- Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Seal Books; 1st mmpb edition (Sep 11 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400025044
- ISBN-13: 978-1400025046
- Product Dimensions: 18.8 x 10.7 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 45 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #185,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Denaker's fine, deep voice and varied vocal range works particularly well with Atwood's sardonic humor. But her articulation is so perfect as to be disconcerting, often tossing impediments into Atwood's carefully wrought sentences. The first story begins with an elderly married couple, Tig and Nell, having breakfast and tea while discussing some horrific political murders occurring far away. This is the framework for the family stories to come. Nell's girlhood is dedicated to the tender care and feeding of her difficult sister. She perpetually struggles with the pleasure and resentment of her lifelong role as caregiver to her sister, Tig, his sons, his ex-wife and, finally, her own parents. Her life-like Atwood's book-is "a sock drawer into which a number of disparate things were shoved, a jumble." Apparently personal, perhaps even autobiographical, these stories are knit together by the "moral disorder" Atwood sees in everyone from one generation to the next.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
From Booklist
Atwood's brilliant and bracing novels appear apace, yet it's been 15 years since her last short story collection, Wilderness Tips. Atwood now returns to the form in a book of interconnected tales that span the life of a skeptical, stoic, book-loving woman named Nell. Swooping back and forth in time and mordantly assessing everything from fashion to the counterculture to real estate, Atwood touches down to illuminate Nell at age 11, knitting furiously while awaiting the arrival of an unexpected sibling. Lizzie turns out to be an exceedingly anxious child, and their exhausted mother leans too heavily on Nell for help. At once fascinated and repelled by the domestic arts, Nell strives to remain unencumbered during her sojourns as an "itinerate brain" at various universities, fending off married academics until she finally falls for one. Tig's dreadfully imperial wife, mother of his two sons, plagues them even after they flee to a farm, where Tig and Nell live in a fever of hard work and earthy sensuousness. Atwood's meticulous stories exert a powerful centrifugal force, pulling the reader into a whirl of droll cultural analysis and provocative emotional truths. Gimlet-eyed, gingery, and impishly funny, Atwood dissects the inexorable demands of family, the persistence of sexism, the siege of old age, and the complex temperaments of other species (the story about the gift horse is to die for). Shaped by a Darwinian perspective, political astuteness, autobiographical elements, and a profound trust in literature, Atwood's stories evoke humankind's disastrous hubris and phenomenal spirit with empathy and bemusement. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
atwood is never dull,
By lafleurpetite (canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Moral Disorder (Hardcover)
Related to this book and the protagonist in so many ways and on so many levels. Another great from the queen of fiction.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Atwood only gets better!,
By Mlle Fantine (Kingston, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Moral Disorder (Hardcover)
It is a real pleasure to see how Atwood's novels develop and change with times. Unlike many authors, she only gets better with each novel. Her novels are fresh, innovative and original. She is able to reinvent her fiction with each new publication, giving the reader something fresh, current and original with every new work. This collection of short stories is fabulous - Atwood at her best.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Strong Collection of Semi-Autobiographical Stories,
By
This review is from: Moral Disorder (Hardcover)
This collection of stories, Atwood's first since Bluebeard's Egg, is a solid, but not exceptional, work by Canada's most famous writer. Atwood is not as strong on literary craft as, for example, Alice Munro, who has also lately produced a collection of semi-autobiographical stories. Atwood has always been content to get across her ideas, which are central to her writing, and it is her ideas or "message" that tend to take precedence over craft. Even so, these stories are interesting and varied. Although it is risky to assume that the first person narrator can be equated to the author (this is generally not true, though the first person narrator is often quite similar to the author), one can certainly gain some insights into Atwood's experiences growing up with her father and mother and much younger sister from these stories. The first story is the only one that mentions the Roman Empire, and here the transition is a bit forced, although the point is well-taken (that our situation is comparable to life in the late Roman Empire). I was a little bothered by the way the two boys in the title story, "Moral Disorder"--the sons of Tig--are never given names or differentiated, not even once. They are always described as "the boys", as though they existed and acted like a single unit in the eyes of the narrator, Nell, and hence in the eyes of the author as well. But apart from these objections, the collection is an absorbing and worthwhile read.
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