BIBLIOTECA TECLA SALA June 21, 2018 The Heart Goes Last Margaret Atwood

Introduction

Stan and Charmaine, a young urban couple, have been hit by job loss and bankruptcy in the midst of a nationwide economic collapse. Forced to live in their third-hand Honda, where they are vulnerable to roving gangs, they think the gated community of Consilience may be the answer to their prayers. If they sign a life contract, they’ll get a job and a lovely house . . . for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents must leave their homes and serve as inmates in the Positron prison system. At first, this seems worth it: they will have a roof over their heads and food on the table. But when a series of troubling events unfolds, Positron begins to look less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled. The Heart Goes Last is a vivid, urgent vision of development and decay, freedom and surveillance, Contents: struggle and hope—and the timeless workings of the human heart. Introduction 1

[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251269/the-heart- Biography: 2 goes-last-by-margaret-atwood/9781101912362/] Margaret Atwood Two reviews from 3-5 The New York Times

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Biography: Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian puritanical, theocratic dystopia in writer born on November 18, which a select group of fertile 1939 in Ottawa. The women — a condition which has internationally-known author has become a rarity — are made to written award-winning poetry, bear children for corporate male short-stories and novels, overlords. including The Circle Game (1966), The Handmaid’s Atwood is a prolific writer who Tale (1985), The Blind has penned additional novels that Assassin (2000), Oryx and include Cat’s Eye (1989) and The Crake (2003) and The Tent (2006). Blind Assassin, which won the Her works have been translated Booker Prize. Continuing her into an array of different languages output of speculative fiction with and seen several screen real-world parallels, the new adaptations, with both Handmaid's millennium saw Atwood releasing Tale and Alias Grace becoming the environment focused miniseries in 2017. MaddAddam trilogy, consisting of Oryx and Crake (2003), The Atwood’s first published work Year of the Flood (2009) was the pamphlet of and MaddAddam (2013). In poetry Double Persephone (1961), addition to The Penelopiad (2005) published via Hawkshead Press. and The Tent (2006), she also More poetry followed during the released the book of essays In decade as seen with the Other Worlds: SF and the Human books Talismans for Imagination, looking at the Children (1965) and The Animals in nuances of sci-fi/fantasy genre That Country (1968). She then writing. published her first novel, The Edible Woman, in 1969, a In 2016, Atwood published the metaphoric, witty work about the graphic novel Angel Catbird, an social status of a woman about to undertaking done with fellow wed. Canadian artist Johnnie Christmas which profiles the A tenacious spirit, Atwood would super-heroic adventures of a later describe taking Greyhound genetic engineer who becomes buses to read at gymnasiums and part feline, part owl. The work is sell books. Atwood continued to slated to be followed up by the publish poetry as well as the February 2017 release, Angel novels Surfacing (1973), Lady Catbird: To Castle Catula. Oracle (1976) and Life Before Man (1980). Several more books Atwood lives in Toronto with followed, yet it was 1985’s The her partner Graeme Gibson. The Handmaid’s Tale that garnered two have a daughter. Atwood a massive wave of [https://www.biography.com/people/ acclaim and popularity. A margaret-atwood-9191928] prescient warning over what could be, the book chronicles a

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Two reviews from The New York Times

Margaret Atwood’s ‘The exclusively with erotic power, When we meet Stan and his Heart Goes Last’ Conjures a kinky impulses and the wife, Charmaine, they are living Kinky Dystopia perversity of desire. in their car, impoverished and

