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Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

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Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$15.95~~
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Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 280
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5 x 0.7

ISBN: 0887848001
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.3
EAN: 9780887848001
ASIN: 0887848001

Publication Date: October 7, 2008
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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Margaret Atwood delivers a surprising look at the topic of debt - a timely subject during our current period of economic upheaval, caused by the collapse of a system of interlocking debts. In her wide ranging, entertaining, and imaginative approach to the subject, Atwood proposes that debt is like air - something we take for granted until things go wrong. And then, while gasping for breath, we become very interested in it. PiPayback/i is not a book about practical debt management or high finance, although it does touch upon these subjects. Rather, it is an investigation into the idea of debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By investigating how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day through the stories we tell each other, through our concepts of "balance," "revenge," and "sin," and in the way we form our social relationships, Atwood shows that the idea of what we owe one another - in other words, "debt" - is built into the human imagination and is one of its most dynamic metaphors.

Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

The Mills of the Gods Grind Slowly But They Grind Exceedingly Small January 4, 2009
I usually enjoy Margaret Atwood's writing and this book is certainly an enjoyable and interesting read. Ms. Atwood presents an admirable discourse on the concept of debt in culture and mythology and one certainly learns something new about literary allusions. The common origin of Saint Nicholas (Santa) and Satan appears to be a bit dubious but is interesting nonetheless.br /br /Apropos of the material I finished reading the book and her ecological retelling of the story of Dickens "A Christmas Carol" on Christmas Day. In contrast to the rest of the book this morality tale felt forced, politically correct and flat. Rather than ending here I probably would have preferred it if she had ended using a more timeless approach to debt and what we owe each other than any single issue. This is what reduced my rating by 1 star.br /br /A small background note for those unfamiliar with the series. The contents of this book consist of a series of 5 lectures that are given annually at Massey College here in Toronto (this year across Canada) to honour the memory of Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada. Most of these lectures over the years have been quite stimulating and the speakers have included Ursula Franklin (she was amazing), Jane Jacobs, Willy Brandt, Martin Luther King, Northrop Frye and John Kenneth Galbraith. br /br /My title line refers to the slow pace and relentless sense of justice/retribution attributed to the Greek gods that Atwood refers to in the text. The book however is a fast and enjoyable read. br /br /Recommended as an interesting general read or for Margaret Atwood fans. Fun for its span of historical and cultural content.

5 out of 5 stars

Intriguing exploration of the spirituality and psychology of debt. December 31, 2008
I've never read Atwood before but now want to read her earlier works. Excellent writer with a probing intellect. Highly recommend this book.

4 out of 5 stars

No Answers, Just Maybes December 9, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth arrives at an amazingly opportune time, when families are watching jobs and mortgages implode, corporations and communities are running out of credit, and the global economic system is undergoing a meltdown--all because of debt. It is, truly, payback time. And while Atwood's book was completed before the Credit Crash of August, 2008, readers will have that ongoing dramatic scenario fresh in their minds as they follow her investigations into the meaning of debt. "Like air," she says, "it's all around us, but we never think about it unless something goes wrong with the supply." Something has gone wrong, and it's time--past time--to give it some very serious thought. This is just what Atwood does, in a wry, witty, wonderful dance of ideas about debt and its importance in human cultures. br /br /A word of caution for starters, though: if you're looking for suggestions for getting out of the debt mess you're in, you've come to the wrong book. Payback is not a how-to, or even a how-not-to. It is a how-we-got-here, a how-this-is, a how-to-think-about-it, an intellectual (sometimes maddeningly so) journey into the meaning of debt. Atwood examines debt as a metaphor for all our obligations to one another; debt and sin; debt as a literary subtext in everything from Mephistopheles and Vanity Fair to A Christmas Carol; unpaid and unpayable debt; and the "debtor/creditor twinship." When you stop to think about it (and you do stop, and you do think, under Atwood's spell), debt and credit underlie everything under our sun and beyond, even our redemptive and retributive notions of Heaven and Hell. "In Heaven," Atwood writes, "there are no debts--all have been paid, one way or another." Hell is a different story. It's an "infernal maxed-out credit card that multiples the charges endlessly." br /br /You can read Atwood's book in many ways. As an illuminating companion to Jacob Needleman's Money and the Meaning of Life, for instance. Or as a cautionary tale about what happens when we borrow more--money, time, natural resources--than it is possible to repay. Or as a literary tour de force that celebrates the audacity of a gifted and agile wordsmith. Read it to be challenged, to be frustrated, perhaps even to be angered by some of the writer's glib simplifications, and to raise compelling questions. Don't read it for answers, because Atwood, like most poets, doesn't have them and doesn't really want them. In the end, in her reworking of the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, all she has--all we have--are questions: br /br /I don't really own anything, Scrooge thinks. Not even my body. Everything I have is only borrowed. I'm not really rich at all, I'm heavily in debt. How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start? br /br /It is a question that many of us, these days, are hard-pressed to answer. br /br /by Susan Wittig Albertbr /for Story Circle Book Reviews br /reviewing books by, for, and about women br /br /

