Leftie aka Closet Romance Reader

Considering how much of a Canadian literary treasure Ms. Atwood is and how much her works have been lauded/recommended, I don't really know how I managed to skip her works as part of some lit course req in school, but I actually did. So yes, this is a first Atwood read for me *gasp*...

Here's a story set in a dystopian world in an unspecified future. It's told from Jimmy/Snowman's POV who in essence lived to tell the tale of how his current world came to be.

There was a lot of back story which was necessary I guess to build this world that Jimmy lives in, a world that feels/appears/sounds familiar and yet not, if put in the context of our current times. I suppose imagining the technology of the future can be limited by the knowledge of the technology of the present; hence a lot of familiar things supposedly still managed to make it in this unspecified future in Jimmy's world. And with all the news we read and hear about GMO's, again it feels like that this unspecified future in Jimmy's world is almost just around the corner. I found it quite depressing, and scary, which is the point I suppose. 

"The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses..."

And because of the all the world building, there's a lot of going back and forth in time, and IMO, things didn't really pick up until halfway thru the story. Now the story itself can be dissected on so many levels, but I'm not going there. I'll leave that to the pros.

It's not usually a genre I read but I almost feel that it'll be highly remiss of me to not read Ms. Atwood's works. Granted I probably should have started with a different novel... sigh...