Please write me a write up on personal odyssey of self. Not the book but an essay kind of thing
Answers
Answer:
Margaret Atwood: A personal odyssey and how she rewrote Homer
Odysseus we know - but who was Penelope? And who better to put flesh on that ghostly presence than Margaret Atwood? The novelist talks to Boyd Tonkin
Friday 28 October 2005 00:00
Culture > Books > Features
Margaret Atwood: A personal odyssey and how she rewrote Homer
Odysseus we know - but who was Penelope? And who better to put flesh on that ghostly presence than Margaret Atwood? The novelist talks to Boyd Tonkin
Friday 28 October 2005 00:00
Margaret Atwood: A personal odyssey and how she rewrote Homer
Predation and survival, the dance of the hunters and the hunted, runs like a red thread through the explorations of human nature, and non-human nature, that have made Atwood one of the most widely admired and avidly followed writers at work in the world today. Times are perennially tough in Atwood territory, with the graces of civilisation often a thin veneer waiting for a lethal crack from without - or, generally, from within. In 1972, her landmark guide to Canadian literature carried the title Survival; 30 years later, the harassed vagrant "Snowman" stumbled through a mutant-infested genetic wasteland left by ecological disaster and botched science in the novel Oryx and Crake.
This summer, the writer who recalls that "I spent a lot of my childhood without electricity" worked at an Inuit sewing, healing and literacy camp on the treeless side of the Canadian far north. These days, the polar bears in the region are hungrier than ever, "because of global warming. The
, and what to do next. And I slept like a baby in my tent, because I knew that they were standing guard, turn and turn about, all night."
Culture > Books > Features
Margaret Atwood: A personal odyssey and how she rewrote Homer
Odysseus we know - but who was Penelope? And who better to put flesh on that ghostly presence than Margaret Atwood? The novelist talks to Boyd Tonkin
Friday 28 October 2005 00:00
Margaret Atwood: A personal odyssey and how she rewrote Homer
Predation and survival, the dance of the hunters and the hunted, runs like a red thread through the explorations of human nature, and non-human nature, that have made Atwood one of the most widely admired and avidly followed writers at work in the world today. Times are perennially tough in Atwood territory, with the graces of civilisation often a thin veneer waiting for a lethal crack from without - or, generally, from within. In 1972, her landmark guide to Canadian literature carried the title Survival; 30 years later, the harassed vagrant "Snowman" stumbled through a mutant-infested genetic wasteland left by ecological disaster and botched science in the novel Oryx and Crake.
This summer, the writer who recalls that "I spent a lot of my childhood without electricity" worked at an Inuit sewing, healing and literacy camp on the treeless side of the Canadian far north. These days, the polar bears in the region are hungrier than ever, "because of global warming. The shore ice, which they usually go on to hunt seals - that's diminishing." So those ravenous predators approached the camp; not once, but five times. Luckily, "we had three excellent hunters with us. They simply knew how to chase off the bears, and what to do next. And I slept like a baby in my tent, because I knew that they were standing guard, turn and turn about, all night."
When Atwood surveys the wild and perilous pre-modern world of Homer and the Odyssey, as she does in The Penelopiad (Canongate), you feel that she can draw on more than merely the written sources. A famously supportive home life in Toronto for more than 30 years with the novelist and naturalist Graeme Gibson (they have a late-twenties daughter, Jess) is the base camp from which she treks out time and again into the artistic, the moral and - often enough - the actual wilderness. Atwood still thrives where Graham Greene yearned to patrol: on the dangerous edge of things.