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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail Yahoo! Search Search: Sign InNew User? Sign Up News Home - Help Navigation Primary Navigation Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Top Stories Most Popular Secondary Navigation Asia Pacific World Search Search: Atwood's latest study in human frailty AFP - Wednesday, April 1 HONG KONG (AFP) - - Canadian author Margaret Atwood has a knack for picking her subjects. Her latest book "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" hit the bookstores in October, less than a month after Wall Street behemoth Lehman Brothers buckled under the weight of its debts and collapsed into bankruptcy. Other US financial giants soon found themselves begging for government assistance, while the country's stock market went into freefall. Could there have been a better time to be writing about the world's obsession with borrowing? "I wrote it before the crisis. It happened to appear just at the time of the crisis," the Canadian author modestly told AFP during her recent visit to Hong Kong to attend the city's annual Man International Literary Festival. Even if it was just coincidence, the non-fiction release was perfectly timed. Atwood, best known for her novels, said US newspapers fought hard for the exclusive right to publish excerpts before its release. "It was the only book available on the subject at the time," she said. It was not the first time the 69-year-old, who won Britain's Booker Prize in 2000 with her multilayered family memoir "The Blind Assassin," has envisioned a crisis before it hit the mainstream consciousness. In 1984, Atwood wrote "The Handmaid's Tale," a dystopian novel about a fundamentalist society where women were reduced to the status of childbearers and servants. The book pre-empted the Taliban's misogynist regime in Afghanistan, which only caught the world's attention after the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. Her other futuristic novel "Oryx and Crake" charted the destruction of the earth by global warming, pandemics and genetic engineering. It was published in 2003, shortly before the deadly outbreaks of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and bird flu, and ahead of the burgeoning awareness of climate change. Atwood insists she does not have a crystal ball, and says she is simply adept at identifying recurrent themes in human history. "These themes are not new. I didn't invent anything," she said. The idea for her latest book came three years ago when Atwood noticed a barrage of adverts offering help with debt to people in the US and Canada, at the same time as the United States was funding an expensive war in Iraq. "Payback" is not about debt management or high finance. Rather, it looks at the concepts of debt and fairness as the building blocks of the human society. Atwood argues that sense of fairness, balance and justice are inherent in all cultures and religions, and were manifested in the exchange of favours, gifts, insults and revenge that preceded the existence of money. "We long to believe that things ought to be fair, that if I lend you some money, you will pay me back," she said. The global financial crisis was above all about the breakdown of fairness, the writer said. "What has happened in the financial crisis is that people ignored those structural principles (of fairness). They did things that were not equivalent, they did things that were not fair," she said. In her book, Atwood uses examples from history and literature of the type of nightmares that ensue if the give-and-take balance is tipped. An emperor who overtaxed his subjects would cause poverty, disease and revolution before the system was restored to balance. A good contemporary example of the importance of fairness and balance was the relationship between the US and the biggest holders of its huge government debt, China, the writer said. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has recently urged the US to maintain its good credit and guarantee the safety of China's assets, she said, but America is equally dependent on China continuing to support its debt. "It's a very interdependent thing to have such a big debt. The two countries are joined at the hip. Their fates are now entwined," she said. Email Story IM Story Printable View Blog This Recommend this article 0 users recommend Sign in to recommend this article » Most Recommended Stories » Related Articles: Entertainment & Lifestyle Postal Service launching "Simpsons" stampsReuters - 2 hours 22 minutes ago Trio of actors ready for "Clash of the Titans"Reuters - 2 hours 33 minutes ago Disney doubles up on 3-D "Toy StoryReuters - 2 hours 46 minutes ago Atwood's latest study in human frailtyAFP - Wednesday, April 1 `Idol' judges distracted by Iraheta's funky outfitAP - Wednesday, April 1 Enlarge Photo Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood gestures as she gives a press conference in Oviedo on October 22, 2008. Atwood has been awarded the 2008 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters. 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