Читать онлайн «The Book of the Unnamed Midwife»
Автор Meg Elison
Annotation
The apocalypse will be asymmetrical.
In the aftermath of a plague that has decimated the world population, the unnamed midwife confronts a new reality in which there may be no place for her. Indeed, there may be no place for any woman except at the end of a chain. A radical rearrangement is underway. With one woman left for every ten men, the landscape that the midwife travels is fraught with danger. She must reach safety— but is it safer to go it alone or take a chance on humanity? The friends she makes along the way will force her to choose what’s more important. Civilization stirs from the ruins, taking new and experimental forms. The midwife must help a new world come into being, but birth is always dangerous… and what comes of it is beyond anyone’s control.
Meg Elison
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Author Bio
Meg Elison
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
Taking cues from works as diverse as Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Cuaron’s Children of Men, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Meg Elison’s Book of the Unnamed Midwife uses its post-apocalyptic setting to explore sexuality, gender roles, patriarchy, and the fluid nature of identity. Speaking as a former card-carrying member of the Society for Utopian Studies, I am as thrilled by this book’s questions for our own society as I am the suspense that surrounds our nameless — or many named? — protagonist. An exciting debut from Elison, and worthwhile for any fan of feminist science fiction.
Meg Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife stands head-and-shoulders above contemporary post-apocalyptic novels with a gritty intimacy that seeps into the subconscious and stays with the reader long after she’s read the last page. Midwife is an astounding debut for an up-and-coming writer.
Prologue
Mother Ina tapped her fingers on her hollow wooden belly. It tied around her shoulders and the small of her back and sloped out in front, making the curve of a nine-month pregnancy. Mother Ina was very old, too old to be really pregnant. Her hair was white and so short that her black scalp showed through, shining. She tapped again, her thin fingers drumming so that the hollow sound echoed through the room. She clicked against the wood with her fingernails rhythmically until the scribes looked up at her.
Six boys, all around the age of puberty. Their faces were hairless and their eyes were bright in the morning light. The schoolroom was older even than Ina herself. Parts of the building had collapsed. The biggest spaces had once been gyms and theatres and auditoriums, but over the years they’d sagged and then fallen, weighted with rain or snow. The long corridors of offices stood empty. Squirrels nested in the file cabinets and the branches of trees grew in through the windows.
