Graphic novel, 240 pages
Published March 26, 2019
Everything Handmaids wear is red: the colour of blood, which defines us.
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships. She serves in the household of the Commander and his wife, and under the new social order she has only one purpose: once a month, she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if they are fertile. But Offred remembers the years before Gilead, when she was an independent woman who had a job, a family, and a name of her own. Now, her memories and her will to survive are acts of rebellion.
Provocative, startling, prophetic, The Handmaid's Tale has long been a global phenomenon. With this stunning graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood's modern classic, …
Everything Handmaids wear is red: the colour of blood, which defines us.
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships. She serves in the household of the Commander and his wife, and under the new social order she has only one purpose: once a month, she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if they are fertile. But Offred remembers the years before Gilead, when she was an independent woman who had a job, a family, and a name of her own. Now, her memories and her will to survive are acts of rebellion.
Provocative, startling, prophetic, The Handmaid's Tale has long been a global phenomenon. With this stunning graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood's modern classic, beautifully realized by artist Renée Nault, the terrifying reality of Gilead has been brought to vivid life like never before.
I absolutely detested the hilariously artificial prose and the story barely held my attention. Also, worldbuilding was wholly superficial. I simultaneously felt the author was spending too much time describing boring shit and that she was not explaining anything at all. Fuck me, I never learn to not expect anything from these types of books.
The Handmaid's Tale tells a story of Offred, a handmaid during the oppressive, misogynistic regime of The Republic of Gilead .
Margaret Atwood has orchestrated a horrifying dystopia, one which even the most extreme anti-feminist couldn't imagine.
The story deserves a 5/5, because of the set up, the emotions, and the idea behind it
1.5*
Unpopular opinion: this book is not good. I trudged through and kept hoping it would get better. After many false starts, it was over. I'll attempt to read her other works. I've heard too many good things. But, I'm nervous. 😨
One of the best elements of compelling dystopia is imagining how circumstances might evolve from reality to the fiction at hand. You end up finding the elements that the author believes are dangerous about the real world, or think would sustain an authoritarian system. The Handmaiden's tale is first about women, and how men might respond to a world in which fertility has become a priceless commodity. It's also about how authoritarian regimes sustain themselves, and that I thought was particularly telling and poignant. The state in the Handmaid's tale is not as omnipresent as it is in, say, 1984. It works largely through social hierarchies of control, men ruling a household, women achieving status through the men and regulating the behavior of women beneath them, and finally, through fear, the individuals regulating themselves. I thought the main character's navigating her place at the bottom of the elite hierarchy was …
One of the best elements of compelling dystopia is imagining how circumstances might evolve from reality to the fiction at hand. You end up finding the elements that the author believes are dangerous about the real world, or think would sustain an authoritarian system. The Handmaiden's tale is first about women, and how men might respond to a world in which fertility has become a priceless commodity. It's also about how authoritarian regimes sustain themselves, and that I thought was particularly telling and poignant. The state in the Handmaid's tale is not as omnipresent as it is in, say, 1984. It works largely through social hierarchies of control, men ruling a household, women achieving status through the men and regulating the behavior of women beneath them, and finally, through fear, the individuals regulating themselves. I thought the main character's navigating her place at the bottom of the elite hierarchy was very compelling, and thought it emphasized for me about how repressive systems can exert control on individuals without the need for guns and armor on every street corner.
The ending was particularly satisfying. There is an afterward that many of the disparate elements of the story together into something cohesive, but it doesn't answer all the questions. I liked that. So much of a good story is trying to see around the corners where the author hasn't written anything, and to have these guesses resolved is very satisfying. But Atwood doesn't wrap it all up - she resolves many of the questions, and then dangles a few more as loose ends that will never be resolved. This is how it should be.
I'm a wee bit disappointed with this book, such a brutal vision of the future and yet the way it was written creates quite a dull experience. There is too much back and forth between timelines, just as things start to pick up the timeline jumps and you gotta get into it again.
The interesting thing about this story is nothing is imagined, at some point in history there have been similar events, I am assuming here that the bible is real (which of course it most definitely is). And now with Trump getting into power and his opinion of women and the gap between the wealthy and the poor, are we heading towards a similar future?
The ending of the book was very clever and it saves the book a bit, a bit more focus and I would have enjoyed this more. Not to see the TV series.
Tja. Zuviel an der Geschichte ist dystopisch, weil es einer weißen middle class Frau passiert? In der Hinsicht: Aneignung der Kämpfe anderer, um es so richtig schön gruselig für Gabi oder Lotta zu machen. Siehe "Underground Femaleroad (srsly?). Ich fand manches super realistisch (die Unfähigkeit zu handeln, das Gefühl, man hat sich was erarbeitet und will jetzt gar nicht mehr soviel ändern oder beim Widerstand kämpfen). Der Fundamentalismus ist realiatisch, genauso die Unfähigkeit männlicher "Allies" die Lage der Frauen konkret einzuschätzen oder gar, wenn sie deren Wut zu kontrollieren versuchen mit : "Ich bin doch noch da, unsere Liebe überwindet das bla" Andererseits: Was war mit den Schwarzen Frauen im Buch, wieso waren die nur "Marthas", in welcher Hinsicht wurde kein bisschen Widerstand ihrerseits gezeigt? Du nennst deinen Heldinnenfluchtweg "The Underground Femaleroad" und gibst Schwarzen Frauen kein bisschen interessante Story? Zu traurig.
A brilliant and dark story of a fictional patriarchal society that envelops the fears of 1980s youth alongside the dangers of fundamentalism. Brilliantly written throughout, but let down by the last chapter, which really did not need to appear in the book and offers nothing.
It was interesting to read this so soon after The End of the Affair, just for how each had me pondering the sometimes conflicting goals of romance and religion.
