From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Atwood's book is a weird but wonderful mélange of personal reminiscences, literary walkabout, moral preachment, timely political argument, economic history and theological query, all bound together with wry wit and careful though casual-seeming research. Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due, Atwood observes on this conversational stroll, from the homely and familiar notion of fairness and notion of equivalent values in Kingsley's
Water Babies to the thornier connection between debt and sin, memory and redemption in Aeschylus's
Eumenides. Any debt involves a story line, Atwood points out as she leads the reader into the nineteenth century [when] debt as plot really rages through the fictional pages, and ruin is financial for men, but sexual for women. Things get even darker on the shadow side where the nastier forms of debt and credit—debtors' prisons, loan sharks and rebellions—abide. Atwood is encyclopedic in her range, following threads wherever they lead—credit cards and computer programs, Sin Eaters, Saint Nicholas, Star Trek, the history of pawnshops and of taxation, Elmore Leonard's
Get Shorty and Dante's
Divine Comedy, Christ and Faust—and a consistently captivating storyteller.
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Review
Atwood's book is a weird but wonderful mélange of personal reminiscences, literary walkabout, moral preachment, timely political argument, economic history and theological query, all bound together with wry wit and careful though casual-seeming research....Atwood is encyclopedic in her range, following threads wherever they lead--credit cards and computer programs, Sin Eaters, Saint Nicholas, Star Trek, the history of pawnshops and of taxation, Elmore Leonard's
Get Shorty and Dante's
Divine Comedy, Christ and Faust--and a consistently captivating storyteller. --Publishers Weekly, starred review, September 29, 2008
In her witty, acutely argued and almost freakishly prescient new book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth Margaret Atwood reminds us that debt is not just a political and economic issue. It's not just a matter for CEOs, heads of state, hedge fund managers or people with mortgages--sub-prime or otherwise. Debt is a cultural issue....Payback plugs a huge hole in our society-wide contemplation of the current financial crisis. In so many discussions of the ongoing mess in global markets, there is little mention of the venerable cultural ideas that underlie borrowing and lending.... All of this is presented, of course, not as something dry and scholarly, but as an arch--even, at times, ornery--argument that is vintage Atwood. --Chicago Tribune