intense journey for the main character, and a more interesting and better-realised world. I never much liked Brave New World, but it's still better than the Handmaid's Tale.

The Handmaid's Tale is wokebait and nothing more. Don't waste your time on it.

>> No.16053775

>>16053452
this
>>16053469
and this

It's not pure feminist propaganda like most of the fags on here who haven't read it probably think, but it's not great either, it's just ok.

>> No.16053816

>>16053260
Best review of it from the exile when it came out:
http://exiledonline.com/old-exile/vault/books/review103.html

>> No.16053869

I liked it for the bewbs

>> No.16054161

>>16053582
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sXMG0Eqx2F0J:https://k-punk.org/atwoods-anti-capitalism/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

Did you read Mark Fisher's old blog post about Atwood's dystopias? I think both his criticism and praise is salient. I'm really interested in your perspective as someone who has done deep reading and study on the texts.

1984 doesn't excel in world-building to me as much as it does in exploring mechanics of social control. Ideology, history, and geography (to my memory) is set aside for a more abstract critique of power. There's something about war in Africa, Eurasia and Eastasia, but I mostly remember censorship, surveillance, and propaganda for their own sake. Boot on face, with the exception of maybe the social stratification.

Handmaid's Tale I think benefits from it's epistolary set-up. Maybe that's just a lampshade for the aspects of the world that might feel shallow, but I like the idea that one person's experience of society is only one slice of the big picture and the telling is another limitation.

To contrast with 1984, the history of the Handmaid's Tale was much more fleshed out on the question of social consent. It digs in to the present authoritarian instinct in North America: its spoken and unspoken codes of bigotry, religious extremism, and "tradition." In 1984, power is taken for granted. To that end, I thought Gilead's pageantry and rhetoric was well-realised. The wrinkle that the fervor stoked backfires on those in charge, who need to keep proving their loyalties to each other and themselves reveals an understanding of tension and inherent instability of that kind of regime. Not that it would be "unrealistic" if it were more stable; I think I mean more that Atwood did a really good job justifying the instability and thinking through the social and psychological ramifications of what she was proposing.

Reproduction in both novels is at it's heart an assembly-line social necessity, and the return of eroticism is a form of rebellion in both novels. But what sex was dressed up with, the rituals and justifications, is much more interesting to me in Handmaid's Tale.

Maybe it's the difference between a younger dystopia that came to be within living memory and the more entrenched dictatorship of 1984. Or the difference between the speculative and allegorical nature of the respective stories. I like them both for what they set out to do. Emotionally, the paranoid and indignant atmosphere created by both books worked for me. That feels more eye-of-the-beholder to me. I might be too theory-fucked at the moment.

I'm still reading Oryx and Crake, so I can't say much about it. I also had more to say about the other two books than I thought. Jimmy's depression and its relation to the nihilistic "everything-has-a-price" culture is the only thing that feels "real" to me. Everything else I find more intellectually interesting than immediate. I agree with Fisher about the names

>> No.16054191

>>16053387
Isn't that true of every work which describes life worse than ours?

>> No.16054293

>>16053260
The robes remind me of menstruation and the hats looks like clitorial hoods.
So if it was meant to represent modesty it doesn't really works.

>> No.16055092

>>16053260
its a fun dystopian fantasy story. Entertaining. I think all the political trappings are just dressing. Ascribing too much meaning is pretty pointless since it is a pretty generic bogeyman totalitarian government. The whole struggle with the main character willingly being a bangmaid so she can one day be reunited with her lost child gets kind of muddled, and Atwood pretty much bails on the premise the first chance she can. Anyway, Entertaining, but pretty hollow if you are looking for anything beyond cliche bogeyman as far as a political drama.

>> No.16055157

>>16053260
How fucking new are you that you think feminist writing = empowerment? Books aren't video games you fucking retard.
Compared to the greatest of the great works (which is all /lit/ has read) it's not as good, but it's still a good work of literature.

>> No.16055169

>>16054161
Using the word "salient" is grounds for immediately disregarding a post.

