I'm reading Margaret Atwood's "Negotiating with the Dead - A Writer Writes About Writing". How is it that she has not yet won the Nobel Prize in Literature? Here is a woman who began as a poet, hauling her own work around on a sled, via buses up the Ottawa Valley in the winter, from community hall to hall, reading aloud to grateful groups, astonished that one so young and alone would sacrifice her life to the Muse as she so willing had done.
And then she moved to Prose, to non-fiction, to marriage and family and still managed to write, to find the edge nearly every time and leave critics gasping at the insights, critical and novel, wide ranging and un-nerving with each new work.
Margaret Atwood's even tempered enough to even laugh at herself when others make fun of her flat Ontario vocal presentation style. She ploughs right on, I think knowing its more important that she speak her words aloud than be put off by a teasing jokester who have nothing better to do but try to undermine style. The substance is so rich he cannot hope to undo it.
Atwood is on top of her power, and can do anything she wants with it. She chooses to weild her power for good, for PEN International, for Amnesty International, for certain political causes and to write future looking works. She is a soothsayer, truth teller.
A Nobel Prize ought to be in her future. How can we move the committee to make it happen? Any thoughts?
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