![]() ![]() ![]() Of course, there’s an echo of Eve’s temptation and punishment, that women will be punished for a desire to know and explore. The stasis of the dead wives, their preservation of a kind of life-in-death, suggests a metaphor for art. Like Angela Carter, Atwood has a fascination with Bluebeard, the aristocratic monster who serially murders his wives and stores them in a chamber, daring his newest, youngest wife to look and not to look. In Stone Mattress, she focuses on how individuals mythologise their own lives. In her shorter works, Atwood has often retold the stories a culture tells itself: myth, fable, folk wisdom. ![]() Stone Mattress also shares Munro’s great subject, time: vast sweeps of it, distilled into a few pages. The praise from Alice Munro on the cover is apt because Atwood shares some of Munro’s mastery at condensing an entire life into a short story. Atwood calls these nine stories “tales”, signalling a playfulness with genre and claiming some of the freedom of the “wonder tale” as told by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson. This line, a reflection that all we are can only be felt and expressed through the body, also serves as an artistic credo, on the way the detail and grit of the mundane give force to the imagination. “Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight,” muses one character in Stone Mattress, the latest book of stories from Margaret Atwood. ![]()
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