the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt four)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Founders’ House, since torn down and replaced by the Gutman Library, was to become one of the models for the Commander’s house in The Handmaid’s Tale. In fact, every building in the novel exists in Cambridge, or existed then. Handmaid outfits were to be obtained at the Brattle Theatre, renamed as Lilies of the Field. Soul Scrolls for automated prayers were located in the Harvard Coop. The secret service—the Eyes—had their headquarters in Widener Library, which was appropriate: both organizations gathered and stored information. The Harvard Wall was where the bodies of the executed were displayed. The cemetery mentioned in the book, with the slogan In Spe (In Hope) quoted from a tombstone, is the Old Burying Ground just outside Harvard Square, where I spent many morbid but instructive hours making gravestone rubbings with charcoal: skulls and hourglasses and cherub heads with wings, giving way to willow trees and urns as the seventeenth century segued into the eighteenth.

Harvard was not amused when The Handmaid’s Tale first appeared: they wrote a sniffy review of it. Were they not now a broadly liberal institution? Did they really have to be reminded that they had started life as a Puritan theological seminary? But they came round later.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt three)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

I have a picture of me, aged two plus, watching while Edie feeds an orphaned baby rabbit with an eyedropper. This may have been how my obsession with bunnies and rabbits began. I was particularly fascinated by the Easter Bunny. He was male—that much was clear—but he had a basketful of coloured eggs that he couldn’t have laid himself. Hens laid eggs, rabbits didn’t; but if they did, they would have be female rabbits. Was there a Mrs. Easter Bunny? Was there a concealed hen that nobody had seen fit to mention? It was a puzzle. “Why are there so many eggs in your writing?” I was asked at a literary event. I came out with something about the perfect form, the primal symbolism. But perhaps it goes back to Edie and the baby rabbit and the egg-carrying Easter Bunny.

Or possibly the ur-influence was the bunny cookies. This story was a staple of my mother’s. She had to go to a tea party in Ottawa—not her favourite thing, as she had to put on a dress and a hat and make polite conversation with strangers—but the wives of junior government employees were expected to go to tea parties thrown by the wives of senior government employees. (Babysitters were an extravagance, which is how I got taken to the film of Henry V, with Laurence Olivier, when I was four or five. I am told I sat very still: no doubt I was baffled as well as petrified, as I had never seen a film before. But I remember the archery scene very well.) The senior tea-party wife, knowing there would be children, had supplied a plateful of cookies shaped like rabbits and decorated with icing sugar. I was given one bunny cookie. Wasn’t I going to eat it? I was asked. No, I said. I just wanted to talk to it. (My belief that I could communicate with inanimate objects—including, on occasion, certain people—persisted for years.) Meanwhile, my brother waited for his chance, made off with the rest of the plateful, ate all the cookies, and was sick later.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt two)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Our parents had made a deal about fish cleaning. Margaret was happy to catch fish, but she drew the line at gutting and scaling them. Carl, having fished on Nova Scotia’s Clyde River as a boy, was an expert at fish preparation, and took those jobs upon himself. Entrails were sunk in the lake for other fish or left for mink on a mink rock. You could tell it was a mink rock by the scat with tiny fish bones and bits of crayfish shell in it. Later, when I was nine, I learned to tie trout flies, and I still have a collection of clumsy and unconvincing hooked and varnished imitation insects. Later still—let’s say eleven—I was given my own handy belt knife, with a fish scaler on the back.

Water for drinking came out of the hand pump in the kitchen. Water for dishwashing, and clothes washing, including baby diapers (in a zinc washtub, with a scrub board and Sunlight soap), was hauled up from the dock in pails and heated on the stove. Baths also took place in the zinc tub, but in cold months only; the rest of the time we took baths of a kind in the lake. We used Ivory soap because it floated.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt one)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

My grandmother, who was my grandfather’s second wife, kept chickens and ran a vegetable garden. She had the Rolls-Royce of wood-burning kitchen ranges, with an oven, a warming oven, a hot-water heater, and chrome trim. She smoked her own fish, and made butter in a churn; as a child I helped her make some.

Seeing this way of life, unchanged since the nineteenth century, was very helpful to me when I was writing Alias Grace. My grandmother’s stove was much fancier than anything available to Grace Marks, but the rhythm of the work and the shape of the days was much the same. My father, Carl, was the eldest of five, unless you count Uncle Freddy, son of the first wife. He was already grown up—a mysterious figure, lurking around the barn not saying much, and said to be not quite right in the head. The story we were told was that he’d been gassed in the First World War, but another informant said he’d already been like that. As with so many family stories, you don’t think to investigate them until there’s nobody left to ask.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt fifteen)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Guggenheim is just the most noticeable part of the plan to change Bilbao. As befitting a Bilbao museum, it has an industrial setting on the Nervión. But the container-loading rail yard next door is slated to be moved elsewhere. The city’s problems and the solutions that are being found are very much like those of other nineteenth-century industrial cities, such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Except that Clevelanders are not trying to build a country.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt fourteen)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

How Bilbao ended up with a Guggenheim museum, paid for by Basque taxpayers, was a demonstration of the inner workings of the Basque Nationalist Party, the PNV. The project was a party dream, with nationalist motives that involved almost every imaginable calculation other than art. Josu Ortuando, mayor of Bilbao, said, “We were able to win out over Salzburg and other cities because city hall, parliament, and the Basque government could act as one.” Though it is not clear that the other cities wanted to win, what the mayor was referring to was the fact that all three levels of government were controlled by the PNV.

The Guggenheim Foundation, in financial difficulty, was shopping for a site to build a new Guggenheim, one that would not cost the foundation anything and in fact would generate revenue for it. Tokyo, Osaka, Moscow, Vienna, Graz, and Salzburg were among the cities that had already turned down this financially dubious proposition when the foundation director, Thomas Krens, heard of this curious thing—a Basque government. In the end, the Basque parliament, led by the Basque Nationalist Party, but in coalition with Socialists, approved the project. It was not so much the Basque government of the Basque legislature that was drawn to it as the Basque Nationalist Party. The key figure behind the scenes in the negotiations, the man whose thumb up or down was critical but who held no elected office, was Xabier Arzalluz, the Basque Nationalist Party boss.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt thirteen)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

For years, nationalists struggled with this class image of Euskera as the language of peasants. The lower-class status of the language was often more image than reality. Many educated people spoke Euskera, and in some towns, notably the metal-working center of Eibar, Euskera was the language of both workers and management, a prerequisite for working in a factory even for an inmigrante from Andalusia.

Like Atxaga, Saizarbitoria found his inspiration in the invention of Batua and the works of Gabriel Aresti. Published in 1969, Saizarbitoria’s first novel, Egunero hasten delako (Because It Begins Every Day), was about abortion, which was legal in the rest of Europe but banned in Spain. The book’s subject and lean, carefully crafted prose launched a new genre in Eureskera literature—the modern social novel.

His second novel was published after Franco’s death, in 1976. Titled 100 metro, 100 Meter, it relates the thoughts of an ETA suspect in the last moments of his life, chased a final 100 meters, before being shot to death.

Saizarbitoria was never an ETA activist, but he was a sympathizer he said, “like almost everyone.” He has remained resolutely political. “I want to defend my culture and my identity, and sometimes nationalism is the only possibility. When I am with nationalist I am against them, but when I am with others I am a nationalist.”