BookNotes, Fiction # The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, 1985 ★★★☆☆ A novel about living under a futuristic totalitarian dystopia. What struck me as particularly revealing were the stories of rebellion, of dissent, of resistance.  Not the active political resistance, but the personal and social one - the psychological obfuscations, the black market bartering, all the ways in which people brake the status quo. And not so much the ways in which we do it, but just the fact that we all do. Victims and oppressors, winners and losers. If only we could "drop the act" as it were, and admit this is bullshit. Instead, we rebel underground, pretending to each other publicly, bartering with each other privately.  Splitting our minds to make it possible to obey and enforce oppression on one side, and cheat and fight it on the other. Tragically pointlessly unnecessarily so.  The novel is a beautiful exemplification of [Moloch in action](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/). Once an ill-defined game passes a certain complexity threshold, nobody likes it and nobody can stop it anymore. Not even the winners. --- Lead female character: **Offred** Offred is 33 years old, was married and had a daughter before being forced to serve as a breeding slave to the Commander (Fred Waterford) and his wife, during a totalitarian post-apocalyptic dystopia. --- ## Quotes I liked "Their faces were the way women’s faces are when they’ve been talking about you behind your back and they think you’ve heard: embarrassed, but also a little defiant, as if it were their right." ** ".. and we would talk, about aches and pains, illnesses, our feet, our backs, all the different kinds of mischief that our bodies, like unruly children, can get into. We would nod our heads as punctuation to each other’s voices, signalling that yes, we know all about it. We would exchange remedies and try to outdo each other in the recital of our physical miseries; gently we would complain, our voices soft and minor key and mournful as pigeons in the eaves troughs. I know what you mean, we’d say. Or, a quaint expression you sometimes hear, still, from older people: I hear where you’re coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is. How I used to despise such talk! Now I long for it." ** "Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is _as usual_. Even **_this_** is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." ** "To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, 'What’s he going to do next?' To have them flinch when he moves, even if it’s a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps. To have them sizing him up. To have them thinking, 'He can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do', this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available. To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, travelling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women."  ** "The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand."  ** "It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It’s difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest." ** "I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said _it_ instead of _her_, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. ==You have to create an _it_, where none was before.== You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before." ** "When I was younger, imagining age, I would think, 'Maybe you appreciate things more when you don’t have much time left.' I forgot to include the loss of energy." ** "Part of it I can fill in myself, part of it I heard from Alma, who heard it from Dolores, who heard it from Janine. Janine heard it from Aunt Lydia. There can be alliances even in such places, even under such circumstances. ==This is something you can depend upon: there will always be alliances, of one kind or another.==" ** "I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulent. I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story." ** "Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations." ** "But whatever the causes, the effects were noticeable, and the Gilead regime was not the only one to react to them at the time. Rumania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility." ** "..the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves. For this there were many historical precedents; in fact, no empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group." ** "He’s like a man toying with a steak, behind a restaurant window, pretending not to see the eyes watching him from hungry darkness not three feet from his elbow." ** "==In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects. I would like a pet: a bird, say, or a cat. A familiar. Anything at all familiar.== A rat would do, in a pinch, but there’s no chance of that. This house is too clean." ** "Does he know I’m here, alive, that I’m thinking about him? I have to believe so. ==In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in thought transference now, vibrations in the ether, that sort of junk. I never used to.==" ** "I feel drugged. I consider this: maybe they’re drugging me. Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion. Not a hope. I know where I am, and who, and what day it is. These are the tests, and I am sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes." --- `Just carbon and water. Just atoms and the void.` ---