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Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2022

Review

Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2022

There’s been so much said and written already about the relative virtues --- and pitfalls --- of novelists turning to nonfiction, or vice versa, that it’s a relief to ignore the entire issue when it comes to Margaret Atwood’s BURNING QUESTIONS.

Throughout this fourth anthology of her shorter prose pieces, the iconic Canadian author (no cliché here; she has fun calling herself that) sprints beyond such critical trivia to talk mainly about writers, urgent global issues, and the radical, even subversive act of simply writing, which is often dangerous in countries less open than ours.

In just over 60 insightful, prescient, funny, poignant, instructive, witty, hopeful and inspiring (adjectives abound) slices from the last 17 years of her long and productive career, Atwood makes it all but impossible to resist being wholly captured by every subject she writes about. Be ready to learn about new people, places and things she feels you should know!

"In perusing the nearly 500 pages of BURNING QUESTIONS, one of the biggest motivating takeaways is Atwood’s comprehensive grasp of global issues, whether political, social, economic or environmental."

A unique chemistry happens when her ideas and issues boil up into words, drawing you in and holding you until the very last sentence. That may be easy to assert when reading her bestselling novels, stories and poetry, like THE HANDMAID’S TALE, ALIAS GRACE, ORYX AND CRAKE, MADDADDAM, BLUEBEARD’S EGG, TWO-HEADED POEMS, or any from a list that now requires two pages of fine print to contain her oeuvre. However, it’s a rare-enough achievement for an eclectic compilation of essays and occasional pieces that range across the entire gamut of human feelings and preoccupations.

Some of those human feelings are timeless --- loss, grief, nostalgia, hope, fear and gratitude, to name only a few whose taste lingers so powerfully in the abundant pages of BURNING QUESTIONS. Here, Atwood reveals her own vulnerabilities, not over-dramatically but honestly, as she shares her impressions of authors whose deaths left gaping holes in the literary world: Doris Lessing, Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Claire Blais and, more recently, the also-iconic Ursula K. Le Guin. She also includes the prescient Rachel Carson, a scientist who warned us of climate change long before it was even recognized as a thing.

Some of her most powerful appreciative musings focus on late partner and fellow author Graeme Gibson (1934-2019), who battled dementia during the last years of his life. Still, he succeeded in completing his last novel and, with Margaret’s collaboration, THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BIRDS, a testament to their shared passion for ornithology and the preservation of declining avian species worldwide.

In the more fraught realm of human preoccupations, Atwood calls numerous forms of injustice and abuse to the carpet and speaks her (and our) truths in arguments honed to a knife-edge of well-researched clarity and measured zeal.

She often claims to have known little about a given cause or issue before being asked to speak, debate or editorialize about it. But for someone who tirelessly clipped news and science tidbits from magazines and newspapers decades before the internet came along, ignorance is always a correctable condition. You may disagree with her opinions or conclusions on any number of topics, but her research is virtually bulletproof.

In perusing the nearly 500 pages of BURNING QUESTIONS, one of the biggest motivating takeaways is Atwood’s comprehensive grasp of global issues, whether political, social, economic or environmental. She conveys their intense connectedness far more convincingly than most celebrities who know that their voice has a wider reach than that of many scientists, human rights advocates, politicians or economists.

Being an “icon” carries with it huge responsibilities, whether you want them or not. Early in the bestseller phase of her career, Atwood chose to take that responsibility seriously --- not with pretension, but with an informed humility that is rarely seen these days.

So if your familiarity rests on her magnificent fiction, try delving into the so-called “serious” writing, where her plot is the tangled mess we humans are making of our world and the cultures and rights of our fellow sentient beings. You’ll be surprised. Even in the realm of Margaret Atwood’s consummate artistry, truth (as she tells it) can indeed be stranger than fiction.

Reviewed by Pauline Finch on April 1, 2022

Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2022
by Margaret Atwood

  • Publication Date: September 5, 2023
  • Genres: Essays, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 512 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 0593314077
  • ISBN-13: 9780593314074