Just because Canadian writer Margaret Atwood is wearing rose-colored glasses on the cover of her latest essay, titled burning questions, that she approaches with naivety and lightness the social phenomena that surround her. On the contrary, the author of The Scarlet Maid (1985) instead offers a collection of stimulating texts rich in reflections on his vision of the world, with a focus on his infinite passion for literature.
Spread over almost twenty years, from 2004 to 2021, the anthological work – which brings together articles, prefaces, personal accounts, critical texts and conferences – addresses many topical issues ranging from culture to the climate crisis, to to the recent rise of religious extremism and fascistic ideologies, particularly in the United States in the era of Trumpism. “On a scale of 1 to 100, Donald Trump’s interest in the arts falls somewhere between zero and minus ten,” she writes. The times are serious, underlines moreover Atwood, who observes that “everything changed” after the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Through false digressions, fashion or Parisian snobbery, Atwood returns to the place of women in societies ruled by men, a leitmotif that embraces in one way or another all of his works. While signing a magnificent compendium of the history of feminism, from suffragettes to the modern era, she published her famous controversial article “Am I a bad feminist? », published in 2018 in the pages of Globe and Mail where she denounces the “excesses of #MeToo”.
Divided into five parts, the collection is sometimes not lacking in humour, like Margaret Atwood herself, an erudite lady of letters with a lively and facetious mind. In the range of subjects covered, literature takes a large place, in particular through mentions of authors she admires, such as Franz Kafka, Simone de Beauvoir, George Orwell, Gabrielle Roy, Karen Blixen and many others. On the writer Stephen King, whom she invites to read Doctor SleepFollowing shiningshe says he is “a pro” and “an excellent guide to the Underworld”.
The rise of poverty
The 83-year-old writer and intellectual is worried about the rise in poverty, and at the same time meditates on the place of art in a surviving and increasingly unequal planet. What is the role of the writer in the face of the ecological issues facing societies?, asks Atwood, for example, in the excellent chapter devoted to literature and the environment, to which she responds with implacable logic that “without the ‘environment’ — the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat — there would be no literature at all”. Despite the many threats, Atwood nevertheless mentions that the art of writing has the power to imagine futures in the realm of possibility. It is up to us to choose the path we want to take.