BODILY HARM is the story of a cancer survivor, Reniee, who, still uncertain of her future, slips away to a small island near Barbados -- ostensibly as a travel journalist, but more realistically, to get some much-needed rest and time to re-group. She and/or her lover had been so uncomfortable with intimacy after her mastectomy that he left her; as the novel opens, she has narrowly avoided rape in her home and, obviously shaken, asks her editor for the travel assignment.
Reniee is clearly having a rough time of it, and her experiences on the island(s) aren't nourishing in any way she had hoped; her room and board are pretty inhospitable, she gets mixed up with dubious characters and political unrest, and so on.
'Bodily Harm' is certainly not the best work by the sometimes brilliant Margaret Atwood. What saves this book are the characterizations and Atwood's stellar prose.
No comments:
Post a Comment