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Tony Miksak
WORDS ON BOOKS by Tony Miksak for KZYX&Z-FM, 90.7 Philo CA
Airs Sunday, February 4, 2007 at 10:55 am, repeated Wednesday, Feb 7 at 1
pm
(copyright 2007 Tony Miksak)
Title: In the End, We'll All Become Stories
(MUSIC UP) This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books.
Lessee... where are my notes for "Moral Disorder" by Canadian author Margaret Atwood?
Ah, here they are. I can hardly read them. Shouldn't write in bed with a skipping pen.
"Highly recognizable." – what did I mean by that?
"Like a turning prism – the stories change when reread." Way too much red wine that night.
"BONELESS HEN FRUIT" (Canadian for chicken eggs).
"All this must really have happened."
What was I thinking?
Margaret Atwood is one of those reliable writers whose every book is a surprise worth reading. She never produces the kind of books you pick up and throw down because they are a) boring or b) not well written or c) through e), fill in the blanks for your own favorite disappointments.
You can depend on her to induce a wry smile, to toss off sharp insights and memorable sentences. She's a consummate craftswoman of words and structure.
For example, at the end of the story "White Horse" she suddenly shifts time by a decade or more. The effect is stunning, and sad.
A good writer eventually stands naked in front of her readers. Atwood exposes herself, certainly, but also shines a light on you, her witness. She's good at this.
She has flexibility and humor. Her writing is sharp as a tractor blade, approachable as a sleeping cat.
In "Moral Disorder" Atwood has written a novel in the form of short stories loosely related to each other. The chapters don't necessarily move chronologically, but overall they tell connected stories through a great deal of passing time: The romance of Nell and Tig, the fate of Nell's troubled sister, and Tig's troubled semi-ex-wife Oona, and their two sons; how Tig gets Nell to live on an old farm in northern Canada, how they move back to the city, and some people die, and some move on with their lives, and some don't.
Looking back, Atwood writes, "... Beards had sprouted, communes had sprung up, thin girls with long straight hair and no brassieres were everywhere. Sexual jealousy was like using the wrong fork, marriage was a joke, and those already married found their once-solid unions crumbling like defective stucco. You were supposed to hang loose, to collect experiences, to be a rolling stone."
There is more than a hint of self-description in these stories.
"... They lacked gravity. They wanted to live in the moment, but like frogs, not like wolves. They wanted to sit in the sun and blink. But I was raised in the age of strenuousness. Relaxation bored me."
Like some of her characters, Atwood is unrelenting in work. She is the author of more than forty books including novels, poetry, books for children and critical essays and she teaches. In 2000 she won the Booker Prize for "The Blind Assassin" after being short listed three times. Plus, she pens comics on her web page.
These final words from her story "The Entities":
(MUSIC) "All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same."
(MUSIC) You can subscribe to the email version of Words on Books by writing to amiksak@mcn.org. Transcripts are available on the KZYX web site.
Notes:
"Moral Disorder & Other Stories" by Margaret Atwood. Doubleday hardcover $23.95. ISBN 0385503849.
Forty books = 400 book signings, or more. No wonder Margaret Atwood invented a remote-control book signing pen: http://www.gadgetgrocer.com/content/view/22/2/
Her somewhat obscure home page: http://www.owtoad.com/
Wikipedia has the best short Atwood biography and numerous links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood
Tony Miksak
Bookseller Emeritus & member, Board of Directors, KZYX&Z
read "Words on Books" at www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/index.html
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