What would we do as an individual or as a race when faced with a species-ending event? What different moral decisions could we take before or after?
Atwood has a knack for creating a totally believable Everyman in Snowman – or Jimmy, as he was once known – lost in the wreckage. There's evidence of disasters, both natural, man-made and even man-managed. Set in the near future, the novel flicks between the story of Snowman's current plight, his mission to survive (for what?) and a sequence of flashbacks alluding to how he ended up as possibly the last human in the world. The opening scenes introducing the central character Snowman, a lonely figure isolated on the sandy and possibly toxic shores of human civilisation, gave a very different edge to the packed Barceloneta beach under my feet. As such I couldn't have asked for a more perfect companion on a recent trip to a welcoming, sunkissed Barcelona than Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.
Crake’s belief that humanity as we know it is irreversibly flawed becomes an obsessive, manic conviction that drives him to terrible actions.I like a bit of dystopian fiction with my sunshine and sangria. Over the course of the novel he becomes increasingly interested in the idea of a biologically optimal human, which eventually leads him to create a new kind of human life ( the Crakers), whom Crake has created in order to literally breed curiosity, humanism, love, and emotional turmoil out of the human condition. Crake is obsessed with what he calls “elegant solutions” to human problems and believes things like hormones, sex, and emotional attachments, for example, are “inelegant” solutions to reproduction. Jimmy is his longtime childhood friend, and Crake is seemingly in love with Oryx, though she notes he is not good with either sexual expression or affection.
Crake is a prodigiously talented scientist with a mysterious demeanor who always wears dark, unmarked clothes and shows no interest in love or friendship except with respect to Jimmy and Oryx. His name is borrowed from the game Extinctathon, which tests players on their knowledge of extinct animals (such as the red-necked crake). Crake’s given name is technically “Glenn,” but Jimmy notes this just once, and only to confirm that he should in fact be called Crake.
0 kommentar(er)
