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Lady Oracle Kindle Edition
Joan Foster is a bored wife, confused by her life of multiple identities. She takes off overnight as Canada's new superpoet, pens lurid gothics on the sly, attracts a blackmailing reporter, skids cheerfully in and out of menacing plots, hair-raising traps, and passionate trysts, and lands in Terremoto, Italy to take stock of her life. But first, she must plan her own death... In this remarkable, poetic, and magical novel, Margaret Atwood proves yet again why she is considered to be one of the most important and accomplished writers of our time.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMarch 27, 2012
- File size2463 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Brilliant and funny. I can’t tell you how exhilarating it was to read it—everything works. An extraordinary book.” —Joan Didion
“A very funny novel, lightly told with wry detachment and considerable art.” —The Washington Post Book World
"Funny, poignant, and briskly energetic." --Newsweek
From the Publisher
"Funny, poignant, and briskly energetic."
--Newsweek
"A rich, subtle, deep, delicate, nourishing book. It's all joy, but it stays with you. She has things to tell us."
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"A really gifted writer...alternately satirical and lyrical."
--Time
"A very funny novel, lightly told with wry detachment and considerable art."
--Washington Post Book World
"Brilliant and funny. I can't tell you how exhilarating it was to read it --everything works. An extraordinary book."
--Joan Didion
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The day after I arrived in Terremoto I was sitting outside on the balcony. I’d been intending to sunbathe, I had visions of myself as a Mediterranean splendor, golden-brown, striding with laughing teeth into an aqua sea, carefree at last, the past discarded; but then I remembered I had no suntan lotion (Maximum Protection: without it I’d burn and freckle), so I’d covered my shoulders and thighs with several of the landlord’s skimpy bath towels. I hadn’t brought a bathing suit; bra and underpants would do, I thought, since the balcony was invisible from the road.
I’d always been fond of balconies. I felt that if I could only manage to stand on one long enough, the right one, wearing a long white trailing gown, preferably during the first quarter of the moon, something would happen: music would sound, a shape would appear below, sinuous and dark, and climb towards me, while I leaned fearfully, hopefully, gracefully, against the wrought-iron railing and quivered. But this wasn’t a very romantic balcony. It had a geometric railing like those on middle-income apartment buildings of the fifties, and the floor was poured concrete, already beginning to erode. It wasn’t the kind of balcony a man would stand under playing a lute and yearning or clamber up bearing a rose in his teeth or a stiletto in his sleeve. Besides, it was only five feet off the ground. Any mysterious visitor I might have would be more likely to approach by the rough path leading down to the house from the street above, feet crunching on the cinders, roses or knives in his head only.
That at any rate would be Arthur’s style, I thought; he’d rather crunch than climb. If only we could go back to the way it had once been, before he had changed. . . . I pictured him coming to retrieve me, winding up the hill in a rented Fiat which would have something wrong with it; he would tell me about this defect later, after we’d thrown ourselves into each other’s arms. He would park, as close to the wall as possible. Before getting out he would check his face in the rearview mirror, adjusting the expression: he never liked to make a fool of himself, and he wouldn’t be sure whether or not he was about to. He would unfold himself from the car, lock it so his scanty luggage could not be stolen, place the keys in an inside jacket pocket, peer left and right, and then with that curious ducking motion of the head, as if he were dodging a thrown stone or a low doorway, he’d sneak past the rusty gate and start cautiously down the path. He was usually stopped at international borders. It was because he looked so furtive; furtive but correct, like a spy.
At the sight of lanky Arthur descending towards me, uncertain, stony-faced, rescue-minded, in his uncomfortable shoes and wellaged cotton underwear, not knowing whether I would really be there or not, I began to cry. I closed my eyes: there in front of me, across an immense stretch of blue which I recognized as the Atlantic Ocean, was everyone I had left on the other side. On a beach, of course; I’d seen a lot of Fellini movies. The wind rippled their hair, they smiled and waved and called to me, though of course I couldn’t hear the words. Arthur was the nearest; behind him was the Royal Porcupine, otherwise known as Chuck Brewer, in his long pretentious cape; then Sam and Marlene and the others. Leda Sprott fluttered like a bedsheet off to one side, and I could see Fraser Buchanan’s leather-patched elbow sticking out from where he lurked behind a seaside bush. Further back, my mother, wearing a navy-blue suit and a white hat, my father indistinct by her side; and my Aunt Lou. Aunt Lou was the only one who wasn’t looking at me. She was marching along the beach, taking deep breaths and admiring the waves and stopping every now and then to empty the sand out of her shoes. Finally she took them off, and continued, in fox fur, feathered hat and stocking feet, towards a distant hot-dog and orangeade stand that beckoned to her from the horizon like a tacky mirage.
