81. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale (402; 1985) is an imaginative dystopian about a fictional world; a place where all rhetorics about women's place in the world are realised. It is also a world that has been lived before. In this novel, Atwood relied on all that had been said and is being said about women and what they should and shouldn't do. In the fictional world of Gilead, the constitutional government of the United States had been overthrown; its place place taken by Gilead, a state based on the Christian teachings and its purpose for women.

In Gilead women are grouped into Wives, Marthas, Aunties, and Handmaids. Handmaids are reproductive 'machines' that keep the population of Gilead from declining. And children are the most prized assets of the day. Rich couples unable to bear their own children contract these handmaids to get pregnant for them. A Handmaid who's unable to get pregnant after several 'servicing' with Commanders are described as unwomen. These unwomen are sent to other parts of the colony.

Offred, the narrator of this story, was a handmaid. She tells of her life as a handmaid and what she went through. It was almost like diary entries, written not to be read by none so that most things are not described detailedly. The reader sometimes feel like the cover was half-closed instead of half-opened. If it were a pot, one would have stretched one's neck to take a full look into it; but this wasn't so. However, in Offred's (or Of Fred) tale, she contrast life in this utopian turned dystopian regime with her life in the earlier period where all things were working well and women had the opportunity to do whatever they wanted to do; where there were women's movement, of which her mother was one, which fought for the rights of women. Like every strictly managed society, there were saboteurs and those unwilling to fit in Gilead, individuals working to bring down the Theocratic state, which itself wasn't theocratic to the core. For though micro- and mini-clothings have been banned and uniforms have been prescribed, prostitution and drugs have all been superficially eliminated, there was a building within which all of these are done with abandon, by the very Commanders who instituted Gilead. Amongst such 'unwilling' individuals was Moira.

Offred's Commander seemed to have some love for past things as 'love' and 'scrabble'. In Gilead, love is not the key. Women function. Men function. Love is not something you fall in in Gilead. However, this primordial emotion awakened itself within Offred's Commander, and most of the commanders for that matter, and as told, unreliably though, by Offred, the commander began showing some levels of love to her during their secret scrabble games. Offred's narration could not be fully reliable as she herself sometimes say one thing only to tell us that it wasn't true, it didn't happen that way. But we can be sure that the glimpses she offered us, which were not reliable, were the watered down versions. The real deal were more macabre. 

Atwood dispassionately wrote this novel and it was difficult to see where she actually stands in this grand scheme. Does she incline towards the period before or the current period or a bit of both; for, in writing, she brought the good and the bad from each side. There were, superficially, no drugs, stealing or any form of blatant crime on the streets of Gilead. It was a peaceful place though the internally, within the people, there was chaos in the first generation of Gileads. Individuals missed the things they were, in the previous period, most likely to term immoral and also of things most likely to be ignored or glossed over. Like women magazines, like lipsticks, like prostitutes and more. However, even though naturally the puritanic ideology of Gilead failed, Atwood, nevertheless, showed how people conditioned themselves to live in such conditions. Later, in the historical notes, where the major impact of the story is felt, Gilead becomes just one of the many past civilisations: Mayans, Aztecs, Hittites and many others. 

Is this world the best it can possibly be? In Atwood's Handmaid's Tale where the issue was fully implemented, tweaking the current dispensation would lead to problems; just as capitalists don't want governments to interfere with business. Academicians studying Gilead, several years later, provided interesting analysis and it is there that story finally converges.

Though this novel is said to have been inspired by Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and also set to have no mean a place beside Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984, I can only say that this novel is Atwood-esque. It had all the characteristics of the only Atwood I have read, Oryx and Crake. The time difference between the books was palpable but taking this out, we see Atwood projecting before us, the very things we have been experimenting and preaching. Whereas in Oryx and Crake it was the scientific world doing all these splicing of genes to create a better world - that novel inspired my poem Middle Sex - in The Handmaid's Tale, it is the religious world or specifically the Christian world. Again, these two books illuminates the age-old rivalry-cum-love affair between science and religion.