desperate, as bands of rapists by Sarah Lyall Not that those aren’t interesting and thieves maraud outside. things to explore, and not that They’ve lost a succession of jobs, It’s hard to pinpoint exactly Ms. Atwood, who has produced and they see no viable future when it happens. Is it the so much extraordinary work until they hear about an enticing moment Stan disguises himself as over her long and distinguished new community where there is a sex robot, escapes from the career, shouldn’t be allowed to full employment and they can live prison-cum-organ-trafficking- explore them, as she has in at no expense, and which is center where he’s spent much of different ways before. But The taking new applicants. the novel and becomes an Elvis Heart Goes Last, her 15th novel, impersonator in Las Vegas? Or inevitably suffers in comparison There are a couple of catches. the one when Jocelyn, having with previous books, including First, their new home, the dual engineered a devastating affair the remarkable, recently community of Positron and between her husband and Stan’s concluded MaddAddam trilogy, Consilience, is essentially a penal wife, undercuts chapters of with its sheer inventive beauty colony ruled by a Big Brotherish wrenching emotion by and stunning emotional leader named Ed whose exclaiming: “Never mind whose resonance. residents take turns being wife is whose. We can’t waste prisoners — one month inside time on the sexual spaghetti”? At the beginning, you can’t help the prison, one month in the wondering what fresh hell the Levittown-like suburbia that In any case, at some point, author has in store for us this surrounds it. (Jobs for everyone! Margaret Atwood’s new novel, time. [...] The world in The If you’re not a prisoner, you’re The Heart Goes Last, loses Heart Goes Last — like ours, but helping to sustain the prison.) control of itself. a little further into the future — Also, it’s like the Roach Motel — Ms. Atwood began the story in is ending not in fire or ice or you can check in, but you can’t serial form for the online some other ghastly natural way, check out. website Byliner, and that might but in catastrophic economic Don’t do it, the reader cries, but, explain its unexpectedly uneven collapse. It’s quick, brutal and of course, they do it anyway. tone. The book announces itself just a whisper away from what could have happened in 2008. at first as an alarmist tale from For a while, it works out. the near future, a familiar Overnight, Ms. Atwood writes, Charmaine enjoys her job, Atwood scenario. The world is “the whole card castle, the dispensing medication to falling to pieces, and a sinister whole system, fell to pieces, prisoners, even when she institution with its own chilling trillions of dollars wiped off the discovers the nasty truth about logic rises to fill the vacuum. balance sheet like fog off a the medicine, and as the reader learns the disturbing reason for But then a narrative that has window.” the book’s title. Stan, too, likes been taut, dread-inducing and No one really understands what his position — tending chickens psychologically tense careers off caused it [...] but jobs disappear, — although he’d like it better if the road, skids into the woods, markets dry up, and large he weren’t forced to pimp them hits its head, loses its memory sections of America slide into out to the resident poultry-sex and emerges as a strange quasi- chaos and anarchy. fetishists. Neither dwells too sex romp concerned almost

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seriously on the existential Ms. Atwood loses me, though, Margaret Atwood’s “The downsides of this new situation when she shifts away from the Heart Goes Last” — e.g., no free will — though urgent questions she’s raised by Mat Johnson

Stan “can’t shake the feeling that about liberty and self- The world of The Heart Goes Last this place is some sort of pyramid determination, totalitarian starts out feeling familiarly post-• scheme.” excess and how mankind will apocalyptic: a destitute married cope with the disasters that couple, Charmaine and Stan, Ms. Atwood’s spins out her plot surely await. Instead, she’s drift across a devastated as busily as a spider, constructing suddenly more excited by who is landscape, forced to sleep in an intricate web that ensnares turned on by whom, and the their car as roving bandits threaten attack each night. As Charmaine and Stan in a dizzying ways that technology is going to the story expands, we see the game of betrayal and enhance or mess around with all counterbetrayal involving novel’s reality is even more that. disturbing: This is not a different extramarital affairs, human-organ universe, just a slightly trafficking, blackmail, espionage, There’s a lot of talk about a exaggerated version of our own. identity theft and sex-bot medical procedure that alters A world where the working class manufacturing. At one point, people’s brains so they’ll become has been pushed off the edge of Charmaine is demoted to folding sexually enslaved to the first the economic cliff, and the towels, and Stan is terrorized by person they see afterward, the middle-class dream is alive only the erotically rapacious Jocelyn, way baby geese supposedly think as a living nightmare. One of the masquerading as his wife (“I’ll that you’re their mother if last sustainable industries is the prison system. pretend you’re the plumber,” she you’re on hand when they hatch. says, ominously). The characters rush to secure [...] the participation of whoever has [...] been tantalizing or rejecting The Positron Project is an One of Ms. Atwood’s great them, but, by then, I was rushing attempt to remedy this, a utopian solution for a dystopian strengths as a novelist, along with to get through this part of the plot. world. If prisons are a surefire her deep understanding of way to make money, why not psychology and her ability to There are consolations. Ms. create a town that thrives reflect our worst fears and Atwood is incapable of writing a because its residents serve as its anxieties back to us, is her way of limp or boring paragraph, and prisoners? “Since it was unrealistic to expect certified leavening even the grimmest her imagination and playfulness criminality from 50 percent of scenarios with dark, impish remain as fertile and humor. It’s in full flow here. In the population, the fair thing unpredictable as ever. But it’s would be for everyone to take the sex-bot facility, Stan learns impossible to feel passionate turns: one month in, one month that customers can ask for an about The Heart Goes Last. out. Think of the savings, with A+B model, meaning Angry and Maybe the best approach is to lie every dwelling serving two sets Belligerent (“not too much back and think of something else. of residents! It was time-share demand for that, you might think, taken to its logical conclusion.” but you’d be wrong”); that [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/ bearded “lumbersexual” male books/review-margaret-atwoods-the- Living in cramped cells while heart-goes-last-conjures-a-kinky- prostibots are a trend; and that being subsidized by the state and dystopia.html] their own free labor, residents accidents can occur when the can finally afford a piece of the * robots malfunction. (“Bits can lifestyle they’ve been taught to come off,” a co-worker warns. “I desire: safe, quaint houses, full mean bits of you.”) employment, TVs and radios that

