The season is turning on its hinges, the earth swings farther from the light; under the roadside bushes the paper trash of summer drifts like an omen in the snow. [p222]
I’m totally at sea about the phrase, “drifts like an omen in the snow.” This is the chapter (The Imperial Room) where Iris talks about the winter of 1935 and Atwood must have been writing during a fresh winter day. That page holds still more mysteries:
I hasten on, making my way crabwise across the paper.
Just so you know I am not complaining, I am truly enjoying Atwood’s writing style. I close the book and think: I am reading a book about the life of a button magnate’s two daughters, in which the one person who makes any sense is the family housekeeper. I want to read more but I don’t know why.
3 Comments
You must have a different version of the book . . . that, or you need reading glasses. My copy says: ” . . . under the roadside bushes the paper trash of summer drifts like an omen of snow.” [my emphasis]
The image is layered, polyvalent in the words of some: there is certainly the surface reading of the changing seasons as Iris writes her memoir/memories, looking out the window at her small-town environment where trash has escaped picnicers and collected around the base of “roadside bushes.” There is also the reading grounded in the mapping of the changing seasons onto a person’s life: the ‘trash’ of the summer (the middle/blooming period) of her life collects at the base of various life events (roadside bushes) as harbingers of the coming end.
I had my reading glasses on when I misquoted that.
I don’t mind abstract imagery but it lacks coherency. The paper trash of summer drifts — not like snow but like an omen of snow. Perhaps later the snow will drift like an omen of paper trash. Isn’t it just about an old woman’s apprehension of the onset of yet another cold dry winter? Am I just being thrown into a frenzy because it is not a typical simile (crisscrossed … like scrimshaw, spreading … like the pelt of an animal, bald as a newt)?
“Like an omen of snow” seems to be a simile wanting to be a pun, twisting “drifting snow” with “drifting trash”.
Point taken . . . but, as soon as I read it I saw what she was getting at: as autumn turns toward winter and most of the leaves are gone from the trees and shrubs, the trash that has collected around the bases of growing things becomes more apparent, looks like snow from a distance, old dirty snow. I don’t think it is an exclusively “northeast” thing, but I associate the sight with Oswego and the like.