Bluebeards Egg

Rating:
Summary: Captivated by the Egg.
Review: In the car I always have an audiobook to listen to, and the last weeks I really have enjoyed Margareth Atwood's Bluebeard's Egg and other stories.

This is a collection of short stories written by a master of words, and a master of short stories. When Atwood writes she uses no extra words or sentences, she takes us right to the point, and the point in this collection is human beings. Common human beings fighting for their lives. No heros, just plain people like you and me. Every time a new story starts I think, this one cannot be better than the last, but it happend again and again, the story captivates me, and it is all mornings hard to stop the car and go to work - I want to hear just one more sentence, and then one more.

My favorite story though is the one that has given name to the collection, Bluebeard's Egg. A well known fairy tale, told and given it's own meaning by Atwood, or may be she just shows us the original meaning of the story. Sally, the main carachter of the story struggles with the puzzle of her life, to keep all the pieces together. The center of her life is her husband Ed, but how can she be sure that she is also the center in Ed's life? No one can write about this, invite us into and let us be in the feeling of the story like Atwood do.

Britt Arnhild Lindland

Rating:
Summary: Average Atwood
Review: No one will mistake Margaret Atwood for Alice Munro when it comes to short stories. Most of these stories are trifles. Atwood's tendency to be elliptical really gets in the way of any development. Her narrators seem to just be skimming the surface of life with little or no consequence of that. Only the stories "Bluebeard's Egg" and "Scarlet Ibis" really rise above the level of craft, particularly the former. I love the preciseness with which Atwood details feminine rivalry over men! Overall, a hodge-podge of "short fiction pieces," not short stories.

Rating:
Summary: Cracking the shell of the egg
Review: Upon reading the first few stories, in this collection, I tended to feel in keeping with some of the reviewers who intimated that the stories were lacking in complexity. However, as I began to probe further, and reread some of the stories, I realized just exactly what a genius Margaret Atwood is... Atwood's writing is a painful blend of the comical and horrific, much as life can be. These stories, some of them, made me cry with laughter. The recognition of some of my own inner demons was a little painful, but at least it was vicarious in nature. Such is the beauty of a story.

I found that the story "The Sunrise" was one of the most exquisite pieces of satire on the art process. As an artist bleeds themselves onto the page or the canvas, the public laps it up like starving vampires. Vicarioulsy. Sometimes the artist gives too much, more than they have to give, and then must seek out the inspiration, the muse, if you will, in someone else. Yvonne, the character here, states that she gave too much at one time. She used to be an artist's model. Now she has shut herself off, but she needs light and life, which she gets from painting unsuspecting humans, and basking in the sunlight. She's like a hothouse flower. She is an artificial creation which she presents to the world. Only she knows the real truth. If this is a collection of stories about the painful truths lurking behind people's hearts, here is the ultimate.

Atwood brilliantly satirizes the whole creative process when she says: "Though if art sucks and everything is only art, what has she done with her life?" The symbology throughout the story is one of blatant vampirism, which only the most obtuse could not see. The creation of art and the sordidness of the art world do suck life not only from the artist, but the viewer as well. Just as some of Yvonne's vitality goes into the young man's collage. Atwood says Yvonne will suck the blood of the tulip until it dies,and that she eats a portion of the souls of her sitters, i.e. her victims. Yes, as one reviewer says, the book is rife with symbology, or apparent symbology, symbols for the reader to do with as they will, instead of being spoon-fed.

She pokes fun at the reader and the critic,even before they would have had a chance to read this work, by making Yvonne the artist, a woman who paints phalluses. She pokes fun at how a phallus cannot be seen as a phallic symbol, because it IS phallic, in and of itself. Even the razor blade she calls a 'memento mori'.

The most exquisite satire comes early in the story, when she writes that it is boring to be characterized by what you paint. "There was one advantage though: people bought her paintings, though not for ultra-top prices, especially after magic realism came back in." If magic realism is the use of supernatural elements treated as if they were commonplace, and she is commenting on how boring it is to be taken so literally, to in essence, have no surprises for the audience, as well as making allusions to the whole vampire myth, then this is truly brilliant satire!

For those of us who get it, here is a treasure, a gem, that has to be dug for, not unlike buried treasure. The very thing which kills her artist's spirit, or cuts off her cash flow, is a renewed fascination on the part of the fickle audience with elements of the supernatural, the mythical, the mysterious, the inutitive. They want mystery and juxtaposed images that don't have meaning until you look under the surface. Like the young man's collages which drain her into them. It's too late for her to use that ploy herself, and she said so, earlier. For the ones who get it, Atwood seems to be slamming the critics right out of the starting gate. She's having the first laugh, and I think it is infinitely funny!