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Bluebeard's Egg

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

With the publication of the best-selling The Handmaid's Tale in 1986, Margaret Atwood's place in North American letters was reconfirmed. Poet, short story writer, and novelist, she was acclaimed "one of the most intelligent and talented writers to set herself the task of deciphering life in the late twentieth century."*

With Bluebeard's Egg, her second short story collection, Atwood covers a dramatic range of storytelling, her scope encompassing the many moods of her characters, from the desolate to the hilarious.

The stories are set in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s and concern themselves with relationships of various sorts. There is the bond between a political activist and his kidnapped cat, a woman and her dead psychiatrist, a potter and the group of poets who live with her and mythologize her, an artist and the strange men she picks up to use as models. There is a man who finds himself surrounded by women who are literally shrinking, and a woman whose life is dominated by a fear of nuclear warfare; there are telling relationships among parents and children.

By turns humorous and warm, stark and frightening, Bluebeard's Egg explores and illuminates both the outer world in which we all live and the inner world that each of us creates.

*Le Anne Schreiber, Vogue

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 1, 1989
      "Conversations in our family were not about feelings,'' recalls the teenage narrator of ``Hurricane Hazel''about her breakup with a boyfriend who ``meant what is usually called absolutely nothing to me''in Atwood's (The Handmaid's Tale, etc.) second collection of shortfiction. Unfortunately, the author's arch cleverness and cool understatementanesthetize the impact of the stories' conversations and gloomy relationshipsbetween parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. Symbols abound and some, reminiscent of Atwood's ``edible woman'' cake in the book of the same title, are strained. In ``Uglypuss,'' the discordant lovers are political activists; at one point they plan to picket a sock company and dramatize the crucifixion, portraying Christ as a large knitted sock, in red and white stripes. But the collection is somewhat redeemed by the affecting title story, where an egga deceptively innocuous object that, according to the legend, ultimately marks as disobedient two of Bluebeard's unfortunate wivesaptly symbolizes the protagonist's premonitions of doom about her marriage to a man she is desperately afraid of losing, although she describes him as obtuse, blundering and predictable.

    • Library Journal

      November 15, 1986
      This excellent book of short stories by one of Canada's best-known authors glitters with vivid characterizations and examples of finely crafted story telling. Atwood's dramatic range is impressive. She opens with humorous, gently satirical stories about childhood and adolescence. Her title story skillfully portrays a woman's fear and grief as she begins to question her husband's faithfulness and her own perceptions, while other stories show the despair of characters who are trying to salvage lost relationships or to establish new ones. Many of these stories have the pacing and tone of spoken tales, stories told on front porches or repeated between mothers and daughters. This entertaining book by a gifted writer is highly recommended. Lucinda Ann Peck, Learning Design Assocs ., Gahanna, Ohio

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  • English

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