Old Babes in the Wood | Atwood, Margaret

Lange Beschreibung
NATIONAL BESTSELLER   From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, a dazzling collection of short stories that look deeply into the heart of family relationships, marriage, loss and memory, and what it means to spend a life together

'If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together. You ve been missing out. The New York Times Book Review, Rebecca Makkai, best-selling author of The Great Believers

Margaret Atwood has established herself as one of the most visionary and canonical authors in the world. This collection of fifteen extraordinary stories some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine explore the full warp and weft of experience, speaking to our unique times with Atwood s characteristic insight, wit and intellect. 

The two intrepid sisters of the title story grapple with loss and memory on a perfect summer evening; Impatient Griselda explores alienation and miscommunication with a fresh twist on a folkloric classic; and My Evil Mother touches on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. At the heart of the collection are seven extraordinary stories that follow a married couple across the decades, the moments big and small that make up a long life of uncommon love and what comes after.

Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection Stone Mattress, Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.

Rezensierung
There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we re stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it s Margaret Atwood. Long may she reign...If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together. You ve been missing out.
Rebecca Makkai, New York Times Book Review

Old Babes in the Wood is touching, smart, funny, and unique in equal measure A dazzling mixture of stories that explore what it means to be human while also showcasing Atwood's gifted imagination and great sense of humor.
NPR

These fifteen stories are a master class in how to write, a rollicking good time, and a deep exploration of human relationships the damage we do to each other and the ways we come together. Delving into Atwood s work feels a bit like coming home you can trust her to tell a good story and not make any gaffes along the way.
Brooklyn Rail

'Atwood explores love and loss in this brilliant collection that mixes fantastical stories about the afterlife with realism...She s writing at the top of her considerable powers here.'
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

'The celebrated author s first collection of short fiction since Stone Mattress (2014)...Honest and artful depictions of aging and loss.'
Kirkus

Buchausschnitt
Chapter 1

i

TIG & NELL

first aid

Nell came home one day just before dinnertime and found the front door open. The car was gone. There was a trail of blood splotches on the steps, and once she was inside the house, she followed it along the hall carpet and into the kitchen. There was a knife on the cutting board, one of Tig s favourites, Japanese steel, very sharp and beside it, a bloodstained carrot, one end severed. Their daughter, nine at the time, was nowhere to be found.

What were the possible scenarios? Desperadoes had broken in. Tig had tried to defend himself against them, using the knife (though how to explain the carrot?), and had been wounded. The desperadoes had made off with him, their daughter, and their car. Nell should call the police.

Or else Tig had been cooking, had sliced himself with the knife, had judged that he needed stitches, and had driven himself to the hospital, taking their daughter with him to avoid leaving her by herself. This was more likely. He must have been in too much of a hurry to leave a note.

Nell got out the bottle of carpet cleaner and sprayed the blood spots: they would be much harder to get out once they d dried. Then she wiped the blood off the kitchen floor and, after a pause, off the carrot. It was a perfectly good carrot; no need for it to go to waste.

Time passed. Suspense built. She was at the point of phoning all the hospitals in the vicinity to see if Tig was there when he came back, hand bandaged. He was in a jovial mood, as was their daughter. What an adventure they d had! The blood was just pouring out, they reported. The tea towel Tig had used for wrapping the cut had been soaked! Yes, driving had been a challenge, said Tig he didn t say dangerous but who could wait for a taxi, and he d managed all right with basically just one hand since he d needed to keep the other one raised, and the blood was trickling off his elbow, and they d sewn him up quickly at the hospital because he was dripping all over everything, and anyway, here they were! Luckily not an artery, or it would be a different story. (It was indeed a different story when Tig told it a little later, to Nell: his bravado had been an act he hadn t wanted to frighten their daughter and he d been worried that he would pass out if the blood loss got out of control, and then what?)

I need a drink, said Tig.

So do I, said Nell. We can have scrambled eggs. Whatever Tig had been planning to do with the carrot was no longer on the agenda.

The tea towel had been brought back in a plastic bag. It was bright red but beginning to brown at the edges. Nell put it to soak in cold water, which was the best way to deal with bloodstained fabrics.

But what would I have done if I d been here? she wondered. Not a Band-Aid: insufficient. A tourniquet? She d had perfunctory instruction in those at Girl Guides. They d done wrist sprains too. Minor emergencies were her domain, but not major ones. Major ones were Tig s.



That was some time ago. Early autumn, as she recalls, a year in the later 1980s. There were personal computers then, of a lumbering kind. And printers: the paper for them came with the pages joined together at top and bottom, and had holes along the sides, in perforated strips that you had to tear off. No cellphones though, which was why Nell hadn t been able to text or call Tig and ask him where he was, and also what had caused the blood?

How much waiting we used to do, she thinks. Waiting without knowing. So many blanks we couldn t fill in, so many mysteries. So little information. Now it s the first decade of the twenty-first century, space-time is denser, it s crowded, you can barely move because the air is so packed with this and that. You c