Future Home of the Living God covers a lot of the same thematic ground as The Handmaid's Tale, and I enjoyed it despite that. Not to say that Handmaid's Tale isn't an excellent book in its own right, but its unrelenting bleakness and too-close-to-home imagining of a theocracy colonizing functional wombs makes for brutal reading/viewing. For Erdrich, it seems like it's worth covering some of the same ground in light of recent events...
I've tried to read several Louise Erdrich books on several occasions, and haven't disliked any of them, but I've never gotten pulled into one enough to finish it. Recently I had to spend some time in airports over multiple consecutive days, and that was exactly the motivation I needed to finish this book. Living God follows a young half-Ojibwe woman who was "adopted" as an infant by Minneapolis liberals, and in young adulthood, becomes pregnant in a time of theocratic takeover when evolution appears to be reverting. So, women are having extreme difficulty getting pregnant and delivering healthy babies, and society appears to be collapsing. Oh, and there are occasional megafauna and dinosaur-like-creature sightings. It's complicated.
I didn't like any of the characters initially, which probably would have led me to put this book down under different circumstances, but since I was a bit of a captive audience, I stuck with it. Whether they were written more sympathetically as the book went along or I just got used to them, I grew to like most of them by the end. Which turned out to be unfortunate, because a lot of really horrible shit happens. Dammit.
No comments:
Post a Comment