>> No.16055184

I remember thinking it was fucking stupid in high school, and I wasn’t very discerning then.

>> No.16055193

Do hose morons not know that they have to pull it up over the nose?

>> No.16055362

>>16053260
>I've just read an incredible article where "The Handmaid's Tale", a sub-par piece of science-fi trash, is defended by its author.
>The author, who rightly should be apologizing for her execrable prose, not only defends it but calls it "timely".
>The book has been made in to some sort of cable mini-series.
>I'm Canadian, so had to suffer through this book as a young person. It's one of those cheap, dystopian tracts.
>The difference with this one is it has a deeply paranoid feminist look into the future.
>The story is as impossible as most of these " frightening looks into the future".
>But to call it timely, when the possibility of this fiction ever becoming fact even more of a joke, is just a cynical cash-grab.

t. Norm "Based" Macdonald

>> No.16056088

>>16055362
>so one day i read something about this woman writer you know right uhh one of those fiction writers i suppose eh whatever so anyways this woman writer right i met her down at the... down at the bar or however you call it - the pub yeah thats it - so i met her and she goes she says "well look at this man right here" she says "aint he the epitome of a macho man" and she i saw her she looks over to her friend or something i dont know and she has this kind of secretly embarassed but approving look on her face you know the kind and I didnt realise at first because I dont usually get talked to like that in a pub you know but she was talking about me! so i look around i say "well Ill be damned if it aint a bitter old wine-aunt saying this because Im quite the gentleman may i say even quite the catch" i go i say "you dirty old hag!"

>> No.16056930

>>16053816
Holy shit, that's the best takedown I've ever read. This perfectly articulates everything I've felt; that it's a piece of unrealistic torture porn meant to coerce people into supporting liberal capitalism out of fear of a fundamentalist boogeyman.

>> No.16056990
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16056990

>>16053260
>mfw my family watched the series, and won't shut the fuck up about it
>mfw they spout shit like "It could so easily happen!" ignoring the fundamental absurdity of impoverished fundie retards taking over the United States government
>mfw they don't realize that neoliberalism is the real, omnipresent enemy of humanity, and shit like this is just an unrealistic horror story meant to goad them into accepting woke capitalism by contrast
It's so infuriating bros, especially when these corporate-backed, multimillionaire liberals somehow think that "the Alt-Right" will violently overthrow the fucking US government. What's infuriating is that they can't comprehend dialectical materialism, and therefore can't understand that WE ARE LIVING IN THE DYSTOPIA. God, fuck that red-Tory Atwood, and fuck the millions of wine-aunts that take her drivel as gospel.

>> No.16057009
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16057009

>>16053816
>Handmaid’s Tale is meant to reassure every wretched office-worker who goes home to a cat, a VCR, and Pizza-for-one that her life is noble and progressive. Handmaid’s Tale is fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives. No one wants to force middle-class American women to have babies. In fact, it’s almost impossible for them to contemplate having kids, because they’re terrified that it might set them back in their careers, and their rivals in the adjacent cubicles would grab their parking spaces and health plans. Nobody wants to use their bodies.

>> No.16057015

>>16053260
Its a masochistic fantasy, the author desperately wishes to be subjugated/desired

>> No.16057017
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16057017

>>16053260
Trust me anon, it's based

>> No.16058802

>>16057015
Not to mention that she wishes it was real so she could validate her own agenda. Progressive capitalists always need some fascist/communist strawman to pose their ideas against in order to convince the masses.

>> No.16059339

>>16053582
I read Oryx and Crake probably about the same age and liked it, I'll have to skim it next time Im at the library and see if my opinion has changed as well.

>> No.16059551
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16059551

>>16056990
Yeah, that’s the feel alright

>> No.16059557

>>16053260

>> No.16059672

>>16053582
>>16054161
Imagine if posts on /lit/ were always of this sort and never of this sort. >>16055169

>> No.16059827

Thought it was much better than 1984 and BNW.