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play only programming from the that Charmaine soon rebels deflated, or worse, a song on 1950s with its postwar embrace against, indulging in an air-gasp of loop, repeating with diminishing of quiet order. an affair that sucks both her and returns. The latter fate is a Stan into a game of lust in which particular pitfall of writers like Charmaine and Stan, out of they are mere pawns. Power Atwood, who have significantly options, or at least of upwardly and sex, sex and power: The changed the way we look at mobile ones, enlist eagerly, before desires for each become literature itself, redundancy being they even know the surreal scope interchangeable, the lines a side effect of having one’s of the Positron plan. For Stan, the blurred, each tainting the other. rebellion become the regime. seduction is the opportunity for As the narrative builds and employment, to be a provider in couples try to regain their Margaret Atwood, though, has his marriage again as opposed to freedom, the quest is sometimes become something nearly as the dependent he’s become. For thrilling, sometimes comic, often fantastical as one of her Charmaine, it’s the siren call of absurd and entirely engaging, storytelling subjects: a living Disneyworld-esque small-town spinning sins into the territory of legend who continues to remain living and the security that implies. Elvis-themed escorts, stuffed- fresh and innovative on the page. They agree to join, the first of animal carnality and several failures of the couple in customizable sexbots. The Heart Goes Last is a the war against desire. Soon they captivating jump into the are indeed imprisoned, but in The battle between monogamy absurdity of dominance and ways even more personal and and the reality of human desire, desire, love and independence — traumatic than they had imagined. the intertwining of sex and opposing forces that never find dominance, of love and free will: resolution. As Charmaine says to It’s difficult to read this kind of These have been recurring one of her primary tormentors work — “speculative fiction,” a themes over the span of late in the novel, after being given genre that Atwood herself has Margaret Atwood’s prolific yet another upending piece of arguably done more than any career. Whether it was the information: “This isn’t fair. contemporary writer to define — governmental sexual hypocrisy Everything was all settled!” and not see metaphor and of The Handmaid’s Tale, the allegory in the shapes of its marital secrets and lies of The “Nothing is ever settled,” the narrative landscape. In this case, Blind Assassin or the genetically woman replies. “Every day is the dual dream/nightmare of the altered, polyamorous Crakers different. Isn’t it better to do town of Consilience offers a tribe of the MaddAddam trilogy something because you’ve bifurcated symbol. There are the and their blue penises, Atwood decided to? Rather than because economic implications of a middle has returned to this exploration you have to?” -class existence that can be repeatedly. What keeps The sustained only by economic Heart Goes Last fresh, as with the “No, it isn’t,” Charmaine insists. oppression. Instead of a wealthy rest of Atwood’s recent work, is “Love isn’t like that. With love, lifestyle made possible by that while it revisits earlier you can’t stop yourself.” And, sweatshops and slave wages in themes of her oeuvre, it never Atwood adds, “she wants the distant lands, the Positron replicates. Rather, it reads like helplessness, she wants. . . .” Project’s innovation is that now an exploration continued, with the exploited and those who new surprises, both narratively [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/ benefit from the exploitation are and thematically, to be books/review/margaret-atwoods-the- heart-goes-last.html] the same people. The Positron discovered. metaphor also offers another, more intimate interpretation; the Often an author has a cluster of confining restraints of the white- ideas, either on the world or the picket-fence fantasy, to which art of literature itself. Once Charmaine is particularly attached, those views are largely comes with the sexual constraints disseminated, the writer can of monogamy. It is this restriction artistically become a balloon

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