Fans of bestselling author Margaret Atwood must engage in a somewhat slimy thought experiment in her new collection of short stories: What if a snail lived on in the body of a bank employee?
From the snail’s point of view, people are somewhat surprising. “When people say ‘sorry’, they don’t want to be excused. They want to make it clear to you that you have offended them,” writes Atwood from the perspective of the animal in its now human shell.
The Canadian calls this a “woman-shaped snail refuge” and thereby highlights her talent, creativity and eloquence, which have made her one of the favourites for the Nobel Prize in Literature for years.
“We won’t get out of here alive”
The snail episode is one of 15 new short stories collected in the volume “We’re Not Getting Out of Here Alive”. The focus is on the couple Tig and Nell, who are the subject of both the first and the third and final chapters. In the meantime, however, the husband has died. The widow is left with the memories.
Death, farewell, and grief are recurring themes in the stories. Sometimes a cat dies, sometimes Atwood, now 84 years old, writes from the perspective of a dead person. Then again she conducts an interview with the writer George Orwell (1903-1950). And in another place she states relatively soberly: “Something that is happening more and more often: people are dying.”
Even though none of the texts are clearly autobiographical, a connection to her life does not seem far-fetched. In the essay collection “Burning Questions” published last year, Atwood had already addressed the topic of transience here and there. Among other things, it dealt with the dementia diagnosis of her now deceased partner Graeme Gibson.
So it is perhaps no coincidence that the new book now says at one point: “I used to believe that a good memory was a blessing, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps forgetting is the real blessing.”
Eye for details
The author, who has received the Booker Prize, the Nelly Sachs Prize and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, among others, also demonstrates her literary expertise and writing skills in her new short stories. Be it the change in style from interview to letter form to the classic narrative, be it the change in perspective from the snail to the dead person.
Atwood sometimes packs pointed comments almost inconspicuously into brackets. And she places value on the details: here, a carrot covered in blood triggers a mental image. There, a woman is described vividly after too much sunbathing: “The skin is slightly wrinkled.”
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