Sequel was decent and expanded the world a bit.

>> No.16059934

>>16059827
>much better than 1984 and BNW
How? I mean, I could see you making the case on a purely technical level; Huxley was never that great a prose-writer. But in terms of crafting a dystopia? Both Ingsoc and Fordism are more well-crafted, socially-relevant systems than "Westboro Baptist Church but super big and powerful and can somehow maintain a successful industrial economy alongside reactionary traditionalism". For God's sake, 1984 had an entire 50-page excerpt explaining the intricacies of Oceania, from the history to the subtle means of control.

Let's not forget that Orwell and Huxley crafted FAR more socially relevant examples than Atwood. Ingsoc relies on linguistic and conceptual manipulation to secure power over minds, a pretty powerful psychological observation to make. Fordism relies on a constant stream of positive stimuli to emotionally attach the people to the ruling class, a principle which is blatantly used today. What does Atwood have? An unrealistic, almost-cartoonishly backward theocracy that fundamentally ignores that the United States government and upper-class, no matter how reactionary it seems compared to the rest of the world, would never accept in a million years.

This is fundamentally because Atwood does not have any genuinely radical political principles, so when she conceives of a dystopia, she can't even think of one that's remotely believable. Orwell, Huxley, Kafka and London were all socialists, so it's no surprise that they were able to properly comprehend the nature of dystopia. Liberals are fundamentally unable to do the same, as they inherently enjoy the dystopia within their own status quo. In this regard, she set a precedent for YA dystopias.

>> No.16060168

>>16053260
I tried reading t when it was first published, but I couldn't get past the first chapter. It is just so poorly written.

>> No.16060231

>>16053260
Pretty boring, really.

>> No.16060510

>>16054161
>the question of social consent

This is a fair point, and the area where it does something different. 1984, being based on Stalinism, is more about brute force, BNW is nominally about hedonism, but actually rests on the idea that the whole cast have been genetically dehumanised so the consent thing is kind of dodged.

Anyway, picking up one of the original, really good, negative reviews
> https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/specials/mccarthy-atwood.html
Aside from showing that the book's critical status has changed, what stands out is the Aids mention as a justification for returning to controlled sex, which possibly seemed more realistic then.

>> No.16060531

>>16053387
Incel "but muh dick" antifeminist talking points have been around for a while apparently

>> No.16060725

>>16059934
THT is more socially relevant to Americans and modern audiences, and from a historical perspective. Everything in it is based on something that has actually happened. I don't even know how you can say that exploring fundamentalism in America, even if taken to 'cartoonish' extremes (how BNW and 1984 don't suffer from that?), is less socially relevant than some satirical fictional forms of socialism/communism and technocracy taken to their extreme.
>fundamentally ignores that the United States government and upper-class, no matter how reactionary it seems compared to the rest of the world, would never accept in a million years
False flag + Patriot Act stuff. Extremists hijack the government and the Anglo-Saxon elites are close enough that they could quickly adapt. Jewish elites leave the country. What grounds BNW in reality? "Well they just dropped anthrax bombs on anyone who disagreed" Or 1984? Eurasia and Eastasia I get but how would the West have realistically turned into Oceania?

But I agree that THT could have been more fleshed out and explored some of the other themes like racial discrimination, class, how different industries and states would conform. From an American perspective. Would have elevated it as dystopian fiction. But that's missing the point when it was never meant to be more than one woman's story in that world from a feminist perspective. The sequel doesn't flesh out the world much either, other than the female experience in that society. Still, we got glimpses of those other themes too and to me even those minor details even if Harry Potter levels of thought were put into them make it better than 1984 or BNW.

>> No.16060735

>>16053435
dilate.

>> No.16060833

>>16054161
>It digs in to the present authoritarian instinct in North America: its spoken and unspoken codes of bigotry, religious extremism, and "tradition."
lol

>> No.16060903

>>16053260
>>16053452
Is the main character ugly in the book too?

>> No.16061260

>>16059672
Things would be much worse.