women

Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

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Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty.

In today’s world, where so many people value opinions and beliefs over fact, it is a huge relief to communicate with someone who actually believes in science. Both of her parents were scientists–an entomologist and a nutritionist–and she spent much of her youth in the woods of Northern Ontario. She talks about the family pulling over when an infestation was spotted so that they could collect the invading critters. “Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations.”

That early influence shows in her concern with the threats to our environment, both in her fiction and her nonfiction, including a number of pieces in this collection. She writes of how this concern fueled her Oryx & Crake trilogy and her MaddAddam trilogy, as well as a moving tribute to Rachel Carson, calling her “a pivotal figure of the twentieth century” and “Saint Rachel.”

Another theme that threads through this collection is the way autocracies try to silence writers and control women. She has been a force in founding Pen Canada and acted as its president in the 1980s. In “If We Don’t Defend Free Speech, We Live in Tyranny” she writes about the attack on Salman Rushdie and the murder of translator Hotoshi Igarashi. In another piece she states that “There is nothing that repressive governments desire more than imposed silence . . . secrecy is an important tool not only of power but of atrocity.”

She generously continues to write about The Handmaid’s Tale, noting that “absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women.” She adds that writing a dystopia from a woman’s point of view “does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things.”

These pieces are not all darkness with a glimmer of wit. In “Literature and the Environment” she writes that “as long as we have hope—and we still do have hope—we will be telling stories, and—if we have the time and the materials—we’ll be setting them down; because the telling of stories, and the wish to listen to them, transmit them, and derive meaning from them, is built into us as human beings.”

Indeed, the pieces I most appreciated were about how essential the arts are to our well-being and about writing in particular. Parsing out her approach to these short pieces taught me so much about her methodology. Often she starts with a clear statement of purpose: “I’ll divide my talk into three parts, and I’ll even tell you what they are, just so you know what’s coming.” That’s from a speech honoring the Department of Forestry’s centennial. I’m touched by how, despite her blockbuster status, she’s willing to turn up and speak at so many events.

After the statement of purpose, she wanders here and there in the best tradition of essay-writing. She includes asides, rhetorical questions, digressions, allusions. She explores the question without answering it, instead opening our minds—gently and respectfully. I also especially appreciated the pieces about other authors and about her late husband, author Graeme Gibson: both joyful moments and mor trying times as he drifted deeper into dementia.

While some readers may be unnerved by this collection’s length, diversity, and chronological structure (rather than thematic), I found it a joy to read. Most of the pieces are quite short, making it a perfect bedtime book: you can read a few pieces and chuckle at her quips before you turn out the light.

I’m grateful to Atwood for collecting these pieces—no small task—and putting them out for us to absorb. In fact, for a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

What have you read by Margaret Atwood? Her novels, poems, and/or essays?

A Woman Is No Man, by Etaf Rum

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A Woman Is No Man

Rum’s powerful debut novel begins with an arranged marriage. In 1990, Isra’s family is eking out an austere living on the outskirts of a town in the West Bank, having been driven out of their home by the Israeli invasion, which they call the Nakba—the Catastrophe. They are delighted to marry off their 17-year-old daughter to the oldest son of an American Palestinian family who are looking for a quiet, submissive Muslim girl.

The marriage to a stranger doesn’t come close to Isra’s dreams of romance and adventure, but it has to be better than the constant beatings and verbal abuse from her parents. Instead, it is worse. Isra often has cause to remember her mother’s warning: “There is nothing out there for a woman but her bayt wa dar, her house and home. Marriage, motherhood — that is a woman’s only worth.”

Adam and Isra live in the basement of his family’s crowded Brooklyn home. Upstairs are his parents, Fareeda and Khaled, and his three younger siblings. Isra becomes, essentially, a prisoner in the house, where Fareeda watches soap operas while Isra does most of the housework and cooking.

As their Bay Ridge neighborhood has a large Palestinian population, the cultural norms are enforced. For example, only a prostitute would leave the house by herself, and Fareeda takes her only to homes of other women where Isra has to endure snubs from the other women for not having produced a male child. Thus, she is unable to develop social connections. Her plight illustrates the way self-blaming and cultural shaming add to the abuse of women.

Even as Adam takes to drinking and beating her, Isra understands that his lot is not easy either. As the eldest son he is expected to run his own convenience store, help at his father’s store, and then even help his spoiled younger brother set up a third store. She also taps a larger perspective.

The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her. That the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba bulging in his veins… She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?