But I was wrong about the rest of them. They were smiling and waving at each other, not at me. Could it be that the Spiritualists were wrong and the dead weren’t interested in the living after all? Though some of them were still alive, and I was the one who was supposed to be dead; they should have been mourning but instead they seemed quite cheerful. It wasn’t fair. I tried to will something ominous onto their beach – a colossal stone head, a collapsing horse – but with no result. In fact it was less like a Fellini movie than that Walt Disney film I saw when I was eight, about a whale who wanted to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. He approached a ship and sang arias, but the sailors harpooned him, and each of his voices left his body in a different-colored soul and floated up towards the sun, still singing. The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met, I think it was called. At the time I cried ferociously.
It was this memory that really set me off. I never learned to cry with style, silently, the pearl-shaped tears rolling down my cheeks from wide luminous eyes, as on the covers of True Love comics, leaving no smears or streaks. I wished I had; then I could have done it in front of people, instead of in bathrooms, darkened movie theaters, shrubberies and empty bedrooms, among the party coats on the bed. If you could cry silently people felt sorry for you. As it was I snorted, my eyes turned the color and shape of cooked tomatoes, my nose ran, I clenched my fists, I moaned, I was embarrassing, finally I was amusing, a figure of fun. The grief was always real but it came out as a burlesque of grief, an overblown imitation like the neon rose on White Rose Gasoline stations, gone forever now. . . . Decorous weeping was another of those arts I never mastered, like putting on false eyelashes. I should’ve had a governess, I should have gone to finishing school and had a board strapped to my back and learned water-color painting and self-control.
You can’t change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to; that was the one thing I really wanted to do. Nostalgia convulsed me. The sky was blue, the sun was shin ing, to the left a puddle of glass fragments shimmered like water; a small green lizard with iridescent blue eyes warmed its cool blood on the railing; from the valley came a tinkling sound, a soothing moo, the lull of alien voices. I was safe, I could begin again, but instead I sat on my bal cony, beside the remains of a kitchen window broken before my time, in a chair made of aluminum tubes and yellow plastic strips, and made choking noises.
The chair belonged to Mr. Vitroni, the landlord, who was fond of felt-tipped pens with different colors of ink, red, pink, purple, orange, a taste I shared. He used his to show the other people in the town that he could write. I used mine for lists and love letters, sometimes both at once: Have gone to pick up some coffee, XXX. The thought of these abandoned shopping trips intensified my sorrow . . . no more grapefruits, cut in half for two, with a red maraschino cherry like a navel boss, which Arthur habitually rolled to the side of the plate; no more oatmeal porridge, loathed by me, extolled by Arthur, lumping and burning because I hadn’t taken his advice and done it in a double boiler. . . . Years of breakfasts, inept, forsaken, never to be recovered. . . . Years of murdered breakfasts, why had I done it?
I realized I’d come to the worst place in the entire world. I should have gone somewhere fresh and clean, somewhere I’d never been before. Instead I’d returned to the same town, the same house even, where we’d spent the summer the year before. And nothing had changed: I’d have to cook on the same two-burner stove with the gas cylinder, bombola, that ran out always in the middle of a halfdone meal; eat at the same table, which still had the white rings on the varnish from my former carelessness with hot cups; sleep in the same bed, its mattress furrowed with age and the anxieties of many tenants. The wraith of Arthur would pursue me; already I could hear faint gargling noises from the bathroom, the crunch of glass as he scraped back his chair on the balcony, waiting for me to pass his cup of coffee out to him through the kitchen window. If I opened my eyes and turned my head, surely he would be there, newspaper held six inches from his face, pocket dictionary on one knee, left index finger inserted (perhaps) in his ear, an unconscious gesture he denied performing.
