Reception
On best seller lists in the Canadian market, the hardcover peaked at number one in MacLean's and number two in The Globe and Mail in the fiction category. In the American market the book did not place on the New York Times Best Seller list but was listed as an "Editors' Choice". The book was nominated for the 2006 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and long-listed for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The book's French translation was nominated at the 2006 Governor General's Literary Awards for best English to French translation.
Some reviewers like Christopher Tayler and David Flusfeder, both writing for The Daily Telegraph, praised the book as "enjoyable intelligent" with "Atwood at her finest". Robert Wiersema echoed that sentiment, adding that the book shows Atwood as "fierce and ambitious, clever and thoughtful". The review in the National Post called the book "a brilliant tour de force". Specifically singled out as being good are the book's wit, rhythm, structure, and story. Mary Beard found the book to be "brilliant" except for the chapter entitled "An Anthropology Lecture" which she called "complete rubbish". Others criticised the book as being "merely a riff on a better story that comes dangerously close to being a spoof" and saying it "does not fare well colloquial feminist retelling". Specifically, the scenes with the chorus of maidservants are said to be "mere outlines of characters" with Elizabeth Hand writing in The Washington Post that they have "the air of a failed Monty Python sketch". In the journal English Studies, Odin Dekkers and L. R. Leavis described the book as "a piece of deliberate self-indulgence", that it reads like an "over-the-top W. S. Gilbert", and they compare it to Wendy Cope’s limericks reducing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to five lines.
Read more about this topic: The Penelopiad
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)