#367 Revenant- Margaret Atwood
Gavin is a poet, coming of age during the sixties. Now in
his old age, he lives in Florida with his third wife, thirty-years his junior.
He struggles with vitality, in all forms:
“How to describe the deliciousness of ice cream when you can
lo longer taste it.”
He is drying up, as a poet, as a lover, as a man. What he
has left is his legacy, which he has ceded somewhat unwittingly to his wife.
She controls his papers, his house, his correspondence. She has scheduled an
interview with a grad student to talk about his work. Only the interview ends
up being about his first love, Constance, the world famous fantasy author (whom
we saw in the first story of this collection).
He is angry, hurt, confused and betrayed by this onslaught of
memory: “To show anger would be to reveal his soft underbelly, to pile more
humiliation upon the primary humiliation.”
But instead of keeping his composure, he gets sucked into a
place he wished to keep to himself: “It’s like being drawn into a time tunnel,
the centrifugal force is irresistible.”
The world sees Gavin in a public way. They study him, discuss
his ex-girlfriends, and now even read back to him private letters he wrote when
he was younger. He wanted to keep some things for himself.
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