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A review by ozuzo
Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood
5.0
Heel fijne verhalenbundel, waarbij de meeste verhalen gaan over Tig en Nell, een ouder echtpaar dat wat aanrommelt in hun tweede huisje, en waar Nell terugblikt op hun leven (voor en na de dood van Tig).
"Nell got out the bottle of carpet cleaner and sprayed the blood spots: they would be much harder to get out once they’d dried. Then she wiped the blood off the kitchen floor and, after a pause, off the carrot. It was a perfectly good carrot; no need for it to go to waste."
"The people who made the croissant have evidently never seen a real one, Nell thinks, chewing. Flaky, not doughy, she broadcasts to them silently, whoever they are. What if she could have control over one of the frog-mouth portals and drop things into it? Away would go all the bad croissants.
"Nell got out the bottle of carpet cleaner and sprayed the blood spots: they would be much harder to get out once they’d dried. Then she wiped the blood off the kitchen floor and, after a pause, off the carrot. It was a perfectly good carrot; no need for it to go to waste."
"The people who made the croissant have evidently never seen a real one, Nell thinks, chewing. Flaky, not doughy, she broadcasts to them silently, whoever they are. What if she could have control over one of the frog-mouth portals and drop things into it? Away would go all the bad croissants.
Tig would just have thrown this doughy croissant out. Why eat food if you disapprove of it? he’d say. If you don’t like the road, don’t go. He’d laughed at her for being so frugal. I’m fighting waste, she’d say. Which was ridiculous: Why was it less wasteful for a croissant to go through her digestive system than through the compost pile? It was not. "
De rest van de verhalen zijn een stuk minder conventioneel: van een soort-van sprookje over een moeder die (alleen zegt?) een heks te zijn, via een alien die een groep mensen probeert te kalmeren, Hypatia die op haar (gruwelijke) dood terugblikt, tot de belevenissen van een slak die opeens gereincarneerd is tot een wat saaie bankbediende...
"She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighbourhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group."
"Yes, I know I look like what you call an octopus, little young entity. I have seen pictures of these amicable beings. If the way I appear truly disturbs you, you may close your eyes. It would allow you to pay better attention to the story, in any case. "
"Oh, and my eyes were gouged out, whether before or after I was dead I am not entirely sure. By that time I was watching from a location near the ceiling, so I was probably dead. But there was such an uproar going on during the eye-gouging—such fervour, such zeal, such impatience to be in on it—that I was not able to get a clear view.
In your day they would have taken pictures with their phone cameras: posing and holding up their scarlet clamshells. I am up to date on the latest technologies and practices, as you can see. They would have taken videos of my eyes coming out. One of the gentlemen threw them onto the floor and stepped on them. I was sad about that. I had enjoyed my eyes, they had helped me to observe the heavens, to chart the pathways of the divine spheres. “Goodbye, dear eyes,” I whispered. "