Oryx and Crake
Publication date/ Length: 2003 / 9 discs
First line: Snowman wakes before dawn.
Synopsis (from ReviewsofBook.com): Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake begins with the narrator, who calls himself Snowman, marooned on a beach and believing himself to be the sole survivor of a tragedy that has destroyed the human race.…
Review: The most apt review of my impressions of this novel would be to simply quote one of Atwood’s own poems:
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye
This so describes my experience of most of Atwood’s work — compelling, engrossing, devastating, debilitating… Am I glad I read Oryx and Crake? Yes. Did I enjoy Oryx and Crake? Absolutely not. Atwood is such an artist and has the ability to worm her way into our deepest, darkest fears and present them not only as possible, but inevitable. Years from now, I may not remember the specific characters or premise of this novel, but images of “Hot Tots” and “Nubbens” will populate my nightmares most certainly. Here is an excerpt from an article by Atwood describing her inspiration for this novel:
So I’d been clipping small items from the back pages of newspapers for years, and noting with alarm that trends derided ten years ago as paranoid fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities. The rules of biology are as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die. No animal can exhaust its resource base and hope to survive. Human civilizations are subject to the same law…
The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?
Atwood’s answers to those questions are haunting and debilitating… I couldn’t help but reach for a bit of fluff reading as soon as I finished Oryx and Crake. So, has anyone read this — and/or the sequel? Should I keep going and read Flood?
I absolutely loved this book and read the sequel too, which I enjoyed but not quite as much.
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i haven’t read flood yet, but this one I read years ago in college and had a similar reaction
I need to read this and FLOOD – thanks for the reminder
Atwood has at times disputed the novel being science fiction preferring to label it and adventure because it does not deal with things that have not been invented yet and goes beyond the she associates with the novel form. Oryx and Crake was first published by in 2003 and was also shortlisted for the for Fiction that same year..The events of Atwoods 2009 are contemporaneous with those of Oryx and Crake and contain some of the same characters……