In a dual timeline, we meet Isra’s oldest daughter Deya, now 18. Isra and Adam have died, and their four daughters are being raised by Fareeda with the same strict rules. Even as her grandmother searches for a husband for Deya, the young woman wants to break free and go to college. Eventually an estranged family member reveals some jarring truths about the family’s history to Deya and encourages her to stand up for herself.

Despite the repressive, patriarchal culture portrayed in the story, several characters step up to say that such treatment of women, little more than servants who don’t even sit at the table to eat with the men, goes against the Koran and Islamic teachings that celebrate the role of women and enjoin men to honor them. We are told that the Prophet Muhammad himself said, “‘Observe your duty to Allah in respect to the women, and treat them well.’”

One thing that stands out to me is the role of books and reading in the story. For Isra, her sister-in-law Sara, and her daughter Deya, these are the tiny windows into the world and sole comfort in their severely restricted lives.

I’ve read several books recently that frame a main character’s engaging personal story in an explicit political framework: Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez; Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng; Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell; even The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble. In trying to understand how the authors manage to keep the politics from overwhelming the story, what I see is their intense focus on the main character’s experience.

Rum’s task must have been especially difficult given today’s Islamophobic prejudices and anti-Arab stereotypes. And it’s no wonder she found it difficult to make the men into rounded characters, because of the cultural norm that once the men leave the house, what they do in invisible to the women stuck there. And we only have the women’s experience.

It’s important to note that Rum describes their perception of their lives sometimes as simply brutal and other times in a more nuanced way, such as Isra’s recognition of the effects of their historical trauma on the men. I’m sure not all Palestinian families are like the ones portrayed here, but some are and I’m grateful to Rum for breaking the code of silence and letting us in.

Can you recommend a novel about Palestinian families?

Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez

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There are inflection points in our lives, moments when everything changes: What we thought of as our life now exists only as the past, and the future is about to begin. We meet Antonia Vega as she confronts such a moment.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Antonia came to the United States with her family and found herself teaching Americans about their own language and literary traditions. Now, not only has she retired from her work as a college professor, but her husband of over thirty years has died. “Who am I going to be anymore?” she wonders. As a woman with no profession, no husband, no children, she feels herself becoming invisible.

At the same time, she is haunted by words: those of her husband—a beloved doctor in their small Vermont town—and those of all the authors whose work she has read and taught over the years. She tells herself: “An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is indeed depleted.”

The world has not done with her, though. She becomes embroiled in the problems of an undocumented worker on the neighboring farm, whose fiancé is being held hostage in Colorado by coyotes who demand Mario send more money. At the same time, her older sister Izzy is behaving more and more erratically, and her other two sisters rope her into their schemes to force Izzy to get help. Then Izzy goes missing.

As both situations escalate, Antonia questions where her responsibility lies. Unlike her big-hearted, activist husband, she lacks the appetite for self-sacrifice that most women have had drummed into them. She turns to questions from a Tolstoy story she used to teach: “What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?”

She reminds herself of the rampant individualism in her adopted country, that advises you to put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others. Yet she also conjures a saying her husband’s mother used when someone had a problem: “Let’s see what love can do.”

One of the aspects of this book that I most valued turned out to be these contradictions and how we manage to live with them. For example, the farmer next door (whom Mario works for) loudly complains about illegal immigrants, yet he secretly hires them because he can’t afford to pay the salary a citizen would expect.

The themes here fascinate me: the identity crisis caused by your world flipping over; the way women are taught to sacrifice their own needs and desires to those of others; the immigrant experience, not just in the first contact with the new culture, but what happens after a few decades of steeping in it. I was surprised by how much this short novel resonated with me. And of course I appreciated the Vermont setting.

I love all the lines from stories that swarm into Antonia’s thoughts, their sources mostly not identified. However, that can cause danger for the author, similar to the danger of using such a generous amount of Spanish, especially in the dialogue. As a former English teacher and devoted reader, I recognised most of the quotes and, though not knowing Spanish myself, I could figure out what was meant by the context. But that will not be true for everyone. One reader on Goodreads thought that these quotes were just the author trying to be a poetic and instead, sounding like “word salad.” Reasonable enough.

I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite part of the book: the four sisters. Every scene with them explodes with life and emotion and—oh, golly!—the dialogue! Alvarez so beautifully articulates the shifting dynamic between them: alliances forming and reforming, ancient injuries resurrected, fierce loyalties and unquestioned support. Most of all, a secret language that only those you’ve grown up with can understand.

