Tig and Nell are the protagonists of almost half of the stories that make up Lost in the forestthe latest book by Margaret Atwood, which the Salamandra publishing house has just published translated by Victoria Alonso Blanco. These characters are not new in the bibliography of the Canadian writer, who had already used them for the plot of Moral disorder (2007), but now he has placed them at different moments in his life and even his death. The rest are stories unconnected in their theme, but inevitably atwoodianas: a mother who pretends to be a witch, unstoppable viruses, snails that become humans or conversations with people who are no longer on earth. The material that your fandom want to find in its pages.
This is the first book he has published since 2019, the year in which his sequel to The Handmaid’s TaleThe willswon the Booker Prize and in which his partner of 50 years, also the writer Graeme Gibson, died. In fact, in Lost in the forest He dedicates one of his thanks: “And, as always, to Graeme Gibson, who was by my side for much of the years in which these stories were written, and who is still very present, although not in the usual way.” Some aspects of Tig and Nell’s stories are based on their own experiences – widowhood, in fact – while the rest come from different inspirations or requests.
“There are some that come from material that you think you are going to put in a novel, but you don’t think there is enough material to complete it and in the end there are stories of about 30 pages that can be a portrait of a moment or a story that has lasted. years but in a much more concentrated story,” explains Margaret Atwood in an online press conference with media from Spain and Latin America. Furthermore, some of the stories are there in response to a specific request from people.
For example, The impatient Griselda appeared in the Decameron Project that The New York Times Magazine promoted during the pandemic based on the work of Giovanni Boccaccio and The post-mortem interview of a series of conversations between living authors and others already deceased. “I chose George Orwell because I have always been very interested in him and I had a series of questions that I wanted to ask him. So we did it through a medium. In the story you will see that he has managed to stop smoking despite being in the afterlife, although he knows that it is not good for his health,” she says with amusement.
The influence of the British writer on Atwood’s universe is no secret. When he started reading Farm Animal For the first time – when she was still little – she thought it was a fun story for children, not a political allegory, and it terrified her. But when faced with 1984 She had already entered adolescence and her relationship with Orwell changed. “The interest in totalitarian forms of government started with him,” he says. “Another thing that also influenced me was that in these stories about the future and horrible governments, you always need an explanation of how it got there.” Despite everything, she considers that this novel is not negative or gloomy as was proposed at the time of its publication, but rather that it ends with a common language, “a standard English in the past tense that indicates that the era of 1984 has ended,” she develops. .
Memory and teachings
Currently, Atwood is in the process of writing her memoirs, a task that has been difficult for her to undertake and which she spoke about at the elDiario.es Festival of Ideas last June. He strongly clarifies that they are neither a biography nor an autobiography: “Memoirs are things that you can remember. And what you usually remember are stupid things and catastrophes. There are people who constantly take photos of what they eat and post them on the internet. Well, a memoir is not about that because otherwise it would be very boring. To understand each other, there won’t be much of my summer vacation in that book,” he says. Yes, he will stop at important moments such as near-death experiences – much more suggestive than his breakfasts, without a doubt – and in the life phases that seem juiciest to him.
“I think it is more interesting to read about the first stage than about the last stage. It was a long time before I became a writer, and I find that part more appealing to readers and to me. If I talk about the middle part of my life I will say that I wrote this book and then the other one, and then the other one. It has no more interest. And the last part is either sadder or more boring,” he reflects.
After so much time writing and with more than 60 books published, he considers that what he has learned from his work is that “writing teaches you about writing and books teach you many things about human beings.” And mention the book Write and failwhere its author Stephen Marche states that one of the things you learn when writing is, precisely, how to fail. “You have to throw a lot of things in the trash and you can even come to think that there are books that have been published and that they are a failure. That is to say, if you wrote them again you would write them differently,” he comments. “But I don’t think writing has made me a more spiritual person.”
The endless dystopia
The presentation of Atwood’s book in Spain could not come at a better time because it seems that current events are tending towards dystopia. She is an optimistic pessimist because she believes that “it could always be worse.” According to their interpretation of history, the 19th century was a period given to utopias because they lived in progress: they invented sewage, there were medical advances, bicycles, typewriters and vehicles appeared, they dreamed of flying. But the future stops being promising with the First World War or even before, when the first science fiction novel is published. The war of the worldss by HG Wells that “presents a fatal future with Martians arriving from Mars and devouring people. And although humans survive or some of them survive, they go through an absolutely horrendous experience of the future,” he comments.
It is inevitable to ask Atwood – in fact, it is the topic that everyone present at that virtual meeting wanted to discuss – what she thinks about the results of the recent United States elections, in which Donald Trump was the winner. The Canadian writer maintains that she believes that the campaign has been very short and that Kamala Harris was not given much time to develop her approaches. And, of course, that voters were afraid of having a female and racialized president “because they feared that she would do to them what they had done to people like her. In other words, many people were afraid of losing status and identity power with a presidency led by Kamala Harris,” he declares.
Likewise, he points out that there has been a change in the conversation because in recent years, the debate has revolved around identity and now it will return to a previous one: that of class. “There is no longer the class understood as in 1930, but there is a class of poor people, middle class, rich class, wealthy and very rich class. And membership in the United States has changed: before, Democrats represented the working class and Republicans represented the rich, but now the perception is that Republicans represent the working and middle class. Democrats represent the elites, which does not mean the rich, but the snobs, the know-it-alls,” he says.
As for Donald Trump and the future, he doesn’t really know what to think. He considers that it was smart – or his party – to separate the abortion referendum, which was carried out by States, from the presidential elections. “He said that he represented the United States and that there had been a referendum in ten States and seven had voted what they had voted for. And that means that as a woman you could vote in the referendum to protect abortion and at the same time vote for Trump,” she says.
He doubts that the matter will lead to a “Hitlerian” dictatorship, but believes that we have to wait because since the new president “lies so much”, it is not known what can be expected from him. Likewise, he considers that the issue of his age may be a determining factor, because it may disqualify him. “The United States has been the most powerful country in the world until now, despite some failures. But we don’t know if we are seeing an empire in decline, there is a lot of speculation about it. And I think it will create a lot of anxiety, especially for people who live near Ukraine,” he concludes.
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