"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum"

"Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it's this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people."

I'd forgotten just how good a novel Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' is. If you can set to one side the apparently inconsistent circumstantial details that occasionally render her vision of the future puzzling or even incoherent, it's evocative, poetic, horrifying, acid and beautifully written. And a damn sight better than the Harold Pinter scripted silver screen version, with its clumsy feminism, wooden acting, irredeemably goofy lines and gratuitous plot alterations. However, as this commentary suggests, there is a problem with the novel in the sense that its dystopian world seems to implicitly and contrastively endorse contemporary America as some sort of feminist utopia - and that's questionable, to say the very least.

Links:
An interview with Atwood about her novel.
Further links relating to Atwood and / or 'The Handmaid's Tale'.