Back from a work trip to Paris with Amanda. I liked these bookshelves I saw in Elle Deco magazine at lunch
I'm crazy about grey, right now. Anyway, not much conversation out of Amanda because she was absorbed in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace.
She finally finished it on the train home, and once I'd dragged her out of the afterword we had the following conversation:
Me: So what's it about?
Am: It's based on a true story of a woman accused and convicted of murder in Canada in the 1840s
Me: Sounds like a riot. Go on…
Am: Well, the author weaves in historical sources and quotes and the odd period illustration
Me: Still not really selling it to me.
Am: Ah, well it's just a really good story. A mystery. There are all sorts of contemporary elements. You get a real sense of the desperate situation of women of the time, how few choices they had, and the realities of their lives. All those moral codes that meant a woman couldn't make any decisions or shape her own destiny. Grace is an amazing character, very clear-sighted, intelligent. It's absolutely gripping. You never really do find out what happened, but somehow that doesn't really matter. And not nearly as tricky and difficult a read as I thought it would be, being a booker nominee and all.
So there you go. Highly recommended.
1 Comment
Since my rather bland account of Alias Grace to you, Kate, I have discussed it with my other book club and was astonished at quite how differently it was read by some of them. Was Grace abused and innocent – a naive victim of her circumstances and her times – or was she as guilty as all hell? Both interpretations are perfectly plausible. It’s a very very clever book: a light read but very darkly ambiguous. Definitely a good book club choice.