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A review by holly_moward
Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood
4.0
It’s no secret I’m a simp for Margaret Atwood. After all these years I can’t believe I’m still finding novels of hers that I haven’t read; the woman is like James Patterson but talented. Life Before Man is heady and melodramatic, but I read it in fits and starts which I think made it feel sort of disjointed. There were so many passages that were so beautiful—my copy is dog-eared to hell from all the places I marked to come back to (I am not offended by dog-ears. I don’t think the interiors of books should be pristine). Here’s one in particular I read several times:
“Elizabeth stares at her, pitiless, unbelieving. Such malevolent vitality cannot die. Hitler lived on after the discovery of his smoldering teeth, and Auntie Muriel too is one of the immortals.
But she has shriveled. The flesh once compact and stolid is drooping on the bones; the powder Auntie Muriel has continued to apply is caked in small ravines of collapsing skin. Her throat is a cavity above the virginal bow of the bed jacket, her prowlike bosom has withered. Her color, once a confident beige, has faded to the off-white of a dirty tooth. Her eyes, once slightly protuberant like those of a Pekinese, are being sucked into the depths of her head. She’s falling in on herself, she’s melting, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and seeing it Elizabeth remembers: Dorothy was not jubilant when the witch turned into a puddle of brown sugar. She was terrified.”
She smacks you in the head with passages like that again and again throughout the course of the novel. It would really be a wonderful book to study for craft on a line-level basis, but I do think the pacing drags overall. The one time I convinced my mother to read a Margaret Atwood book (The Robber Bride), her only feedback was: “I just couldn’t stand any of those women.” I was annoyed when she said this to me of course, but I have to say I echo her sentiment with the character of Lesje in Life Before Man. What a whiny baby, and Nate too. I would’ve almost preferred a book entirely from the perspective of Elizabeth as I found all of her passages to be the most interesting. As with all of my Atwood canon reading, I do look for the seeds of future novels, and I think in the Elizabeth passages I was picking up bits and pieces of what might become The Blind Assassin, my personal favorite of her novels and perhaps why I liked those parts the best.
Tl;dr—a good novel, not her best.
“Elizabeth stares at her, pitiless, unbelieving. Such malevolent vitality cannot die. Hitler lived on after the discovery of his smoldering teeth, and Auntie Muriel too is one of the immortals.
But she has shriveled. The flesh once compact and stolid is drooping on the bones; the powder Auntie Muriel has continued to apply is caked in small ravines of collapsing skin. Her throat is a cavity above the virginal bow of the bed jacket, her prowlike bosom has withered. Her color, once a confident beige, has faded to the off-white of a dirty tooth. Her eyes, once slightly protuberant like those of a Pekinese, are being sucked into the depths of her head. She’s falling in on herself, she’s melting, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and seeing it Elizabeth remembers: Dorothy was not jubilant when the witch turned into a puddle of brown sugar. She was terrified.”
She smacks you in the head with passages like that again and again throughout the course of the novel. It would really be a wonderful book to study for craft on a line-level basis, but I do think the pacing drags overall. The one time I convinced my mother to read a Margaret Atwood book (The Robber Bride), her only feedback was: “I just couldn’t stand any of those women.” I was annoyed when she said this to me of course, but I have to say I echo her sentiment with the character of Lesje in Life Before Man. What a whiny baby, and Nate too. I would’ve almost preferred a book entirely from the perspective of Elizabeth as I found all of her passages to be the most interesting. As with all of my Atwood canon reading, I do look for the seeds of future novels, and I think in the Elizabeth passages I was picking up bits and pieces of what might become The Blind Assassin, my personal favorite of her novels and perhaps why I liked those parts the best.
Tl;dr—a good novel, not her best.