Customer Reviews

Bodily Harm [Signed]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Alright, maybe you have to be extremely sophisticated to understand this book. Or maybe I just wasn't up to the task. I adore Atwood's work, largely speaking. I love the play on gender issues, the windows onto the character's personal worlds, the suspense and tension Atwood can introduce and tease into page-turners... But this book? Maybe it's because it spent so much time developing a "politics" sub-plot, or because it took place on an island that was difficult for me to render inside my head... but I just never understood what was going on. Never exactly understood, never could get "connected" enough with anything to care. That's so weird, since I get completely wrapped up in her other stories and novels, and I've read them all. I don't want to give this book a thumbs down, for fear that it's my own lack of skill *as a reader* that made the book so opaque and boring... but at least this review might give you some information pertaining to the apparent difference in this work from Atwood's others, you know?

Bodily Harm is one of those rare books which is almost impossible to evaluate. On the one hand, Atwood's prose is flawless. (You really cannot complain.) The plot is excellent, and the "back story" is quite compelling. The title manages to cover all bases - the "bodily harm" serving to cover the main character's (Rennie's) breast cancer, her abuses at the hands of her boyfriend (cleverly not described as abuses), her wretched childhood and then onward and upward through hard pornography, Caribbean revolution and the continuing "bodily harm" perpetuated on third world nations by "sweet Canadians" and their counterparts down here in the belly of the beast. Nevertheless, this book fails to live up to its title and to its potential.

Where Atwood falls down is in the way she has structured her novel. The flashbacks into her main character's past had an appeal at the beginning of the novel, and served to thoroughly "peg" her personality, but eventually they slowed down the action - and right at the worst possible moments. (Do we really need a boyfriend flashback when her life is in danger?)The device gets so old towards the dramatic climax, that you may be tempted to throw the book down in disgust.

But you won't. You will continue reading (because the climax really is dramatic) until you reach the last page, when you will be tempted to burn it. Because after countless pages in which Atwood devotes herself to laying out the inner contradictions of her main character, the horrific challenges to her shallow, self-absorbed "life so far," Atwood - unforgivably - does not devote more than a single sentence to the transformation which finally takes place in Rennie's soul (and long overdue I might add). One measly little sentence of resolution to all the endless anomie, despair, confusion, depression and utter willful ignorance which we have been subjected to throughout the exploration of Rennie's ragged interior is enough to make the most hardcore Atwood fans pull out their hair.

All that being said, I would still recommend this book. Even when she doesn't live up to her own well-deserved reputation, Atwood is still a remarkable read.

Though I wouldn't consider this my favorite Atwood novel, it is a good one, nonetheless. Atwood has a way of involving you with her characters, even if you don't necessarily like them. I couldn't put this book down, because I was so intent on finding out the fate of the heroine. Part mystery and part romance but all introspective, I'd recommend it.

Although I have not read many Atwood novels, when I pick up one of her books I expect to be provoked intellectually and emotionally. Bodily Harm kept me reading well into the night, and I was amazed at Atwood's ability to write so evocatively. I noticed early on that while I did not like Rennie, the main character, I did empathize with her. Before breast cancer hits her, Rennie is the 'every woman' and not in a positive sense. Breast cancer and the ensuing chaos in her life leads her to question her purpose as a survivor. The theme of finding a purpose in the midst of tragedy is used often in popular fiction, and Atwood does a good job with it. The synopsis of this book sounds trite, but in actually, the book is very dense and stimulating. It is replete with symbolism and meaning, and I will be reading Bodily Harm again.

I enjoyed this novel on many levels. It is a great story, skilfully woven, laced with trademark Atwood satiric wit and all of the brand-name dropping you've come to expect: Drano, Holiday Inn, McDonald's, Elastoplast, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Bank of Nova Scotia, Chatelaine magazine, Ovaltine, Crest toothpaste, and not just soup, but Campbell's Chicken Noodle. I love how she does this, it seems so... Canadian!
The strength of Bodily Harm is the way Atwood delves deep into the psyche of the protagonist, the young female Toronto journalist, Rennie Wilford. Flashback portions reveal Rennie's history, connecting us to her narrow/stifled/religiously-hypocritical upbringing in backwater Griswold Ontario. It's a history she resents. Flashbacks illuminate her relationship history also. We really get to KNOW Rennie, and the more light that Atwood throws across this life, the more Rennie emerges as someone unfulfilled at her core.
And now Rennie's life is on the fritz. She is coming to terms with her partial mastectomy and the recent breakup with Jake, two problems that she imagines are directly related to each other. She becomes obsessed with the word "malignant" and feels that everyone dear to her (even her own body) is rejecting her. On top of this, someone has just broken into her apartment and, instead of robbing her, has left behind an ominous threatening message.
Change of scenery is badly needed.
So Rennie accepts a Caribbean assignment to the island of St. Antoine, and now comes the part of the story that could be summarized by saying "Shoulda stayed at home!"
This "tropical paradise" is really an economically depressed dump! And her small-town Ontario naivete is no match for the shifty characters she meets on this island. She is soon intricately involved in the political turmoil of St. Antoine, and her trip ends up being everything BUT the paradise and recuperation she was hoping for.
Illegal smuggling, bloodshed, betrayal, malnourishment, imprisonment... forget emotional improvement, physical survival becomes the issue!
It's as though Rennie goes to St. Antoine because of bodily harm from within, and finds that she must leave the island because of bodily harm from without. There's more to the story than this for sure, but this is an interesting aspect of it. The island did nothing to solve her problems, but it certainly made her see those problems for what they were... a part of her life, but not the whole.