It was my own stupidity, my own fault. I should have gone to Tunisia or the Canary Islands or even Miami Beach, on the Grey - hound Bus, hotel included, but I didn’t have the willpower; I needed something more familiar. A place with no handholds, no landmarks, no past at all: that would have been too much like dying. By this time I was weeping spasmodically into one of the landlord’s bath towels and I’d thrown another one over my head, an old habit: I used to cry under pillows so as not to be found out. But through the towel I could now hear an odd clicking sound. It must’ve been going on for a while. I listened, and it stopped. I raised the towel. There, at the level of my ankles and only three feet away, floated a head, an old man’s head, topped by a raveling straw hat. The whitish eyes stared at me with either alarm or disapproval; the mouth, caved in over the gums, was open at one side. He must’ve heard me. Perhaps he thought I was having an attack of some kind, in my underwear, towel-covered on a balcony. Perhaps he thought I was drunk.
I smiled damply, to reassure him, clutched my towels around me and tried to get out of the aluminum chair, remembering too late its trick of folding up if you struggled. I lost several of the towels before I was able to back in through the door.
I’d recognized the old man. It was the same old man who used to come one or two afternoons a week to tend the artichokes on the arid terrace below the house, cutting the larger weeds with a pair of rusty shears and snipping off the leathery artichoke heads when they were ready. Unlike the other people in the town, he never said anything to me or returned a word of greeting. He gave me the creeps.
I put on my dress (out of sight of the picture window, behind the door) and went into the bathroom to swab my face with a dampened washcloth and blow my nose on some of Mr. Vitroni’s scratchy toilet paper; then to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.
For the first time since arriving, I began to feel afraid. It was more than depressing to have returned to this town, it was dangerous. It’s no good thinking you’re invisible if you aren’t, and the problem was: if I had recognized the old man, perhaps he had recognized me.
Product details
- ASIN : B007EDOS0O
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster (March 27, 2012)
- Publication date : March 27, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 2463 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 378 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,251 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4 in Literary Satire Fiction
- #4 in Classic Literary Fiction
- #7 in Humorous Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. ‘Her sequel, The Testaments, was published in 2019. It was an instant international bestseller and won the Booker Prize.’
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Photo credit: Liam Sharp
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Top reviews from the United States
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The last 10 percent of this book tied everything together, including fat-shaming, fairytales and the gothic. I was breathless waiting to see what the main character would decide. It was worth the push-but I wish the first part was shorter.
Generally I think of Margaret Atwood as a woman's writer, who tackles issues both political and personal that matter to women. She also writes a lot of science fiction, and I read and enjoyed (and I don't usually read science fiction) her recent Crake and Oryx trilogy. But this novel is something else.
The heroine, Joan, is a woman who has staged her own death--for various reasons. The idea is an appealing one to a lot of women--maybe not to stage their own death, but to just disappear and start all over in some exotic place. Unfortunately, the exotic place is not all glamour for Joan and she spends a lot of time reviewing her past, trying to save money, and working on writing a Gothic romance novel, which is her usual source of income. Joan has kept many secrets over the years, and there are layers to her personality that are unusual, but may also represent the layers of any woman's personality. She is rebellious and compliant; frivolous and practical; sentimental and cynical. She creates cages for herself and then tries to break out of them, figuratively.
I have to admit when I first read the book I was turned off by the pages of her Gothic novel. I lacked the sense of humor needed to realize the inherent spoof. The stories Joan writes are silly bodice-rippers, but when seen as satire, they really are funny. The best part of this book for me was the middle part, in which Joan recalls events in her life from a young child through adulthood and up to the present. Seeing how she progressed, who mattered to her, and what types of events shaped her personality was intriguing and Atwood writes so fluidly, with dialogue that seems real, it is a pleasure to read.
I recommend this book. There may be more layers to it than it seems on the surface. And it really is humorous at times. But don't expect a wow ending.
I have to admit I found the ending a little anti-climatic. It was just a wrap-up and maybe not as satisfactory as what I wished it would be. However, I enjoyed the book and recommend it to anyone, especially if you have enjoyed Margaret Atwood's other works.
Top reviews from other countries
I laughed out-loud a lot reading this book, even in public and I didn't care who heard me! How about this one: "Everything for him was style; nothing was content. Beside him I felt almost profound." Hahahhaaha!! Then the description of Fraser Buchanan: "He was a short man, tidily dressed in a tweed jacket and turtle-neck sweater, with sideburns that he obviously found daring, as he turned his head often to give you the benefit of a side view." Snort!! I can just imagine these characters vividly!! "Daring sideburns" hahahahaha!!!
Ms. Atwood must have been giddy writing this stuff and I can picture her sharing some of these lines with Graeme Gibson so they both could have a good chuckle. I would definitely recommend Lady Oracle if you want a good giggle or full-out laugh reading a book that is hard to put down. Enjoy!