Luckily, I consumed this story as an audiobook, masterfully narrated by Alma Cuervo. I enjoy physical books—I’d better, since they threaten to overwhelm my home—but there are times when an audiobook works better, at least for me.

While I seek out stories about people and cultures different from mine, I’m also interested in books about women and men in the later stages of life. There are many ways to define these stages: Shakespeare’s seven stages of man, Erik Erikson’s eight stages, Gail Sheehy’s Passages. Mostly I think about the four stages of life as described in ancient Hindu texts (the Student, the Householder, the Hermit, and the Wandering Ascetic).

Whatever stage of life you’re in, I recommend this 2020 novel by the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

What novel have you read that surprised you? How?

Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi

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I’m in a few book clubs and, luckily for me, they are all interested in reading more diverse authors, hence this Man Booker-winning novel by Alharthi, who is an author and university professor from Oman. It is the story of three sisters and their extended family in a rural village outside the capital of Oman during the late twentieth century when the culture in that country was rapidly and unevenly changing.

Mayya, the oldest sister, doesn’t have much to do with the outside world, preferring to stay at home sewing. When her parents inform her that she will be married to Abdallah, son of the merchant Sulayman, they do not know she’s in love with a young man recently returned from London, whom she’s seen from afar twice. Mayya obediently marries Abdallah but names her first child, a girl, London.

Asma, the second sister, finds her joy in books and traditional religion. When her parents inform her that Khalid wants to marry her, she insists on taking a few days to decide, but eventually agrees. He is an artist whose ideal wife, as it turns out, is someone who will fall “into the orbit he had marked out, who would always be there but would also always stay just outside, yet without wanting to create her own celestial sphere, her own orbit.”

Khawla is more modern, wearing lipstick and adamantly refusing to marry anyone but her beloved Nasir who eventually rewards her devotion by marrying her but immediately decamps for Canada where he lives with his girlfriend, returning more or less annually, just long enough to get the faithful Khawla pregnant.

Marriage is not the only area where customs and mores are changing. Social classes, education for women, contact with the outside world: all of these are in motion and thus reflected in the fluidity of the book’s structure. Instead of a single plot with subplots, there are a multitude of plot threads that come to the fore and disappear, sometimes returning, sometimes not, a structure that seems to mirror what life was like for those living through such upheaval.

The brief chapters shift between a multitude of voices, making all of us in the book club rely heavily on the genealogical chart in the front of the books. Most chapters move between the sisters’ voices and those of others: their parents, London, even Zarifa, originally Sulayman’s slave, now a servant and his mistress. Almost all are women’s voices. We all preferred the book’s original title, literally translated as Ladies of the Moon.

These are interspersed with chapters of Abdallah’s first person narration. We questioned why a man should have so much real estate in a book primarily about women and be the only one addressing us directly. The only thing we could think of is that his prominence reflects the male privilege still dominating the culture. The irony is that although Abdallah’s chapters all take place on planes (he flies around the world for work), he and the other men are the characters most confined and hobbled by their roles.

Time is also extremely fluid in this book, sometimes moving decades forward and then backward into the past all in the same paragraph. Readers like me who tend to prefer a mostly linear and chronological plot may struggle to keep track of what is going on and who the characters are. Yet the effort brings a huge reward, not just in a glimpse into a—for me—unfamiliar culture, nor just the vivid and sometimes intoxicating language, but also the enlightening experience of navigating a changing world.

What diverse voices are you reading?

My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor

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These days I’m on the lookout for positive stories. I can only bear an hour or two of news early in the day, leaving me time to bury my dismay and disgust with normal daily activities before darkness comes.

I came to this memoir by the Supreme Court justice—the first Hispanic and only the third woman—with some hesitation. I knew it would be a story of success, but feared it would might be saccharine and superficial.

I needn’t have worried. Sotomayor is an excellent writer. Her prose is clear and flows well, developing scenes and narrative that a reader can easily follow. I think this skill must have been honed in her written arguments, where logic and emotion must both be consistently deployed.

It can be hard to find the right tone in a memoir. You have to describe your successes in a way that doesn’t come across as bragging, not even a “humble brag”. You have to talk about the obstacles in your way without whining or succumbing to a woe-is-me mentality. You have to be open about your failures.

Sotomayor starts by describing a scene soon after her diabetes diagnosis when both of her parents argue about giving her the insulin injection she needs. Burdened by their sadness, seven-year-old Sonia decides to learn to prepare the injection and give it to herself. The scene is a good introduction, not only to the challenges facing her—illness, financial hardship, cultural difference—but also to what she calls “the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with.”

