The Handmaid's Tale

by

Hardcover, 350 pages

English language

Published Jan. 1, 2006 by Everyman's Library.

ISBN:
978-0-307-26460-2
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OCLC Number:
140786839
Goodreads:
4025053

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4 stars (3 reviews)

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time. Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules. Like …

47 editions

reviewed The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Well written, disturbing

3 stars

This work was well written. I would say I liked it three stars. Definitely left me feeling uneasy, and honestly quite hopeless. In part I think that is what the author was going for. A speculative fiction work based in a North American society that has taken Calvinist fundamentalism to the extreme. Including, but not limited to, forbidding "baren" wives from fornicating with their husbands, instead forcing a "hand maid' to move in in which they have a breeding ceremony once a month to try to impregnate her with everyone watching. Its been said that when Atwood only put things in here that already existed somewhere in the world in 1980s. Maybe in Iran? I'm not sure. Seems far-fetched even for such repressive regimes. I was disappointed that the story kind of just ended. Nothing resolved, and it certainly wasn't happy (or maybe it was, we really don't know). The …

reviewed La servante écarlate by Margaret Atwood

Not so speculative fiction

5 stars

I was warned this book is not a fun one. Indeed it is not.

You get to see the omnipresent fear and violence of a patriarchal surveillance state. You get to see how it got there, little by little, and how it got accepted. The disturbing part is that it is very much believable...

I hadn't seen since Orwell's "1984" the effect of a totalitarian system on an individual so well described, especially at an individual level. You get to see how a single mind resists or breaks when faced with such overwhelming brutal and oppressive environment.

It is definitely worth reading, especially when you keep in mind the fact that Atwood has been censored in several US states.

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rated it

3 stars

Subjects

  • Misogyny--Fiction.
  • Women--Fiction.