Loss suffuses these stories ... They’re stories that look backward ... While that perspective isn’t new for Atwood, the lens seems to have changed ... Here, people look back in grief ... The Covid invocations feel tacked on, and it’s in their somewhat unconvincing attempts at timeliness that these middle stories miss as often as they hit. They don’t feel carefully curated so much as collected from the disparate corners of Atwood’s mind ... I’d be more tempted to dwell on the puzzle of that grab bag of middle stories being sandwiched between realistic, virtuosic, elegiac linked stories if the reasoning didn’t so simply present itself: This is Atwood. This is our four-faced Janus, who’s got one face turned to the past, one to the present, one to the future and the fourth inside a spaceship, telling stories about eating horses. Long may she reign.
The irreverent title and witty jacket accurately convey the vibe of this marvelously funny and mischievously wise collection ... The collection is nothing if not various, and it provides ample runway, in its myriad surfaces and angles...for Atwood to show herself as nothing if not vital and virtuosic. All her tricks and skills are apparent: She does first person, third person, dialogue, personae, with flawless dexterity. She ranges from the comic to the tragic to the tragicomic, from the existential to the absurd, the contemporary to the historical with verve and poise ... For a collection about aging, loss, and death, Old Babes in the Wood is remarkably buoyant. It zings and zips with energy, crackles with wit, radiates dynamic intelligence and playful charisma ... Atwood writes with an exuberance, precision, and unabashed vitality that writers decades younger would kill for ... Atwood holds objects still momentarily, allowing us to examine them, searches for meanings that are transitory but not inconsequential, finds them in the light of our desire to know, like matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. These stories are sometimes screamingly funny, sometimes wrenchingly sad, but always deeply invigorating.
A dazzling mixture of stories that explore what it means to be human while also showcasing Atwood's gifted imagination and great sense of humor ... These stories, which taken together feel like a mosaic novella more than literary bookends for a collection, offer a deep, heartfelt, engrossing look at the minutiae of life ... These tales show Atwood's characteristic insight and intellect while also putting on full display her ability to make us laugh, her chronicler's eye for detail, and her unparalleled imagination ... Touching, smart, funny, and unique in equal measure. Atwood, who's always had her finger on the pulse of modern society, tackles everything from love and the afterlife to the importance of language and the pandemic ... Showcases Atwood's imagination and her perennial obsession with getting to the core of what makes us human while dishing out plenty of entertainment and eye-opening revelations along the way.
The stories not featuring Tig and Nell are more of a mixed bag, but they’re all quick reads ... Fans of the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale may not flock to read Old Babes in the Wood, but Atwood purists will find enough here to like.
There are chips and fragments of lives, full of sass and sadness ... Many of these stories dwell wanly on how love flourishes, as time goes on, amid the most crosspatch and cussed of human interactions ... Atwood is a literary writer who entirely sees the point of science fiction, and her speculative instincts are on show in several of the stories here.
A collection of stories, though — alas — not a very substantial one ... There is too much slightness; sketches for stories rather than the real thing ... A handful of the stories here stand up very well. They are generally longer and less high-concept ... It’s a relief to end on strong stories after the skimpy stuff earlier.
There is perhaps less that separates these neatly sectioned stories than one might suspect from their ostensible subject matter and style ... Bereavement winds its way in and out of these stories ...
Atwood’s new collection of stories isn’t short on the fantastic ... Vitality and virtuosity have been the hallmarks of Atwood’s literary career — and, as Old Babes in the Wood, published in her 84th year, shows, triumphantly continue to be so ... Counterpoint is central to these stories. Reminders of death — from Tennyson’s sonorous elegies on aloneness and forlornness to Mexican memento mori toy skeletons — pervade them. So do buoyantly vivid vignettes of life in all its quirky diversity. Mortality shadows the book. Vivacity makes it shine.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that they are gathered here simply to fill enough pages to make a book of reasonable length while the Hulu series based on Atwood’s greatest work is still in production ... This is too bad because, when Atwood returns to Nell and Tig, she offers a powerfully affecting quartet of stories in which Nell navigates widowhood ... Honest and artful depictions of aging and loss—plus some other stuff.
