Alias Grace
In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood tries her hand at historical fiction, speculating about what might have happened in the case of Grace Marks - a young maid who was convicted of killing her master and his mistress (Grace's boss) and sentenced to life in prison. The case is murky, with changing testimonies and contradictory evidence. Atwood did a lot of research to try and get to the bottom of it and tell a coherent story about what happened from Grace's point of view.
The problem is that she doesn't ever seem to come to any conclusions. Grace is an enigma wrapped in lies wrapped in misdirection. Even though she told her own story in this book, I left it without any real sense that I understood who she was. Was she lying the whole time? Was she sick? Was she faking amnesia or not? Atwood chooses to leave this all up in the air, which left me frustrated.
It didn't help that the book is incredibly slow. It took over a hundred pages to get to Grace's account and even longer to get to the meat of the matter. There were other distractions, like the doctor's weird sexual urges and dalliances that just felt unnecessary.
I can appreciate that Atwood was trying to do something interesting with the patchwork theme. She was attempting to make an argument that we are all made up of scraps and pieces, memories and stories and incidents that seem to have very little to do with one another but come together to make a whole with a very clear pattern. But the metaphor never quite came together for me.
This book was fine. There was something interesting stuff in here. But it ended up being far too ambiguous for me to get a grip on it. Which left me feeling unsatisfied. At least I don't feel a strong need to carve out time for the TV adaptation of this book.
The problem is that she doesn't ever seem to come to any conclusions. Grace is an enigma wrapped in lies wrapped in misdirection. Even though she told her own story in this book, I left it without any real sense that I understood who she was. Was she lying the whole time? Was she sick? Was she faking amnesia or not? Atwood chooses to leave this all up in the air, which left me frustrated.
It didn't help that the book is incredibly slow. It took over a hundred pages to get to Grace's account and even longer to get to the meat of the matter. There were other distractions, like the doctor's weird sexual urges and dalliances that just felt unnecessary.
I can appreciate that Atwood was trying to do something interesting with the patchwork theme. She was attempting to make an argument that we are all made up of scraps and pieces, memories and stories and incidents that seem to have very little to do with one another but come together to make a whole with a very clear pattern. But the metaphor never quite came together for me.
This book was fine. There was something interesting stuff in here. But it ended up being far too ambiguous for me to get a grip on it. Which left me feeling unsatisfied. At least I don't feel a strong need to carve out time for the TV adaptation of this book.
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