At first I did not like this book and almost put it down after the first few chapters, too much jumping around from past to present. Then it started to entice me as it got more and more personal with the character. The character reveals her secrets and feelings and it almost leaves you feeling guilty of voyeurism. I at first thought the jumping around back and forth with background on the character to be confusing, then I started noticing that the past and the present action all tied in with relevance. This book is a hard read, but well worth it.

BODILY HARM is the story of a cancer survivor, Reniee, who, still uncertain of her future, slips away to a small island near Barbados -- ostensibly as a travel journalist, but more realistically, to get some much-needed rest and time to re-group. She and/or her lover had been so uncomfortable with intimacy after her mastectomy that he left her; as the novel opens, she has narrowly avoided rape in her home and, obviously shaken, asks her editor for the travel assignment.

Reniee is clearly having a rough time of it, and her experiences on the island(s) aren't nourishing in any way she had hoped; her room and board are pretty inhospitable, she gets mixed up with dubious characters and political unrest, and so on.

Sounds pretty interesting. The problem is that Reniee's situation is sympathetic, but she's really not. No one is particularly likable, which made it a real chore for me to finish the book. Yes, I KNOW that Reniee is depressed and has survived a crushing life-ordeal, but her thought life is so tentative, under- or over-observed, and often illogical that she just comes off as a wispy doormat. Since she's the central character, the book suffers enormously.

The writing is fine -- I think there was a turn of phrase or two which I admired -- but I would only recommend this book to an Atwood completest. She's done much, much better work elsewhere.

'Bodily Harm' is certainly not the best work by the sometimes brilliant Margaret Atwood. I'm not sure what possessed her to write about a young woman undergoing deep self-examination after having a mastectomy and, bizarrely, soon finds herself in some civil unrest in a banana republic. What saves this book from being totally silly are the characterizations and Atwood's stellar prose. However I have to admit the last twenty percent of 'Bodily Harm' where our central character is caught up in political unrest whilst on a holiday-from-hell is really a waste. Not terrible, just wholely implausible.

There probably isn't much value in describing the plot further. For those who loved Atwood's more female-centric novels (such as 'The Robber Bride') I recommend 'Bodily Harm'. But for those who have not experienced the wonder of Margaret Atwood I suggest reading 'The Blind Assassin'.


Bottom line: an uneven but overall decent read.

I'm a big Margaret Atwood fan and have read and reread her novels over the years. I think I had read this one previously actually but blocked it from my mind because it is such a depressing and horrific read. I hate Rennie: I want to identify with her because she is someone in a terrible situation (trying to deal with her recovery from the masectomy)who warrants sympathy for her mental anguish. But she is thoroughly unlikeable: she is a coward and that never changes. I kept thinking there was hope for her; she used to write, think, and talk about the "important" issues. Now she keeps insisting that she only does "lifestyles" or jewelry or whatever. I thought, OK, so all this awful ugliness on the island will be justified because she will regain her voice and write a real journalistic piece on the politic upheaval. She will become proactive. But in the end she is still totally inert, codependent, and frustratingly meek, naive, and detached.

Also, as a side note, this book makes the 80s seem very, very far away, like another time in history--which I guess they are now. But having grown up during the 70s and 80s, I feel generally attached to it. This 80s of darkness, despair, rape, murder, and hardcore, twisted pornography feels unfamiliar to me (and the latter does actually make even the oblivious Rennie vomit). Not to say these things didnt exist then, but why write about them without providing a commentary that explicitly denounces them in that Atwoodian way we know and love? The main character seems to be over the whole women's movement thing; she treats it like last year's hemline. And she doesn't mind when her boyfriend wants to very realistically pretend to rape her and gets off on that. She just does what he wants, whenever he wants it, without question, without any expression of her self and her desires. When she visits the porno exhibit in the police station where they collect things from raids, she and her friend laugh at the instruments there and Rennie seems oblivious to the fact that the culture surrounding the violent pieces (not all of them are, of course) in the exhibit is the culture that impacts her life (the rapist who visits her house and breaks in the window to wait for her who, BTW, could easily be her ex coming for her because he used to get off on this exact scenario [he would break in] as part of his rape-fantasy thing. She is unable to have sex with her boyfriend in this way after the operation b/c now that she is harmed, she feels vulnerable to these "fantasies", and the fear is all too real for play-acting).

I just don't get what this book is intended to add to the world of literature. Handmaid's Tale too is a dark tale but the protagonist is a subversive and you root for her the whole time. This character is detestable and the world is wholly detestable as well. The symbols seem odd and not really symbolic of anything; but you know that b/c they are oft-repeated, they are supposed to be symbolic of something. I'm sorry if this review doesnt have any cohesiveness but I feel that is also represenative of the book itself! I talked myself into giving it 3 stars instead of the 2 I originally intended; it's more obvious to me now that Atwood put a fair amount of effort into some of the constructs, I just still can't comes to terms with why she bothered to do so to tell this seemingly pointless tale.

After getting over the typicly Canadian opening of Bodily Harm (it took four days to get past page 4), I breezed through the pages clinging on to what Attwood has always been great at, suspense. She makes one wonder what will happen next, what insight she will give into the characters and whether of not she will start writing like a normal author. Well...good. Her style is different but refreshingly enjoyable. Though she may not be descriptive about the externals of the plot, the reader knows where each character stands at each moment of the story. Dont let yourself get dicouraged if the plot seems to pass by slowly. It speeds up and brings you to new situations you would never have guessed. I would only encourage those of you who are looking for something different. While the ending may not bring you the answers you may have wanted, you will feel satisfied that you made it through the book knowing how Rennie made it in a Revolution. With the due exception of her constant description of female feelings and her compulsive use of the word mabey, after reading this (male or female), popular fiction seems so dry and empty. Three and a half stars. A definate read for anyone who likes a story that holds true to life but doesnt dive into the normal dark subject matter of todays literature