the Penelopiad

I meant to have a quick lunch today, but lunch stretched out for quite a while. I just couldn't put Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad down before finishing it. I hadn't read Atwood for over a decade - I'd felt Handmaid's Tale was a bit heavy-handed. But The Penelopiad had been well-reviewed, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's really well-done. Atwood's a clever writer technically, but it's also fair to call her clever, because she writes for clever people. Or at least well-read ones (my favorite example: "'That which we are, we are,' said Odysseus"). Chapter xxiv ("The chorus line: an anthropology lecture") was a clever insert - much better than reading that information in an afterword.