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:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)