4 out of 5 stars

Debt and redemption December 2, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Given the current worldwide economic malaise, it appears rather prescient that the 2008 Massey Lectures address the subject of debt. In these lectures, Margaret Atwood examines of the concept of debt as a motif in human society, particularly through an examination of metaphors of debt in western literature. As such, this book only obliquely deals with personal monetary debts. Rather, the focus is on the more general idea of debt in relation to justice, sin, redemption, balance, and revenge, among other topics.br /br /Atwood begins with the idea of debt and its relationship to fairness, which is ingrained in the psyche of the human race (and other intelligent creatures). In early societies, notions of debt are aligned with justice, which is typically represented by a supernatural female figure. It is the emergence of Greece, and the induction of the court system described in Aeschylus' Oresteia, that the idea of a female arbiter of fairness/justice (and thus of debt) is replaced, although the image remains.br /br /Next, Atwood describes the links between debt and sin. In heaven, debts are forgiven; in hell, debts are eternally paid back. The character of Satan is often portrayed as a collector of debts, and often described as wielding a ledger. With these notions of debt and sin, the creditor is often seen to be as sinful as the debtor, particularly in pre-industrial literature. Moreover, motifs of debt are always twinned with motifs of credit, one symbiotic with the other.br /br /In the lecture on "Debt as plot", Atwood examines the characters of Faust (as particularly exemplified by Marlowe's Doctor Faustus) and Scrooge (of Dickens's A Christmas Carol). In a fascinating passage, she wonders if Dickens wrote Scrooge as a reverse characterization of Faust:br /br /"Was Dickens consciously writing Scrooge as a reverse Faustus? ... There are so many correspondences it is hard to avoid the thought: Faustus longs to fly through the air and visit distant times and places, Scrooge dreads it, both do it. Both have clerks - Wagner and Bob Cratchit - the one treated well by Faustus, the other treated badly by Scrooge. Marley is Scrooge's Mephistopheles figure who carries his own Hell around with him... Everything Faustus does, Scrooge does backwards."br /br /As someone who has been studying variations of the Faust legend for over a decade, I found this digression fascinating. The characters of Scrooge and Faust will loom large over the subsequent lectures in this book.br /br /An examination of the shadow side of debt described in the title focuses on the ideas of punishment, resentment, and revenge, among others. The endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge exemplified in the myth of the house of Atreus are shown as analogous to cycles of debt and credit: one is a moral debt, the other a financial one. The solutions to both are laws (as exemplified in the Oresteia) or forgiveness (as exemplified by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission). The shadow side of the debtor is the creditor: hence we have Faust/Mephistopheles, Scrooge/Cratchit, and Antonio/Shylock. It was inevitable that a treatment of the motif of debt would include mention of The Merchant of Venice, and Atwood succeeds with a detailed and trenchant analysis of the relationship between Antonio and Shylock with regards to the debtor/creditor roles.br /br /Payback is associated with redemption, and requires recognition on the debtor's part of the debt incurred. In the concluding lecture, Atwood returns to Scrooge. Recognizing two archetypes in the Dickens tale (Scrooge Original, before his redemption, and Scrooge Lite, after his redemption), she introduces a third archetype for a new variation: Scrooge Nouveaux. This twenty-first century Scrooge is an annoyingly narcissistic modern businessperson, both astoundingly rich and astoundingly ignorant. This Scrooge is visited not by the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, but the spirits of Earth Day past, present, and future. At this point, the narrative moves into a strong focus ecological ethics and the role of debt. The debtor, Scrooge Nouveaux, is a stand-in for all of us and our negligent razing of the planet, racking up an enormous amount of ecological debt from our creditor. We can either start to pay back through sustainable and ethical practices and receive the forgiveness of Gaia, or proceed with business as usual and face her revenge. As Scrooge Nouveaux begins the new day after the nocturnal visit of the three spirits, he thinks:br /br /"I don't really own anything... Not even my body. Everything I have is only borrowed. I'm not really rich at all, I'm heavily in debt. How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?"br /br /Scrooge Nouveaux's thoughts apply to all of us. Where shall we begin?

5 out of 5 stars

A Fine Distillation November 29, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

The last chapter of this book should be required reading in the upcoming holiday weeks. Atwood does a marvelous job of distilling the human predicament into something that even the most systems-challenged among us can understand -- and hopefully act upon.br /br /It was with some amusement that I read the review of this book by The Economist magazine. The first sentence of the review: "Without debt there would be no capitalism; mankind would be living in caves and eating whatever it killed." Somehow I missed the part in the book where it said that primitivism was the route that society should have followed. It is ironic that if we continue to follow the current system's -- and The Economist's -- ideology of unlimited growth, we will end up living in caves and eating whatever we kill. It is hard to make the case that the dominant economic system has given us -- and I mean all of us -- much freedom. (See Mindful Economics: How the US Economy Works, Why it Matters, and How it Could be Different for an excellent treatise on the "system.") As Atwood illustrates with her Scrooge Nouveau tale in the last chapter, any freedom we had is rapidly being sucked from us as a result of the way we have conducted ourselves the last few hundred years.br /br /Comments by other readers that this book did not provide answers reminded me that Atwood tells the story of Solon (p. 182 183). Solon solves "the nation's problems by cancelling the massive debt structure that has enriched some, but impoverished everyone else." Unless a "jubilee" of this nature takes place in short order, most countries will be struck in the doldrums for generations to come. Individual restraint is commendable, but the hole is simply too deep for society to climb out of at this point. For more information on Solon see Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul.

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