Ngày đăng : 12/11/2008

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Sources: Publishers Weekly and Booklist)


  • Author: Margaret Atwood
  • ISBN-13: 9780887848001
  • Format: Paperback, 280pp
  • Publisher: House of Anansi Press
  • Pub. Date: October 2008

Atwood's book is a weird but wonderful mélange of personal reminiscences, literary walkabout, moral preachment, timely political argument, economic history and theological query, all bound together with wry wit and careful though casual-seeming research. "Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due," Atwood observes on this conversational stroll, from the homely and familiar "notion of fairness" and "notion of equivalent values" in Kingsley's Water Babies to the thornier connection between debt and sin, memory and redemption in Aeschylus's Eumenides. "Any debt involves a story line," Atwood points out as she leads the reader into "the nineteenth century [when] debt as plot really rages through the fictional pages," and ruin is financial for men, but sexual for women. Things get even darker on "the shadow side" where "the nastier forms of debt and credit"-debtors' prisons, loan sharks and rebellions-abide. Atwood is encyclopedic in her range, following threads wherever they lead-credit cards and computer programs, Sin Eaters, Saint Nicholas, Star Trek, the history of pawnshops and of taxation, Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty and Dante's Divine Comedy, Christ and Faust-and a consistently captivating storyteller.

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

 

Atwood tackles the most vexing topic of our time—debt—as a social construct that lies at the very heart of our fears, desires, and expectations, threatening not just a global economic crisis of immense proportions but a deep spiritual crisis as well. She examines the debtor-creditor relationship as one that exists in the netherworld between honest trade and thievery, subject to fairness on interest terms, defaults, and so on, which inherently creates an adversarial situation down the road. Delving deep into ancient mythology, religion, animal behavior, and the classic texts of Shakespeare and Dickens, Atwood observes the moral entanglements that ensue when the debt agreement is entered into, like a Faustian pact, where the borrower becomes an indentured servant and gives up part of his soul in the process. Casting the corporate big shot lording over his minions as the twenty-first-century Scrooge, Atwood serves up an update of the familiar tale that is both clever and frightening. Delivered with her trademark wit and imagination, this is a meditation that challenges conventional thinking on one of the most morally pressing issues we face.

— David Siegfried

(Source: Booklist)

 



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