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A Quiet Game

by Margaret Atwood, Kathy Chung and Sherrill Grace, eds

The world has produced many child prodigies in music, but few in literature. A few precocious teens in days of yore wrote classic novels (Mary Shelley, Matthew Lewis), and the late 20th century has produced some lesser talents like, say, Gordon Korman. But the fact is that fiction and poetry are crafts that take years of study and sweat as well as talent, as this slim volume of Atwood juvenilia makes clear.

A Quiet Game collects two very brief stories and a poem from the high-school hope chest of a 17-year-old Atwood. (The 13th in a series from Juvenilia Press, an imprint of the University of Alberta, it is the first to feature a living author.) Co-editor Sherrill Grace herself acknowledges that the poem offered here “is by no means a good Atwood poem or even a precursor of the brilliant poetry to come,” and she is right. The two stories (both under 800 words) likewise shed little light on the mature Atwood of Alias Grace.

So what’s the purpose of this volume? It’s difficult to see A Quiet Game as serious literary scholarship and, fortunately, the editors don’t appear as earnest as they might have. They admit that these “scribblings of youth” are really only interesting because of the writer Atwood later became, and the book is sprinkled with a number of light illustrations that add some levity. The annotations, however, can seem a bit of a reach; one suggests that it’s odd for a “soon-to-be Canadian nationalist” to use American spellings, another that Atwood’s changing “it is” to “it’s” on a typescript “contributes to a less formal tone.”

Considering the small investment in time and money this book requires, though, it is an enjoyable glimpse into the past of a writer now at the height of her powers. And it gives some hope to those who haven’t quite reached the height of their own.

 

Reviewer: Dan Bortolotti

Publisher: Juvenilia Press

DETAILS

Price: $7

Page Count: 23 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-9698271-8-0

Released: May

Issue Date: 1997-6

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