The Tent

by ATWOOD, MARGARET

• ISBN13: 9781400097012
• ISBN10: 1400097010
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-05-08
• Publisher: Anchor

Summary

Margaret Atwood is one of the world's most esteemed authors, a writer of wide rangenovels, stories, essays, criticism. She now brings readers a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays punctuated with her own wonderful illustrations. Chilling and witty, these highly imaginative, Atwoodian pieces speak on a broad range of subjects, reflecting the times we live in with deadly accuracy and knife-edge precision. Herein Atwood gives a sly pep talk to the ambitious young; writes about the disconcerting experience of looking at old photos of ourselves; gives us Horatio's real views on Hamlet; and examines the boons and banes of orphanhood. "Bring Back Mom: An Invocation" explores what life was really like for the "perfect" homemakers of days gone by, and in "The Animals Reject Their Names," she runs history backward, with surprising results. Prescient and personal, delectable and tart,The Tentis vintage Atwood.

Author Biography

MARGARET ATWOOD’s books have been published in more than thirty-five countries. Her novels The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye were shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Blind Assassin was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000; Alias Grace won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; her most recent novel, Oryx and Crak,e was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Orange Prize. Atwood was the 2005 recipient of the Edinburgh International Book Festival Enlightenment Award, a unique accolade to mark a distinguished contribution to world literature and thought. She lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Table of Contents

Life Stories Clothing Dreams Bottle

Impenetrable Forest

Encouraging the Young Voice No More Photos

Orphan Stories Gateway

Bottle II

Winter’s Tales

It’s Not Easy Being Half-Divine

Salome Was a Dancer

Plots for Exotics Resources of the Ikarians Our Cat Enters Heaven

Chicken Little Goes Too Far

Thylacine Ragout The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins

Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon

Take Charge

Post-Colonial

Heritage House

Bring Back Mom: An Invocation

Horatio’s Version

King Log in Exile

Faster Eating the Birds

Something Has Happened Nightingale

Warlords The Tent

Time Folds

Tree Baby But It Could Still

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Life Stories

Why the hunger for these? If it is a hunger. Maybe it’s more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge, of the life, no matter who lived it.

It helps if there are photos. No more choices for the people in them — pick this one, dump that one. The livers of the lives in question had their chances, most of which they blew. They should have spotted the photographer in the bushes, they ­shouldn’t have chewed with their mouths open, they ­shouldn’t have worn the strapless top, they ­shouldn’t have yawned, they ­shouldn’t have laughed: so unattractive, the candid denture. So that’s what she looked like, we say, connecting the snapshot to the year of the torrid affair. Face like a half-­eaten pizza, and is that him, gaping down her front? What did he see in her, besides cheap lunch? He was already going bald. What was all the fuss about?

I’m working on my own life story. I ­don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.

I was born, I would have begun, once. But snip, snip, away go mother and father, white ribbons of paper blown by the wind, with grandparents tossed out for good measure. I spent my childhood. Enough of that as well. Goodbye dirty little dresses, goodbye scuffed shoes that caused me such anguish, goodbye well-­thumbed tears and scabby knees, and sadness worn at the edges.

Adolescence can be discarded too, with its salty tanned skin, its fecklessness and bad romance and leakages of seasonal blood. What was it like to breathe so heavily, as if drugged, while rubbing up against strange leather coats in alleyways? I ­can’t remember.

Once you get started it’s fun. So much free space opens up. Rip, crumple, up in flames, out the window. I was born, I grew up, I studied, I loved, I married, I procreated, I said, I wrote, all gone now. I went, I saw, I did. Farewell crumbling turrets of historic interest, farewell icebergs and war monuments, all those young stone men with eyes upturned, and risky voyages teeming with germs, and dubious hotels, and doorways opening both in and out. Farewell friends and lovers, you’ve slipped from view, erased, defaced: I know you once had hairdos and told jokes, but I ­can’t recall them. Into the ground with you, my tender fur-­brained cats and dogs, and horses and mice as well: I adored you, dozens of you, but what were your names?

I’m getting somewhere now, I’m feeling lighter. I’m coming unstuck from scrapbooks, from albums, from diaries and journals, from space, from time. Only a paragraph left, only a sentence or two, only a whisper.

I was born.
I was.
I.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from The Tent by Margaret Atwood
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.