Negotiating With the Dead
By Margaret Atwood
Read: August 2009
Rating: Nonnegotiable
The whole time I was reading this I wondered why none of my writing classes assigned us to read it.
Margaret Atwood is one of the Big Ones. She’s made her mark on modern literature, and at least some of her books will still be considered worth reading and studying a century from now. My favorite is The Handmaid’s Tale and I want to give Oryx & Crake a second try sometime.
I bought Negotiating With the Dead at Shakespeare & Co. while on a quest for assigned reading. (Some of our teachers were too somethingorother to give business to the school B&N so they reserved our course materials at independent shops, no matter how inconvenient.) The hardcover was on sale, so I threw it on the pile. That was years ago, of course. When looking for the next bit of nonfiction to torture myself with this month, I chose this.
Please note that the book itself is not torture. My reading five nonfiction books in a row is.
The book is essentially an expanded version of the lecture series Atwood was asked to give at Cambridge in 2000. Each chapter is one lecture. The series focuses on what it is to be a writer. The mythic persona assigned to Writers (capital W), the double life this creates (the Writer vs the person leading a normal life), the Why of writing, the debate between Art For Art’s Sake and money. The final chapter explores the title of the book, theorizing that writing is a way of holding off death (legacy), and of communicating with the dead.
My attention was held in the beginning, but began to wane about halfway through. I sat up again for the last chapter, but was annoyed–that topic could easily be a tome all to itself.
Nevertheless, Atwood is an authoritative writer/lecturer and I have no doubt I would have been riveted in person. It’s a comfort to read her. She has no pretensions, and no false humility. She is genuine. She says things that one wishes other ‘important’ people would acknowledge. I enjoyed spending time with her. She should teach. She has a lot of insight to give. Here’s hoping she does more writing in this vein.
