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The Blind Assassin: A Novel, by Margaret Atwood
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The Blind Assassin opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura?s story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Brilliantly weaving together such seemingly disparate elements, Atwood creates a world of astonishing vision and unforgettable impact.
- Sales Rank: #15523 in Books
- Brand: Anchor
- Published on: 2001-08-28
- Released on: 2001-08-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.10" h x 1.04" w x 6.20" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 521 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret Atwood's most ambitious work unfolds--a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire novel-within-a-novel--we're reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be: What had she been thinking of as the car sailed off the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon sunlight, glinting like a dragonfly, for that one instant of held breath before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain. Meanwhile, Atwood immediately launches into an excerpt from Laura Chase's novel, The Blind Assassin, posthumously published in 1947. In this double-decker concoction, a wealthy woman dabbles in blue-collar passion, even as her lover regales her with a series of science-fictional parables. Complicated? You bet. But the author puts all this variegation to good use, taking expert measure of our capacity for self-delusion and complicity, not to mention desolation. Almost everybody in her sprawling narrative manages to--or prefers to--overlook what's in plain sight. And memory isn't much of a salve either, as Iris points out: "Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them." Yet Atwood never succumbs to postmodern cynicism, or modish contempt for her characters. On the contrary, she's capable of great tenderness, and as we immerse ourselves in Iris's spliced-in memoir, it's clear that this buttoned-up socialite has been anything but blind to the chaos surrounding her. --Darya Silver
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Atwood's Booker Prize–winning novel, with its 1930s setting and stories within stories, is well suited to audio dramatization. O'Brien has simplified and streamlined the structure so that it jumps around in time less and makes clearer parallels between past, present and the whimsical internal novel. Some dialogue has been added, while many meditative and descriptive sections are absent, but the new words blend gracefully with Atwood's own, and her elegant style remains intact despite the omissions. Abundant sound effects make the production much richer than many audiobooks; it sometimes seems like a movie without the visuals, with chirping birds, clinking silverware and the murmur of crowds filling in the background. Music that alternates between a lovely, slightly melancholy theme and an ominous one, helps highlight the shifts from the protagonist Iris's personal history to her retelling of the novel. The skills of the cast almost make such extras unnecessary: the three women who play Iris at different ages capture her brilliant but frustrated spirit perfectly, while the actresses for her troubled younger sister, Laura, find just the right blend of dreaminess and defiance. Though in some respects this adaptation is less intricate than the rather complicated original, the condensation serves it well, making the story more tightly wound and intense in a way that should attract listeners who may be put off by Atwood's writing. (Sept.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Library Journal
Atwood does not mess around in her riveting new tale: by the end of the first sentence, we know that the narrator's sister is dead, and after just 18 pages we learn that the narrator's husband died on a boat, that her daughter died in a fall, and that her dead husband's sister raised her granddaughter. Dying octogenarian Iris Chasen's narration of the past carefully unravels a haunting story of tragedy, corruption, and cruel manipulation. Iris and her younger sister, Laura, are born into the privileged Canadian world of Port Ticonderoga in the early part of the 20th century. At 18, Iris is the marital pawn in a business deal between her financially desperate father and the ruthless, much-older industrialist Richard Griffen. When the father dies, the rebellious Laura is forced to move into Richard's controlling household, accelerating the tangled mess of relentless tragedy. At this point, Atwood brilliantly overlays a second story, an sf novel-within-a-novel, credited to Laura Chasen, that features nameless lovers trysting in squalor. Some readers may figure out Atwood's wrap-up before book's end. Worry notDnothing will dampen the pleasure of getting there. Highly recommended.
-DBeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
One of the best nested stories I've read.
By James B.
In The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood weaves a large number of narratives together to tell one story of love and loss. Each story feeds off of the other in an organic way, all building to a very somber conclusion.
The main character of this novel is Iris Griffen, an elderly woman nearing the end of her life. The first story is how she lives in the modern age (the 1990's). The second is the biography she's writing about her early life with her family, particularly her sister Laura. Laura killed herself in 1945, and had a novel published posthumously, the titular 'the Blind Assassin'. This novel is the third story, detailing a love affair between a rich woman unsatisfied with her life and a communist-sympathizing pulp fiction writer. During the affair, he tells the woman a made up love story about planet Zyrcon. This is the actual 'blind assassin' story. All four of these tales feed into the life story of Iris Griffen.
While Iris is certainly a sympathetic protagonist, the real star of this novel is Atwood's prose. This book is filled with wry, humorous descriptions of life and people, and she excels at being able to give each character a unique voice. I can certainly see why this won the Booker prize.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Densely Written... Story within a Story... One of my All Time Favorites!
