Margaret Atwood, more chef than seer

Margaret Atwood is 82 years old and the other day she posted a photo of herself on Twitter at the demonstration organized in Toronto in support of Ukraine.

One of the epithets that they have most often attributed to it is that of “seer”. But she, she no longer knows how to say it, she has never been a seer. In Burning issuesthe collection of his essays from 2004 to 2021 just released for Ponte alle Grazie (pp. 672, € 22.50; translated by Guido Calza), explains why, and does so by reflecting on The Handmaid’s Tale, the book released in 1985 and thirty years later became the banner of the so-called fourth wave of feminism. She writes: «In writing the book I had given myself a rule: do not insert any detail that humanity had not already put into practice. In other words, I couldn’t invent anything ».

More chef than seer, therefore, in the last 60 years of his career Atwood has managed, in novels, poems and essays, to put together pieces of reality, link them together and give them back to us with new meanings-flavors. A work for writers, not for fortune tellers.

In Burning issues the issues that, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have found in the newspapers and which we have debated on social networks are the hot ones: the climate crisis, the feminist question, democracy and despotism, the distribution of wealth.

Environmentalist since his parents brought it up in the woods of eastern Canada, without TV, but with books and nature at hand, already in 2006 in Wetlands he thundered: “How long will it take us to die boiled and asphyxiated?” Sometimes they accuse me of being too harsh. […] You have to be tough to wake up sleepwalkers in a trance. All of us would much rather be told that everything is fine, that the world is safe, that we are all good people and it is no one’s fault. […] The trouble is it’s not true. ‘

On her beloved science fiction, in which she is interested because of the intersection between “science” and “fiction”, she observes with insight: “Science deals with knowledge; fiction, on the other hand, deals with feelings. Science as such is not a person, and it doesn’t have a built-in value system any more than a toaster does. It is only a tool, a tool that allows us to realize our desires and to defend ourselves from what we fear, and like any other tool it can be used to do good or evil “. And she continues by drawing up an illuminating “partial” list of the desires of us humans, unchanged for millennia:

«We always want a wallet full of gold. We want the Fountain of Youth. We want to fly. We want a table that is filled with delicious food just to say so, and that afterwards clears itself up. We want invisible servants who never have to be paid. We want the seven league boots to be able to travel at great speed. We want the Invisibility Cloak to be able to spy on others without being seen. We want the weapon that never misses and that will annihilate the enemy. We want to punish injustices. We want power. We want thrill and adventure; we want protection and safety. We want to be immortal. We want a large number of attractive partners to have sex with. We want the people we love to reciprocate our love and be faithful to us. We want cute and intelligent children, who treat us with the respect we deserve and who don’t wreck our cars. We want to be surrounded by music, wonderful aromas and beautiful objects to look at. We don’t want to suffer from the heat. We don’t want to suffer from the cold. We want to dance. We want to drink a lot without the hangover. We want to talk to animals. We want to be envied. We want to look like the gods.

We want wisdom. We want hope. We want to be good. So, from time to time we tell each other stories about the darker side of all our other desires. ‘

Long, very long life to Margaret Atwood.