I understand. I often say that I am lucky to have been born with the happy gene. I’m less good at perseverance, but Sotomayor shows in situation after situation how extra effort can compensate for other gifts.

What keeps this memoir of her successful rise in the legal world is two-fold. For one thing, there are plenty of stories of failures mixed in with the successes, misery among the happy times. The other is the credit she repeatedly gives to others who have helped her along the way. On the first page of the first chapter, right after her remark about optimism and perseverance, she says:

At the same time, I would never claim to be self-made—quite the contrary: at every stage of my life, I have always felt that the support I’ve drawn from those closest to me has made the decisive difference between success and failure.

It is this generous spirit, shown also towards her parents where her love for them shines through even when she describes their failures, that makes me want to cheer her on and give her more credit than she gives herself.

Another challenge of writing a memoir is deciding what time frame to choose. I think she made a wise choice to start with her independent approach to her diabetes and end with her first becoming a judge. Since becoming a judge was her dream from the beginning, it ties up the story neatly.

If you’re feeling low, I recommend this book. As she says in the preface, “People who live in difficult circumstances need to know that happy endings are possible.” Although our circumstances are dissimilar and our ideas of what makes an ending happy differ, her story lifted my own spirits.

What book have you read that brightened your day?

Crooked Heart, by Lissa Evans

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Lissa Evans’s fourth novel is set in and around London during the Blitz in WWII. The characters are ordinary people, not homefront heroes like midwives or wardens or detectives. Well, I say ordinary, but like the best fiction, Crooked Heart shows us how extraordinary each life may be.

In the remarkable prologue, we are introduced to orphaned 10-year-old Noel who lives with his godmother in Hampstead. Mattie, a suffragette in her younger days, has retained her free-thinking ways, treating Noel to an eccentric and wonderful education. However, she is beginning to suffer from dementia. As she struggles to remember words and where she put things, the wordplay and accommodations between Mattie and Noel are wonderful to behold.

I’m generally not fond of prologues, but I loved this one. In fact, I thought it the best part of the book.

All good things come to an end, including Mattie, and ostensibly under the care of her cousins, Noel is evacuated to St. Albans. Unprepossessing and limping from a bout with polio, Noel is the last child to find a home. Finally, Vera Sedge snatches him up for the sake of the stipend and extra rations she’ll receive.

Vera, known as Vee, is a widow who barely makes ends meet by sewing notions for hats and engaging in various small money-making schemes. She has little affection to spare for Noel since she is absorbed in waiting on her no-good grown son and elderly mother who spends her time writing letters to Churchill.

Noel, however, is quite brilliant and, thanks to Mattie, creative at coming up with unusual solutions to problems. He and Vee become partners in petty crime.

Much of the joy in this book is seeing how their relationship develops. The description of wartime London, where the two conduct their activities, is brilliant. More than what it’s like to take refuge from the bombs in a shelter or the unsettling disappearance of buildings, we learn about the plethora of minor crime going on while ordinary mores seem to be suspended. I also enjoyed the glimpses of regular life continuing during the Blitz, how people adjust to the new normal.

Much of the story is light-hearted, but it has its dark side—and I’m not just talking about bombs. The reader cannot help but share Vee’s ongoing panic about how to make ends meet and the extremes she’s willing to go to in order to pay the rent—just like today when so many are struggling to survive.

How can you not consider stealing a loaf of bread if your children are hungry? And I’m not just talking about the Blitz or Jean Valjean. People are starving today, even in the richest country in the world. People—especially single mothers—are unable to pay the rent and are thrown onto the street.

I’m sure there are those who would describe this novel as charming or heart-warming. Perhaps it is my own background that makes me so aware of the shadow of desperate poverty that haunts the comic shenanigans of Vee and Noel. As in drawing, thought, the shading adds depth and power to this story.

Have you read a novel that is by turns funny and sad, light-hearted and dark?

Nora Webster, by Colm Tóibín

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Newly widowed Nora doesn’t want to answer her door. In the Irish town of Wexford in the middle of the 20th century, it is customary for people to stop by the home of someone in mourning in the evening. Without phones there’s no way to call first to see if they are welcome, so they just come and knock on the door.

Despite her yearning to be alone, Nora always opens the door. To a neighbor who commiserates with her, she says, “‘They mean well. People mean well.’”