In the end I can only say that I enjoyed reading this book. It helped me a lot on my trips to different communities. Sometimes reading this imaginative world and entering a rural community where pastoral life is dominant is almost akin to landing on Mars blindfolded. An interesting book. All should read especially those who think they need to change the world to conform to a universalised law in a homogeneous world. And the changemakers. This is an Atwood and every Atwood is a must-read.
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For the Top 100 Books Reading Challenge

37-39. Non-African Books I have Read this Year

This blog is aimed at promoting African Literature. Consequently, all interviews, reviews, events, and profiles concern African authors, published or unpublished. However, a suggestion was made that once a while I let others in on non-African authored books I have been reading and so to resolve this, I tried conducting a poll. Unfortunately, the question got lost in the dark background of the blog and there was no way I could edit it.

What I am doing today is to also solicit your views concerning the inclusion of non-African authored books. The reasoning behind this blog is simple. I have read a lot of book blogs and almost always, about ninety-nine percent of what they read, reviewed or talked about were Western books. Only a few book bloggers profiled  authored by Africans and even then the usual authors comprising Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ben Okri and recently Chimamanda were the most discussed books. So I decided to use this blog to fill that gap, blogging for a niche readers, those ready to know about Africa's literary folks, up and coming and those already established.

Initially, I was scared of not having much to talk about. And I am glad to say that I was wrong to be scared. New books are published on daily basis by Africans, and if one wants to talk about then, one would publish a blog a day. However, like most of you, I also keep a 8am to 5pm job; hence my inability to reach out fully.

So for those who want to know what I do read in addition my African books, today I present those non-African authored books I have read this year, not much though considering the fact that my readings this year has severely been affected. Last year September I read 8 books, whilst keeping an 8-5 job; this year I have read only two or three. However, this post would not be frequent because I don't want to risk populating this blog with non-African authored books; I don't want to fall under the Western literature spell; I don't want to lose sight of my vision for this blog. So books presented here would not be reviewed, I would only talk about them. Matter of semantics? Wait and see!

99. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

My followers on twitter would know how much I loved this book. The simple reason is that I enjoyed the vision of Atwood and it reflected mine. I have always talked to friends about my fear of Science. Not as a subject but the misapplication of its boundary-pushing researches and findings. Like nanotechnology, like artificial intelligence, like anti-matter, like DNA splicing and many others. I am afraid that humans would be the cause of their own extinction and that if I were God, I would create no Hell for man, with time, would annihilate itself. We are more than capable. What haven't we done with the Nuclear bombs? Baghdad, Kabul, Vietnam, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are all there for us to see.

100. Possession by A.S. Byatt
This book was too academic and again, my followers on facebook and twitter would know that I abandoned this book and picked it up again. Its abandonment is not a result of disinterest but the difficulty in penetrating certain sections. The overall story is interesting, yet it is too academic and draws a lot of attention to the writer. It makes you always realise that there is someone writing something. Besides, I didn't like the small fonts. It makes reading tedious. What about the reading of long diary entries? I hated them. Sometimes you lost yourself. The poems were way beyond my comprehension. However, I love the use of diary entries in the telling of the lives of Randolph Ash and Christian Lamotte and the parallels it draws with Roland and Maud. Byatt reached for much and came with a work too academic. Yet, I rushed to look for Randolph Ash only to realise that it is a fictional creation of Byatt. Why wouldn't I congratulate her then?

101. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

Alright so this is the last of Naipaul's books I would ever read and thank God I have none unread in my shelf. The other only other book I read was A Bend in the River. This book is dystopian; very depressing. I wonder how fun could be created from a life so dejected. What I never understood was how Mr. Biswas couldn't make himself happy from the academic performance of Anand. The character of Mr. Biswas is one of depression filled with the I-can-do-nothing behaviour. Always blaming someone. I think his wife was also too attached to her parents; never wanting anything his other sisters don't yet have. Everything Mr. Biswas tried doing was causing her shame, especially if her other sisters don't already have it. I was bored to the core. I really didn't like any of them but I sympathised most often with Mr. Biswas. I also like his gradual upgrade in life and had it not been his fear of absolute progress, partially fortified and entrenched by Shama, his wife, he would have made a big impact. And for him to die shows the extent of Naipaul's love for depression. 

Dear readers, kindly let me know what you think: Should this be a quarterly affair or should I drop it?