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Payback

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

Available in a new edition and with an introduction by Margaret Atwood, Payback delivers a surprising look at the topic of "debt" — a subject that continues to be timely.

Legendary novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood delivers a surprising look at the topic of "debt" — a subject that continues to be timely during this current period of economic upheaval. In her intelligent and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that "debt" is like air — something we take for granted and never think about until things go wrong.

This is not a book about practical debt management or high finance, although it does touch upon those subjects. Rather, it goes far deeper into an investigation of debt as a very old, very central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By looking at how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day, through the stories we tell to our concepts of "revenge" and "sin" to the way we structure our social relationships, Atwood shows that this idea of what we owe — in other words, "debt" — is possibly built into the human imagination as one of its most dynamic metaphors. In the final section, Atwood touches upon not only our current global financial situation, but also the concept of our "debt to nature" and how our ideas of ownership and debt must be changed if we are to find a new way to interact with our natural environment.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 29, 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 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.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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