Bound by convention, missing her husband’s steady presence, Nora must begin making her own choices. As the sole support for her four children, she is first confronted with financial decisions. Later she has to contend with emotional issues as her two young sons come to terms with their own grief. Their two older sisters are away at school.

Nora is a fascinating character. She does not seem to be close to anyone, now that Maurice is gone. Though she says at one point that she never loved her mother, she’d expected at some point they would find a place to meet. However, it hadn’t happened before her mother has passed away. Nora is not interested in being with her two sisters and aunt, though she and they make the customary visits.

She is not even close to her children, thinking at one point “that she had never before put a single thought into whether they were happy or not, or tried to guess what they were thinking.”

She seems to hold herself at the same distance. Practical, focused on the everyday things that must be done, she barely touches the fringes of introspection. The reader, too, is held at a slight distance from her. Tóibín uses a close third person point of view, telling the story through Nora’s eyes, but her lack of self-analysis leaves us as much in the dark as she is. We hear her think one thing and then see her do the opposite, and have to assume that she is giving in to convention again or to what another person wants her to do.

When we discussed this novel in my book club, one person pointed out that much of the drama in this quiet book came from the space between Nora’s thoughts and her actions. Whether you call it drama or conflict or tension, I think that this analysis is accurate.

I called it a quiet book, though things large and small happen, and there are plenty of emotional upheavals. Another book club member praised the way political events of the time were woven into the story, giving it additional depth and universality.

In the end, though, what we all liked about this book was the close look at an ordinary life, one of the reasons we like Anne Tyler’s novels as well. A master storyteller like Tóibín can make us care about a single, ordinary individual. He can find the value in that life and as a result help us understand more about ourselves and our own lives.

In the first chapter, a neighbor Mrs. Lacey mentions her daughter. Ellis Lacey is the young woman whose story is told in Tóibín’s best-seller Brooklyn, recently made into a film. What did you think of that story? How do you think it compares with this one?

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, by Elizabeth Taylor

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Elizabeth Taylor was a well-known and much-loved British author, publishing thirteen novels and short stories in magazines such as The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. She has been praised by writers such as Kingsley Amis and Hilary Mantel; Anne Tyler compared her to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, and Elizabeth Bowen. However, since her death in 1975, her fame has faded; somehow women, especially those who write about society and the family are less likely to make it into the literary canon. The Telegraph calls her “one of the forgotten geniuses of the [short story] form.”

I came across her name and this title on one of those lists of best books. Mrs. Palfrey arrives at the Claremont on a dreary January day, comforting herself with the words “If it’s not nice, I needn’t stay.” Recently widowed, she is coming from a visit with her golf-mad daughter and her family in Scotland. Once in her room “she thought that prisoners must feel as she did now, the first time they are left alone in their cell, first turning to the window, then facing about to stare at the closed door: after that, counting the paces from wall to wall.” But she thinks this “briskly”. After all:

She had always know how to behave. Even as a bride, in strange, alarming conditions in Burma, she had been magnificently calm–when (for instance) she was rowed across floods to her new home; unruffled, finding it more that damp, with a snake wound round the bannister to greet her. She had straightened her back and given herself a goo talking-to, as she had this afternoon on the train.

I love this kind of everyday courage. It is so rarely celebrated. It stands her in good stead as she adjusts to the routines of the somewhat seedy hotel, where long-term residents mingle with “birds of passage”. The residents are a marvelously eccentric bunch, their world narrowed to the hotel and its inhabitants, the predictable dinner menu a source of endless speculation. Mr. Osmond tells racy stories and frowns on Mrs. Burton’s nightly drinks–they cost extra–as does Mrs. Arbuthnot, a rather stern woman crippled with arthritis, but also the person who first spoke to Mrs. Palfrey, including her in the group, a kindness Mrs. Palfrey never forgets.

Before she realises that visitors are a major topic of conversation, Mrs. Palfrey mentions that her nephew Desmond lives in London. When he doesn’t show up, Mrs. Arbuthnot and the others commiserate with her, something she cannot bear. When she encounters a young writer on one of her walks, Ludo, and repays his kindness by inviting him to dinner at the Claremont, she decides to pretend that he is Desmond.

The webs become ever more tangled, but–as with Anne Tyler–Elizabeth Taylor treats her characters with respect. She may invite us to laugh at them sometimes, but never loses sight of their essential goodness and the courage it takes to face a lonely and penurious old age. I found this novel satisfying and unexpectedly moving. I see that it was made into a film in 2005 and hope that I can find a copy.

What other once-famous writers can you recommend?