It sounds archaic today that the two main characters Marian and Duncan, meet in a laundromat in The Edible Woman. In the report, the Hungarian reviewer uses the word “Patyolat”, the name of a state-owned laundry and cleaning company that was very popular during Communism.1 This “domesticating” translation strategy (Venuti, 1995: 1–42) is also typical for the way Canadian social classes are described in the reader’s reports. Almost every single reviewer describes the social context that Atwood’s characters belong to. The reports describe the 1960s of Canada in a way that is consistent with the Socialist world view of the 1970s in Hungary and meaningful to the editors of Európa Publishing House. Canada as presented in Surfacing is “an urbanized, uniformized, and Americanized world” (1974), where the “Francophone-Anglophone conflict appears”. The four reports on The Edible Woman make reference to the USA in one way or the other. The first (1977) points out that the novel “(this early piece of writing already) is a bit of an anti-American caricature of consumer society”. The main character is a “young intellectual woman” (1977, second review), and the story takes place in the “world of the young intellectuals: the characters in the story have completed their university studies” (1981, third review). The novel portrays “young Canadian-American intellectuals […] attracted to the order of social norms (1982, fourth review), in other words “young American intellectuals who belong to the lower-middle class” (1982).

 

 

In the description of the plot, the reviewer obviously tries to push the novel through the selection process when the taboo topics are mentioned but notes that the sexual relationship between Offred and the Commander is “pronouncedly free of any eroticism”, thus it meets the aesthetic requirements of Socialist literature as described above. The reviewer emphasizes that the lack of humor in the novel is resolved only in the last chapter, which is rich in humor and irony. And since before the political change the genre of science fiction fell into the permitted and mostly in the not promoted category (Sohár, 1999; Sohár, 2022), the reviewer adds: “An excellent writer, a fairly well written sci-fi /without sci/?” At the end of the reader’s report, the author notes the “inconsolable hopelessness” of the novel: “Only the lives cannot be replaced any more. /How many times has this been the case in our own history?!/” This overt personal reflection does not appear in any of the twenty-two examined reports before 1987. This first report, on the one hand, mentions key aspects why the novel conforms to the ideals of Socialist literature, on the other hand, makes a straightforward, clear political statement at the end of the report. The second reviewer is outspoken about why the novel is not for publication. The reviewer rejects the idea of “a revolution that creates a totalitarian dictatorship” along gender lines and considers the novel to be boring, even disgusting, and merely a copy of George Orwell’s prose that carries a “real trouvaille” (1988). The name of Orwell is an important reference here, as none of his books were published in Hungarian until 1989 (Czigányik, 2011: 226) and only samizdat copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four in Hungarian were circulating among intellectuals. The reviewer considers the novel to belong to the genre of utopia and science fiction, and harshly criticizes Atwood for using templates that are stereotypical of sci-fi. The literary genre of dystopia is not mentioned, probably due to the fact that this category was prohibited during the Communist era.