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Review of The Heart Goes Last

October 1, 2018

Atwood, book, literature, review, science fiction

The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood, is a quasi-science-fiction story set in the modern United States. Technically, it could be in the near future, but there is nothing to suggest it isn’t set in the present time.

The setup is (post-)apocalyptic alright, but in an individual way. Jobs disappear, social cohesion collapses, people live in the streets. However, the focus is on Stan and Charmaine, who are unwilling to live in their car anymore, and so sign up for Positron. It is a place promising security, safety, bliss; ad infinitum. That is the catch, however. Just like Hotel California, you can check ~~out~~ in any time you want, but you can never leave.

Let me start by saying this: I like Margaret Atwood’s style.Check the Critical Reception section in the article about The Other Side of Dreams to get a hintI like the way she introduces a deeply introspective narrative style, giving her characters life. As a result, I really had high hopes about The Heart Goes Last. Disappointingly, my expectations were shattered.

I have read countless books, both as a casual reader and from the perspective of literary criticism. Honestly, I never remember a narrative disintegrating so completely. Let’s see the details.

Nominally, *The Heart Goes Last* is about freedom versus security. But, sadly, things fall apart pretty rapidly

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Authors Talk: A Discussion with Davyne DeSye

April 13, 2018

Author Interview, Literature

author, Davyne DeSye, fiction, interview, literature, science fiction, writing

This article introduces a new series of blog entries, which I refer to as “Authors Talk”. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual chat with Davyne DeSye, author of Carapace. If you’re a science fiction fan (and even if you aren’t), this novel is a must-read. Easily one of the best science fiction works I’ve read lately (you can read my review of Carapace here). A detailed list of useful links to Davyne DeSye’s work can be found at the end of this article.

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Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: A Timeless Sentence

January 19, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, death, disease, Gothic, post-apocalyptic, science fiction

Note: the following article on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a modified excerpt (pp. 70-74) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is an apocalyptic tale that, as the title suggests, deals with the possibility of someone being the last person left in the world after a plague has annihilated the human race. The trope of immortality is not only present, but also seen in a context of loss, destruction, and forlorn hope. Although Lionel Verney, the surviving character of The Last Man, is not an immortal in the strict sense of the word, he effectively possesses immortal status: he survives the death of everyone he knows, to the point that he apparently outlives every single person on the planet. In The Last Man, death is presented as preferable to staying alive.

The novel features a remarkably complex temporal scheme. Not only does it follow the typical narrative mechanisms of the Gothic canon – discovered manuscripts, multiple narrators, dubious objectivity – but also a time flow so chaotic that it verges on incoherence. The reader discovers that in the universe of The Last Man, time exists on more than one layer, as Albright argues:

Shelley frames her novel as an ancient prophecy by the Cumæan Sybil, written on Sibylline leaves (in various ancient and modern languages) found in a hidden cave in 1818 by an anonymous “author” … It is an ancient prophecy of a future apocalypse written retrospectively by its lone survivor, who looks back upon the final decades of the human race’s existence from the year 2100. By narrating the close of human history, the novel reconfigures and humanizes time. Since history is now complete, we can perceive it in its entirety. (2009, 133–134)

Mary Shelley's The Last Man — Shelley’s novel is among the first examples of post-apocalyptic fiction

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