The Testaments [2019]
By Margaret Atwood
Winner of Booker Prize 2019 🎉🎯
Rating : 5/5 🤓
350 pages [Kindle Digital Edition]
Genres : Hypothetical Fiction, Dystopian future, Booker Prize, Fiction, 2022-read
This book is a sequel to Atwood's The Handmaids Tale [1985] written 35 years ago and it was/is one of the best dystopian books ever written. It is also one of her best books till date. It has made huge splash waves as a TV series too. 🤘
For crying out loud, this book is too damn good! Like a trickle of never ending water, Atwood keeps throwing humorous witticisms and mind blowing philosophical insights at the reader .. while wondering if there will ever be a reader .. lol, her books not having an audience?! In what world, pray tell me? 😝
Hmm .. Atwood has become my newest favorite author. No one and no incident escapes her critical eye. I was shaking with laughter at her silent, biting remarks through out the book .. which never missed her target. Although she comes off as a feminist most of the time, even women don't win her approval easily. She has a gift of deep and unadulterated astuteness and way of looking at things that is hard to be knocked aside as trivial. 😇
Gilead is this hypothetical country bordering Canada where the military has usurped power by overthrowing the lawful government and established a rule of absolute patriarchy. Men and women are to have separate spheres of existence. Men use their physical and mental strengths while women are good for what they are made for. To make loyal, devoted wives or handmaids(child bearing devices) or marthas(house help) or Aunts(leaders of the women sphere). Commander Judd is the most powerful of all the people post the military take over and he is the core founder of the establishment. He has run through a series of really young wives who have failed to produce him an heir/child and been mysteriously gotten rid of. Not much of the book is devoted to describing him other than his actions exposing an authoritarian nature and how dangerous it would prove from someone to cross him. Aunt Lydia is a remarkable lady leading the women's sphere .. a very cunning and masterful lady .. uses her knowledge and cat like tactics when she wants to twist and turn others according to her fancy and need. Its a subtle war between these two powerful people .. yet who has absolute power? Commander Judd or Aunt Lydia ?
This book/plot deals with a subject of a serious purport .. how a dystopian, authoritarian rule in Gilead is brought down from within by a master brain and iron lady Aunt Lydia with the help of two young girls. Despite that, it is the stroke of Atwood's literary genius that she made this a fun read and at times even makes us forget the intensity of the mission on which these women have staked their lives. Aunt Lydia is one freaking hell of a woman .. she might become one of my all time favorite characters. None of the aunts could outsmart her. Commander Judd .. she very masterfully decoys most of the time beguiling him with her pretense and act without revealing her true intentions. She has amassed damaging information about all the commanders and aunts in power through years of complicity and silence .. has planned, plotted/schemed, arranged for everything the two young accomplices of hers will have to do in order to expose this data to the world outside. This is a case of destruction of a totalitarian system of government from within and without. She herself becomes a sacrificial meal in the ploy to restore a normal government and attains a "God" like status later on. If someone could have salvaged the sinking place the Gilead has become, it is most definitely someone with her brains, temperament and convictions about right vs wrong .. even while she has remained on the side of wrong from the outside, she has remained on the right side within herself. :)
Loved the book like all her books. Atwood is a terrific author, writer and her imagination has its concrete foundation that does not fail when it soars high and sees no limits. 💖💖
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