Curious Pursuits is a collection of the ‘occasional writing’ of Margaret Atwood — essays, reviews, talks and introductions to books. Such rehashes often remind one of Juvenal’s adage that ‘twice-cooked cabbage is death’: it was, indeed, only as a fan of Margaret Atwood’s that I wanted to review this book at all, since it would give an excuse to write about her novels.
It turns out, however, to be hugely enjoyable in its own right. Curious Pursuits reminds one that Atwood is a superbly funny (as well as serious) writer: her wit is winningly relaxed and genial as well as sharp.
It is odd how often her humour is dis- regarded, particularly when she is routinely read in relation to the Women’s Movement. At the end of the Eighties, I found myself — after incautiously admitting in an examiners’ meeting that I had read all of her novels to date — marking batches of Tripos theses on Atwood. You would never have guessed, from those earnest indictments of patriarchy, that a joke ever flowed from her pen. But then humour notoriously eludes academic analysis, particularly of the type that needs to refer to Lacan’s concept of the phallus (then de rigueur, as the actress said to the bishop).
Margaret Atwood is a child of her times, of course; so there are plenty of women’s issues in her fiction, if that is what you are after. As she writes,
But she is a fine novelist precisely because she does not write about issues as such. As she says in this book, her subject is ‘individual characters interacting with and acted upon by the world that surrounds them’.the novel has its roots in mud, and part of the mud is history, and part of the history we’ve had recently is the history of the women’s movement.
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