The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Robber Bride
Book Review: Intriguing but not Satisfying
Summary: 3 Stars
I liked this book because I found the story to be at once disturbing and intriguing. My main drawback, however, was the characters; all three of the main characters were extremely disappointing and irritating women. By the end of the book I found that I resented their stupidity and lack of intuition rather than sympathized with the extent to which their lives had been destroyed.Book Review: It's all very nice, but what does it mean?
Summary: 5 Stars
I think Margaret Atwood is at her best when she's writing walking train wrecks of people. Her ability to analyze a person even as she's taking their life apart piece by piece is second to none and part of the joy is watching her artful deconstruction, trying to guess what you're going to end up with when it's all over. It's not as exciting when she's already broken them down and she's showing us how they got to that point, although it still has its moments. This story tends to veer more toward the latter, although her way with prose makes up for any of the slower moments. In this tale, we have three friends, Tony, Roz and Charis who all stayed in the same dorm building in college but weren't really friends back then. What unites them and drives them into friendship is a common enemy, Zenia, another girl who lives in the same building and comes to know them separately. She torments each woman and then years later dies, until the day when they're all eating in a restaurant and Zenia walks right by. From there, we're launched into a series of flashbacks, centering on each individual woman and how Zenia entered her life, messed with it royally and left each woman to pick up the pieces. In the meantime we also get bits of each woman's early life and how it shaped them and perhaps allowed them to let Zenia just walk all over them. These are the meat of the story, where Atwood really shapes the characters, gives us their histories and takes them down the road where they all meet and become friends. At the center of each story, lurking there like some malevolent spider is Zenia herself, insinuating her way into their lives and then wrecking things as best she can, by not caring, by lying and deceiving and playing on their sympathies, using them until she doesn't need them anymore and then just walking away from the mess. Zenia is in fact so frightening that it almost becomes outlandish, she becomes less a woman than a force of nature, hardly believable as a real person, because she's so stunning and so confident and can just take whatever she wants . . . after a while it becomes almost unreal. Which is the point, since Zenia has had such an impact on the woman that they perceive her as something more than just a person, they build her up into this unstoppable wall of a woman, who just steamrolls over everything in her path because they perceive her as being so perfect that they're rendered paralyzed, letting her do whatever she wants. On the reader's end, you may find yourself saying "Yeah right" over the hundredth description of Zenia's awesome power, but in the context of the story it makes perfect sense. The flashbacks for each woman suffer a bit due to a structure that mimics all the others, in that each woman has a man close to her ruined by Zenia, stolen away and discarded, generally due to some lie that Zenia has told to get closer to the woman in question. Tony's flashback comes across as the most fully realized (she's the most stable), with Roz's as a close second and Charis' flaky New Age posturing getting a bit tedious after fifty pages of seeing auras and the like. After watching three flashbacks of Zenia essentially doing the same thing three times, while the other woman first convince themselves that everything is okay and then gradually realize that everything is very much not okay, you start to wonder where this is all going. The plot continues in the present day, as the ladies try to figure out why Zenia is back, leading to an interesting examination of the truth and an ending that you probably won't see coming but is inevitable nonetheless. Oddly enough, for all the jumping around the novel feels linear, where it succeeds is in Atwood's portrayal of Zenia, making her a different monster for every woman, just consistent enough that you know it's the same person each time but totally obscuring any kind of truth about her, leading the reader to make their own conclusions about her by contradicting every single fact about her until you have no idea what's true anymore. By the end the story is more about the examination of a friendship and how they tend to come from the oddest sources. Still, while Atwood's prose hits it usual high marks (her extended metaphors are still tops in contemporary literature) the characters don't feel as fully developed as they normally, or maybe I just can't emphasize with them (I may not be the target audience, although I guess that shouldn't matter) but they just seem silly in spots to me, making horrible decisions and being so blinded by Zenia that you wonder where their brains are. Most of the man don't come off too well either, whether it's by being uninteresting (West), a total jerk (Mitch) or just kind of taking up space (Larry, although he gets more interesting by the end). Couple that with the kids (Roz's twins, I'm sorry, I find them really annoying) and the only real standout character was Tony. Her scenes are the best written and the heart of the book seems to be there, with everything else simply being variations on a theme. Atwood gets credit for creating flawed characters but at some points they're so flawed you wonder how they function (especially when contrasted with the perfectness of Zenia) which may be what she's trying to display but even if she's right that doesn't mean I have to care. By the end I was sure she was trying to tell me something but I really don't know for sure what it was. That all truth and perception is illusionary and prone to interpretation? Who is Zenia? None of us can really say and Atwood dangles the clues without putting it together, a deliberate act on her part but one that leaves the reader kind of empty at the end, waiting for a real conclusion that will never come. Elegantly and flawlessly written, but lacking that bit of punch in the gut that come with her best books, it's not the best place to start but for longtime fans, you'll probably enjoy this just as much as the rest of her work.Book Review: Just the right touch of the mystical.
Summary: 5 Stars
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I thought it had a great balance between reality and fanatasy. I grew to love all of the women in this book. Even the "bad" one.Book Review: Let us all mourn Zenia
Summary: 5 Stars
I just wanted to throw in my two cents after reading some of the reviews, though I agree with what they all say I would add another interpretation as well. There is a tendency to buy the three women's viewpoints that paint themselves as good and Zenia as bad, but come on people how can you possibly "only" believe that after finishing the novel. Zenia doesn't even have to be read as a "real" character, she is everything these women both want to be and are unwilling to be gathered together into dark mystic proportions, it reads like an adult fairy tale(like a lot of her novels). All Zenia does is unravel what was never bound together. The women's relationships and self-deceptions are played with throughout the narrative and all three seem to teeter on the edge of self-knowledge but never quite make it. The great achievement of the novel is how it does show women's relationships without glossing over the shortcomings of each and in the end it is Zenia they are related too much more deeply then each other or their "men"Book Review: Longer than I thought it should be
Summary: 3 Stars
I read Handmaid's Tale, and enjoyed it, so I figured this would be along the same lines. Not EVEN the same kind of book!...there were only a few parts I found funny. I did think the book was long at times, especially the chapter describing Roz and her history. But, generally, it was a decent read.Zenia (the thief) is a very complex character, and chapters are spent describing how Zenia helped to destroy the 3 main characters' relationships (Roz, Charis, Tony). But, Zenia is never given her own chapter on why she feels like being this way. I think this is on purpose though; I think the book is really about women and "rebirth" throughout their lives - women coming to terms with loss and learning to let go. I'm surprised Oprah didn't pick this book!