There are three things that I noticed in this rereading of The Handmaid’s Tale. The use of time in the narrative. The importance of what is not said. The matter of world-building and perspective. In all three, readers are wholly engaged. Engaged in the use of time, in the
When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was a teenager. In a few years, I would start to keep records about my reading: a log and handwritten (or typed( passages that I favoured along the way. The log in a notebook (usually practical rather than pretty) and the
Ian Williams landed in my stack with his longlisting for the ReLit Award in 2011. This is why I read prizelists: they encourage me to read in different directions, when left to my own devices, I sometimes plod along, in familiar reading territory, simply out of habit. The title
"Who is Robertson Davies? It's a fair question." This is how Val Ross opens her review in The Globe & Mail on September 28, 1991. "After all, she continues, "Davies begins most of his novels with a question or a mystery, including the latest,
In Iris Murdoch’s Henry and Cato (1976), Henry Marshalson inherits the family estate when his brother Sandy dies. Henry returns to the home where his mother Gerda still lives, with her kinda-sycophantic admirer, Lucius. Cato lives nearby. So does Colette. Stephanie does not, but, because of her pre-existing
