Product Description

From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband, from writer of romances to distinguished poet - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identiities. She decides to escape to an Italain hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organise her own death...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54089 in Books
• Published on: 1994-04-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
'If you feel safe only with "nine to five" reality, you'll probably not enjoy her books. But if you'd like to lift off, try her' COSMOPOLITAN 'Shrewd, funny, intelligent, honest, ironic' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
'Shrewd, funny, intelligent, honest, ironic'

About the Author
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. She is Canada's most eminent novelist and poet and has published more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her work has been translated into thirty-three languages. Her latest novel, The Blind Assassin won the 2000 Booker Prize.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely classic Atwood, insightful as ever.
'Lady Oracle' tells the story of serious feminist writer Joan Foster, (the Lady Oracle of the title) and her secret life as gothic-romance writer Louisa Delacourt, from Joan's life from a chubby child, her conflict with her mother who wants the perfect daughter, her battle to lose weight, bizarre affairs, (one with a Polish Count and another with an artist named 'The Royal Porcupine',) eventual marriage to the pasteboard Arthur, and the bizarre way in which she leaves the mundanity of her marriage to quite literally begin a new life.

The novel opens with the fantastic line 'I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it' and goes on to explain that the narrator has faked her own death in order to escape both her stillborn marriage and a blackmail attempt by the mysterious Fraser Buchanan.

It then continues with vivid, moving, and highly amusing accounts of her childhood. The narrator was a fat person until her late adolescense, and here Atwood gives a voice to the underrepresented and oppressed overweight of today's society. Joan's battles with her mother, of which her body was the battleground, are telling of a society where it is unacceptable to be anything except a perfect ten.

Atwood then alternates the narrative of the story with extracts from the gothic romance her narrator is writing: 'Stalked by love.' It is in these extracts, and the narrator's thoughts on them, that Atwood's trademark insightfulness truly flourishes, as even the most militant feminist finds herself confessing that what they really want is a Rochester. I particularly like the quotation 'Escape wasn't a luxury for (my readers), it was a necessity ... and when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers.'

What more can I say? This gives a fantastic insight into the world of the fat woman in modern society, and makes the reader of romance novels consider their guilty pleasure in a new light. Atwood at her thought-provoking best.

Atwood does it again with another brilliant book
The only thing I found disappointing about this book is that it came to an end. I therefore immediately went out and bought The Edible Woman so that I could stay in Atwood's world a bit longer.

Margaret Atwood has such a wonderful way of telling the story about an ordinary woman - she isn't beautiful beyond imagination, she doesn't have fantastically wonderful relationships, a model husband and unrealistically good looking children, she is simply Joan Foster, with long red hair and, as one of the characters puts it "built like a brick nuthouse". But she doesn't need to have all the above things because Margaret has given her character a wonderfully touching and extraordinary life. Extraordinary because it is so ordinary!!!
Atwood strikes exactly the right balance in this book between moments of raw pain (Joan's childhood and relationship with her mother) and comic moments. I really really loved this book. It doesn't really have a proper ending but it wouldn't have because this is a snapshot of someone's life so it wouldnt tie up neatly at the end as you would not then be left wondering how Joan gets on.
Some people have moaned that Atwood includes too much detail in her novels but I think this is tosh - the details make it more real - who wants to read a book where the characters don't eat, sleep, burp, become obese, look ugly, in short, they don't behave like real people.
She has a wonderful way of describing relationships, especially the tensions and misapprehensions but by far the most chilling, Atwood can convey exactly the relationship between a bully and a victim and this is a common theme in her novels. It can be very unnerving to read especially if you yourself have been through similar experiences but then again, that just goes towards making the book more "real".

I would DEFINITELY suggest that you read this book, get it out of the library for free if you want to read it first before commiting yourself to buying it, but I reckon that most of you will end up with a copy of your own as you will want to read it again and again!!

A novel that anyone could find something to relate to
This book is worth reading for one reason only, it is simply brilliant! The characters are easy to relate to, especially Joan. She stumbles through the storyline like an elephant on speed and is fantastically funny and loveable. A must for all novel enthuisasts!