Ever since her engagement, the strangest thing has been happening to Marian McAlpin: she can't eat. First meat, then eggs, vegetables, cake, pumpkin seeds--everything! Worse yet, she has the crazy feeling she's being eaten. She really ought to feel consumed with passion. But she just feels...consumed. A brilliant and powerful work rich in irony and metaphor, The Edible Woman is an unforgettable masterpiece by a true master of contemporary literary fiction.
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Ever since her engagement, the strangest thing has been happening to Marian McAlpin: she can't eat. First meat, then eggs, vegetables, cake, pumpkin seeds--everything! Worse yet, she has the crazy feeling she's being eaten. She really ought to feel consumed with passion. But she just feels...consumed. A brilliant and powerful work rich in irony and metaphor, The Edible Woman is an unforgettable masterpiece by a true master of contemporary literary fiction.
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This earliest work of Margaret Atwood's hard to describe. At times lacking the polish of her more recent works, while at others brilliantly skewering the social norms of the 1960's, the overall effect is terribly earnest. Granted, I am also reading this in 2010, and I was not around prior to the women's lib movement, so I feel like there is some sense of context that I may never be able to fully appreciate, no matter what I know about the era, and this context is imperative to "The Edible Woman."
All in all, the book is savagely witty, but it also made me wish I could have read it in 1969.
