A Hand at Cards

Paris in the Terror swallows Charles Darnay, and Dickens begins the strangest rescue operation in Victorian fiction: a spy recognized by his own sister, a card game where the stake is a man's neck, a coffin that turns out to hold paving stones. But Atwood's real subject is a piece of paper. A letter written in a Bastille cell, hidden for decades, surfaces in open court, and she uses it to make a writer's unsettling argument: the written word acquires an authority it may not deserve, and no living witness can outvote it. From Robinson Crusoe to Anne Frank, paper testifies.