L EE L ANGLEY Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder (Bloomsbury, £15.99) worked for
me on every page. Eleven stories with a narrator who shares Atwood’s sardonic, lethal humour, ability to inspire laughter and touch the heart. Family life, memory, the rueful gaining of wisdom and the realities of aging, pinned down with elegant economy. And I caught up with The Penelopiad out in paperback this year (Canongate £7.99). Atwood again — a wife’s-eye view of the Odyssey; witty, clever, with a surface of knowing charm and a shocking sting in the tail that undercuts the comfort of the familiar myth.
And a singular pleasure: a dazzling literary oddity by Christine Brooke-Rose. Life, End of (Carcanet, £12.95), a tiny Trojan horse of a novel, a dark, hilarious disquisition on death, friendship, history, literature and the inadequacies of the narrator’s ex-husband. Brooke-Rose at 83 is bursting with ideas and erudition, laughter never far away — Beckett crossed with Dorothy Parker.
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