Was it like a cliff? - and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled by the angry hand of God. Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they'd stagger and lurch and topple over the verge - The verge of what? we wondered. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us - of our shapely or skinny or fat legs, of our graceful or knobbly or sausage arms, of our peachy or blotchy skins, of our entwining curls of shining hair or our coarse unruly pelts or our straw-like wispy braids, it did not matter. in American offices and schools.):Īrms covered, hair covered, skirts down to the knee before you were five and no more than two inches above the ankle after that, because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. (You see this most obviously in contemporary religious countries & cultures - women's bodies are dangerous and must be kept out of sight - but also e.g. Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. In the case of The Testaments, obviously a lot of the book is about totalitarianism & fascism - see for instance how many of Umberto Eco's 14 Features of Eternal Fascism you can spot in the excerpts below. Having done this exercise with three books now ( Normal People & In the Garden of Beasts were the others), I noticed that I highlight mostly ideas, passages that resonate with me personally, and beautiful writing. I read it over the course of the last month or so and wanted to share with you some passages I highlighted on my Kindle. The Testaments is anything but - it's seen rave reviews (to which I will add my own) and won the Booker Prize. A sequel to The Handmaid's Tale published 30 years later, piggybacking on a successful TV adaptation? It could have been a disaster.

Margaret atwood the testaments