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It is not usually {that a} guide evaluate of any variety threatens to be longer than the unique work. Any evaluate of Margaret Atwood’s Good Bones, nevertheless, dangers such ignominy. Good Bones, which could even have been efficiently entitled Naked Bones, isn’t just succinct: it’s brief. Ostensibly, it is a assortment of brief tales, however cowl to cowl there may be solely sufficient materials to maintain a decided reader completely happy for an hour or so, if the article is merely to cowl the bottom. If the article is to savour the fabric and comply with its concentrated lead, then there may even be a lifetime of involvement inside these few pages.

The tales function characters from fiction, from Classical fantasy, from folks tales and fairy tales, in addition to different, extra disparate sources. Margaret Atwood herself appears to determine right here and there as nicely. In each case, we see one thing acquainted from an uncommon perspective, factors of view that in each case take the reader without warning.

However there’s something far more arresting and shocking than the subject material, and that’s the varied varieties wherein these items are introduced. They’re all completely different, however none addresses its subject material by way of mere prose. And surprisingly, these are usually not poems both. They’re poetic, they usually really feel like they should be prose. They’re like sketches or verbal doodles and, as such, recurrently flit from one surprising flip to a different, equally unpredicted.

If these brief items had been footage, they might remind us of smaller canvases by Paul Klee, with their schematised line drawings, cartoon witticisms and the occasional joke tinged with nightmare. All through they might communicate of huge concepts that appear to underpin the content material, and that is communicated in concentrated kind, regardless of their small scale, rising by way of suggestion. And it’s absolutely their biting irony that concurrently arrests and entertains.

In some methods, these brief tales by Margaret Atwood, these prose poems-cum-doodles virtually represent a brand new literary kind, maybe doing for prose what haikus do for poetry. Each may have grow to be a novel, if Margaret Atwood had been fortunate sufficient to have had the luxurious of a number of lives to afford the time to assemble them. Learn them rapidly and the revisit them individually with extra time to spare. Their stature is small, however their rewards are nice.

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