IN OTHER WORDS BURNING QUESTIONS: ESSAYS AND OCCASIONAL PIECES, 2004 TO 2021 by Margaret Atwood, Doubleday, 496 pages, $30
popular seer figure; despite the sci-fi trappings of some of her books, she seems to discern the world as it really is. About many things, she’s been right. Readers’ enjoyment of Burning Questions may be Charles Arrowsmith I Special to The Washington Post proportional to the pleasure they take in Atwood’s Burning Questions is a canny title for Margaret Atwood’s cozy, twinkling tone. She can’t resist an amusing new book of essays and occasional pieces. It reflects simile; she’s fond of appearing absent-minded; she’s both the urgency of the issues dear to her — literature, self-effacing. This can become grating. Anyone feminism, the environment, human rights — and their who’s won as many prizes and sold as many books combustibility, the risk that in writing about them she as Atwood runs the risk of false modesty calling might get burned. themselves “a mere scribbler ... a ferreter into matters Though she wryly self-defines as a “supposedly about which I don’t know very much.” There’s somerevered elderly icon or scar y times condescension in it; in one witchy granny figure,” Atwood, essay, she adopts an alien persona now in the seventh decade of to show “earthlings” how to avoid her colossally successful literary totalitarianism — not cute. career, can still rile and inspire. Nevertheless, the book’s scope She trends not infrequently on a nd t he per spic acit y of her Twitter, where she has over 2 writing evince the reading and million followers. Hulu’s adaptathinking of a long life well lived. tion of her novel The Handmaid’s There are some good axioms Tale is a touchstone in the fight worth repeating: “It is one of the for women’s reproductive rights functions of ‘horror’ writing to as well as the object of criticism question the reality of unreality regarding its intersectional failand the unreality of reality.” “Each ings. And a recent interview with of our technologies is a two-edged Hadley Freeman in the Guardian sword. One edge slices the way has reignited the firestorm over we want it to, the other edge cuts where Atwood stands in the culour fingers.” She writes about an ture-war scrap over trans rights astonishing array of things: trees, — a painful divide in contempozombies, nursing, censorship, rary feminism. #MeToo. She appraises writers There aren’t always clear answers as varied as Rachel Carson, W.G. Atwood has become a in Burning Questions; indeed, Sebald, Alice Munro, and Stephen Atwood points out that essays are popular seer figure; despite the King. She enjoyed Kung Fu Panda. really just “attempts” at answers sci-fi trappings of some of her Range isn’t a problem. and that they aren’t necessarily all But some pieces feel dashed books, she seems to discern that anyway. “Fiction writers are off. She pads and digresses; what particularly suspect because they the world as it really is. About could be a sentence becomes a write about human beings, and many things, she’s been right. paragraph. Clumsy coinages feel people are morally ambiguous,” like placeholder words — calling she notes. “The aim of ideology is the death of Tiny Tim “weepto eliminate ambiguity.” Although making,” for instance. And some this volume is squarely on the nonfiction shelf, it pieces smell like early drafts — a few pages apart, shares her novels’ aversion to absolutes. These 65 short both Shakespeare and his plays are described as being pieces are liberally punctuated with question marks. slippery as eels. Read them and you will probably be struck by how This may be forgivable, or inevitable, given the sensible and moderate Atwood is. To criticize our demands on Atwood’s time. In a humorous short “fantasies of endlessness” as climate change becomes essay titled “A Writing Life,” she lists things that have ever more visible is scarcely controversial. To argue recently made it difficult for her to write, by the end of that “the hard-won rights for women and girls that which one realizes that the whole article is a smokemany of us now take for granted could be snatched screen for its own execution. By her testimony, she’s away at any moment” seems incontestable after the averaged 40 pieces a year for the past two decades, passage of the “Texas Heartbeat Act.” Many readers which means the 65 selected here were chosen from nowadays will agree that The Handmaid’s Tale is not more than 700 candidates. In that time, she’s also specifically “a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as published half a dozen novels, a couple of short story giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always collections, and two books of poetry. be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women What’s lost in polish is perhaps compensated by ought not to have these things.” As the world has the impression of direct access to her thinking and caught up with her work, Atwood has become a feeling. “Wonderful Doris Lessing has died” is a
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PASATIEMPO I March 11-17, 2022
striking example of an opener that captures both the spontaneity of the commission and authentic emotion. Atwood lamented, in an earlier collection, that “the book review leans a little toward Consumer Reports,” and indeed this word limit permits only an outline of what makes Burning Questions both stimulating and frustrating. It’s certainly a dipper rather than a straight-through read. But it’s a foolish reader who fails to seek the flashes of brilliance and insight that glint amid the more workaday pieces. ◀
GLORY by NoViolet Bulawayo, Viking, 400 pages, $27 Jake Cline I Special to The Washington Post In NoViolet Bulawayo’s new novel, Glory, a nation riven by decades of autocratic rule finds itself dividing once again. Seeking “to forget the screaming in their heads,” the citizens of Jidada flock to the Internet. Safe inside this “Other Country,” they rage against their government in ways that would be unthinkable in the physical “Country Country,” where cancellation is truly final. The gulf between the world as it is and the world as it could be is as wide in Bulawayo’s novel as it is outside it. The actions depicted in the book are so familiar, the events so recognizable, the pain so acute, it’s easy to see how Glory began as a work of nonfiction. That the characters are animals — furred, feathered, scaled, and all — is almost incidental. In a note to readers accompanying pre-publication copies of her book, Bulawayo reports that before writing Glory, she had been at work on a nonfiction account of the 2017 coup that ended Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s oppressive 37-year reign. The 93-year-old strongman’s replacement was Emmerson Mnangagwa, the 75-year-old vice president whom Mugabe fired in one of his last acts as head of state. Mnangagwa, a former military leader with an allegedly brutal history and a vicious nickname, the Crocodile, won the presidency by a narrow margin in 2018. Mugabe died the following year. Glory repeats this story almost as it happened. In Bulawayo’s telling, however, Jidada’s deposed autocrat is an elderly stallion long known as Father of the Nation but now derided as Old Horse. Following a bloodless coup staged by the nation’s canine military, the Father’s vice president and fellow old horse, Tuvius Delight Shasha, returns from a brief exile with promises of “a new dawn, a new season, a New Dispensation.” Tuvy, as he’s called, vows to make Jidada “great again.” In no time, he acquires a cultlike following, a new nickname (the Savior), and a reputation for megalomania, misogyny, and corruption that surpasses that of his predecessor. An expected chain of absurdities follows. That is not a knock on Bulawayo’s storytelling gifts, which
