Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I had to look it up, and it isn't even real Latin, just a schoolboy's mock-Latin joke. Then there's the ghost in Offred's room who hanged herself after carving 'nolite te bastardes carborundorum'/'don't let the bastards get you down'. Some previous handmaid, dead and gone by the time Offred finds it scratched into the woodwork in the dark. For me the graffiti she finds inside her wardrobe from a previous Handmaid took on a totemic significance. And what it does to Offred is enormous, it tells her she is not the first, that someone suffered here and kept a sense of humor about it. I'm glad that Offred was not alone though.

The book is full of small true horrors that snuck up on me. The red of the smile is the same as the red of the tulips in Serena Joy's garden, towards the base of the flowers where they are beginning to heal. A woman with nothing left to rule, so she rules the flowerbeds. Then the Particicution, that word I can't quite say. One of the most interesting points was the ritual where the handmaids, the most oppressed, the most beaten down, were allowed to tear a man to death with their bare hands. A sanctioned release of everything they aren't allowed to feel. And poor Ofglen, the first one. Until it is too late and she is given a new shopping companion, a new Ofglen, from who she learns that the old Ofglen committed suicide before she could be taken by the government because of her connection to Mayday. And she committed suicide just to protect her comrades.

While I was reading this I also kept thinking about 'Children Of Men'. Bleak in outlook and setting, you can feel that the world is all grey-scale around you, the only colours the red of the handmaids. It deals with the severely declining birthrate and social unrest with religious fanaticism. Though this one carries a meaner, more specifically female cruelty. As a woman who first read this in college and has reread it twice since, I can tell you it reads worse each time, more plausible. Atwood's dystopian tale of a theocracy that repressed women to the nth degree was an even more frightening and upsetting read the third time around, given the current anti-woman political climate. Some ring uncomfortably true to current society. We discussed The Handmaid's Tale at our book club this month for FOUR hours. We spent most of that evening on the woman who scratched that phrase and never got out. Fake Latin. It's the truest thing in the book.