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Re: Oryx and Crake
I finished Atwood's Oryx and Crake the other day, but I don't understand the hype. I know what Atwood was doing, because it was patently obvious and her pacing is okay. Her individual sentences and paragraphs and chapters are all very well, but sadly for me, they never come together in a narrative I care about at all. Very mild spoilers (in that I refer to what's basically the point of the book, obvious from the very beginning but, still) here...
I mean, she's got an unreliable narrator in Jimmy aka Snowman, and the book's basically Jimmy's life from childhood until middle age, when the book starts. He lives his life in proximity to Crake, who's the person who does things - Jimmy never really does. His purpose is to be a citizen who's just close enough to the major movers and shakers for you to get an idea of what life is like for a percentage of the population (and Atwood's somewhat lazy nomenclature for branding, which I found to be a combination of amusing and lazy - everything is literally named something like MissppelledCorpoBrand-DE-lux) as well as getting something of an inside look about why everything turned to shit. Crake's the guy that does things. Oryx is a beautiful plot-via-being sexually abused beautiful manic pixie dream sex slave, and she only shows up in the last 20% of the narrative as the bare-bones sexy lamp that she's presented as.
Just like Hunger Games, I read the book in good time and was mildly interested in it as it went by quickly, then when I put it down I just kind of felt, "Whelp, that was a book." Isn't that going to be most books, though? Even good books? I don't mind, I just don't have anything else to say about it besides that. It came initially well recommended and I read it for my book club, so.
I mean, she's got an unreliable narrator in Jimmy aka Snowman, and the book's basically Jimmy's life from childhood until middle age, when the book starts. He lives his life in proximity to Crake, who's the person who does things - Jimmy never really does. His purpose is to be a citizen who's just close enough to the major movers and shakers for you to get an idea of what life is like for a percentage of the population (and Atwood's somewhat lazy nomenclature for branding, which I found to be a combination of amusing and lazy - everything is literally named something like MissppelledCorpoBrand-DE-lux) as well as getting something of an inside look about why everything turned to shit. Crake's the guy that does things. Oryx is a beautiful plot-via-being sexually abused beautiful manic pixie dream sex slave, and she only shows up in the last 20% of the narrative as the bare-bones sexy lamp that she's presented as.
Just like Hunger Games, I read the book in good time and was mildly interested in it as it went by quickly, then when I put it down I just kind of felt, "Whelp, that was a book." Isn't that going to be most books, though? Even good books? I don't mind, I just don't have anything else to say about it besides that. It came initially well recommended and I read it for my book club, so.