Is there a better novelist than Margaret Atwood? This one is very old ... and really good. The narrator-protagonist is a 32 year old Canadian woman, a magazine writer of living & style stories, who has experienced just about all she can take as a result of a bout with breast cancer that resulted in the removal of part of her breast, her love/desire for her surgeon after surgery & at the ending of a live-in relationship with a man who who could no longer feel close after the surgery left her feeling damaged.
She went to a small Caribbean island nation primarily to get away from her life, which she could only barely tolerate any longer, with its discouragement, depression, alienation & staleness as she experienced it. She had an intention to write an article about life on this backwater island that was seldom visited. As you might imagine, the trip did not go as she had hoped. On the final, tiny plane she meets - against her will - a man from the island. He clearly had a high opinion of himself and his clout in the island nation. She just wanted him to stop talking and go away. Upon reaching her hotel she encounters further indications that her trip will be far from relaxing or satisfying. Then, shortly, she meets another man - this one a North American - who is mysterious or complicated ... or deceptive. As time goes on, her view of who he is and what he is about changes several times. Naturally, there is a CIA component to the story.

I'll say no more. It is a finely written book (no surprise) with a very good story and clear character development. Among other things, Atwood expresses her strong beliefs about the character of men, as well as their damaging impact on women (which all rang true to me). I'm glad this book was recommended to me. ( )

I agree with other reviewers who said that the protagonist is a dumb protagonist. This was the author's intent, I suppose, to show a woman so discombobulated by her breast cancer and subsequent surgery, that she asked her editor for an assignment where she could go to forget her troubles for a bit. So she goes to an island in the Caribbean, that has recently shed British rule, and is having a local election. Politics are running extreme, with a couple different parties resorting to violence, and shenanigans with the Canadian aid sent there for the recent hurricane.
I Don't really feel much sympathy for the protagonist. Margaret Atwood is usually one of my favorite writers. So even when she has a bleh book, it's still got some parts that I liked, so here they are.
This one part reminded me so much of my childhood in Missouri. Old people love to talk about their illnesses, and in those days illnesses were fewer than they are nowadays, I'm talking about cancer, and nervous breakdowns, which were referred to as " collapses."
"One of Rennie's less pleasant fantasies about the future, on nights when she can't sleep, is that her mother will get some lingering disease and she'll have to go back to Griswold to take care of her, for years and years, for the rest of her life. She'll plead illness, they'll have a competition, the sickest one will win. That's how it's done in griswold, by the women at any rate. Rennie can remember her mother's church group in the front parlour, drinking tea and eating small cakes covered with chocolate icing and poisonous-looking mini-coloured sprinkles, discussing their own and other's debilities in hushed voices that blended pity, admiration and envy. If you were sick you were exempt: other women brought you pies and came to sit with you, commiserating, gloating. The only thing they liked better was a funeral."

Talking about her recently-broken-up relationship:
"That was what it had been at first: no mess, no in love. By the time she met Jake she decided she didn't much like being in love. Being in love was like running barefoot along a street covered with broken bottles. It was foolhardy, and if you got through it without damage it was only by sheer luck. It was like taking off your clothes at lunch time in a bank. It let people think they knew something about you that you didn't know about them, it gave them power over you. It made you visible, soft, penetrable; it made you ludicrous."

( )

3.5 stars, rounded down.

I discovered this 1982 Margaret Atwood novel that I had not read. Imagine. Back in the 80s, I read them as fast as she released them. What I delved into was one of the most disturbing narratives and characters I have ever encountered. Renee is a third rate journalist; she writes travelogues. She has just had a mastectomy, thinks she might still be dying, has parted ways with her strange and self-centered boyfriend, and takes an assignment to write a piece on St. Antoine in the Caribbean. She is emotionally and physically compromised.

I thought Atwood had set the tale up to be about this woman’s travails dealing with her imagined loss of sexuality. That is an element, but oh my goodness, there is much more than that going on. When she arrives at this tumultuous island, there is political upheaval in the wind, as the people strive to thwart a Papa Doc kind of despotic ruler. Renee, unfortunately, arrives with the misnomer of “journalist” hanging over her and immediately is drawn into expectations and suspicions from the native population. I spent the second half of this novel wanting to scream at her “Are you crazy? What are you thinking? Don’t do it!”

Atwood has always been able to draw me in and hold me. Her style here is comic and tragic all in the same breath. She exposes the cruelty in man, the tools he uses against himself, his thirst for power, and his lack of compassion. Her women are under assault, they are being used, and they are foolishly complicit in their downfall. As Renee discovers, no one is excepted; all are vulnerable.
( )

Maybe because I listened to rather than read this, but it never seemed to entirely hold together. An odd blend of Atwood's dry intellectualizing of mundane social life and overt political topics. The climax was very powerful, though, and Laura will stay with me for a long time.

Not my favorite Atwood—she's at her drier and more intellectual here—but I appreciated the Banana Republic politics and the apolitical narrator's political awakening, if not the quasi-feminism. The scenes in the prison were memorable, and the character of Laura tragic in a very subtle way. ( )

This is an odd mix of nostalgic remembrance and present peril during a nation's revolution. Rennie is a fairly passive protagonist and not easy to root for. Definitely not my favorite Atwood. ( )