By booknosh
Cut to the Chase:
A novel within a novel with little stories nested in between, this is an intricately woven tale about two sisters’ loves and lives, spanning over six decades. There are three distinct sections to this novel: a series of flashbacks by an octogenarian who initially claims she’s unsure who she is or why she’s cataloguing all of this, a series of local newspaper articles detailing the social events, political ambitions, and deaths of some of the more prominent characters, and a novel (also titled The Blind Assassin) that switches between detailing a love affair between a wanted man and a socialite and a fantastical science fiction story about an ancient destroyed world where virgins are still sacrificed and the woven blankets are measured by how many children lost their sight weaving them. If I had to be picky, I would say that yes, some of the twists are a little predictable, but overall, this is, in my opinion, Atwood at her best — it’s thoroughly well-written, crafted, thoughtful, provocative, and masterful. Rereading it now, almost a decade later, it is still my favorite work by her.
Greater Detail:
Our two main protagonists are Laura Chase and Iris Chase Griffen, the wealthy daughters of Captain Chase, an alcoholic war veteran who runs a button factory more by moral principles than economic realities. They’re more or less raised by a loyal servant named Reenie after their mother passes away (complications from childbirth), with their father slowly running the business into the ground, and neither of them really trained for life outside of their sprawling estate. Though the tone with which they interact with one another is often quite pitiless, these are both strong, engaging characters, struggling to make sense of the world around them.
We begin with Laura’s death: though it is officially ruled an accident, witnesses say she drives off the cliff on purpose, and one of the leading threads of the story is for us to find out how we got to such a pivotal point. We learn that Iris had a novel by Laura published posthumously, and that this book ended up being quite scandalous (for the time period). Detailing an illicit love affair between a socialite and a science fiction pulp writer, it’s something that her sister Iris notes (in the present) would hardly turn heads now, but at the time, was racy and divisive enough to inspire hate mail and censorship, as well as memorial awards decades later. Further, the book had personal ramifications for the characters in sometimes surprising ways, triggering a suicide and other reveals.
Some of the parts with Iris in the present feel a little slower relative to the pacing and urgency with which the characters interact in the novel-within-a-novel setting, but overall, it’s nicely juxtaposed throughout, and though these are women who have survived a series of tragedies, sometimes by judging themselves and others quite mercilessly, you feel for them both — the way they’ve purposefully and accidentally influenced, loved, protected and hurt each other, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes with no awareness whatsoever.
I read and loved it a decade ago, when it first came out, and though I’ve since read almost everything (from poetry to her novels) by Atwood, this remains my favorite — its plot feels the most ambitious, and the relationships and characters detailed, sharp and unforgettable.
Comparisons to Other Books and Authors:
One of the things I’ve loved about both Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut is that they tend to tread and blend the lines between science fiction and what’s more traditionally considered literary fiction. The novel-in-a-novel part of this are the free-form, grammar-be-damned styles that Vonngeut, or perhaps Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, might use. This has been balanced wonderfully by the more lethargic present-time ruminations, and the generational tension and stories mired in decades of familial history is similar to Empire Falls by Richard Russo. I still think it’s Atwood’s most successfully ambitious and balanced work, with protagonists more deserving of empathy than our lead in Alias Grace and technically far more well crafted than Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
c booknosh.com reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A melancholy tale that reads like a Greek tragedy
By DaveL
First, I think The Blind Assassin is a masterpiece, a beautifully written chronicle of family decline and personal tragedy. The narrator, Iris Chase, takes us from her grandfather's ascension into industrial age wealth through the death of two of three sons in World War I, leaving the third son, her father, shattered and disillusioned This leads to the near abandonment of his two daughters, Iris and her enigmatic younger sister, Laura, to the care of their housekeeper.
Iris, now in in her elder years and sickly, is recording the family's past in a memoir/confessional to her estranged granddaughter. She writes movingly of her current life and the trials of old age, her family history, and her disastrous marriage of convenience, but most of all, she gradually reveals the truth about the defining moment of her life--the death of Laura (no spoiler here--the first line of the book is: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.") This is a slow, melancholy tale that reads almost like a Greek tragedy.
The characterization is rich and the author creates a somber mood that pervades throughout. But Ms. Atwood doesn't make it easy for the reader. There are plots within plots, novels within novel within novels, some of whose narrators are left intentionally vague to conceal the twist at the end. While there were times when the changing point of view was jarring, the overall effect was compelling.
Still, as I was reading, I felt the paradox of plowing through a novel I was thoroughly enjoying. I wondered if the editor of a less famous author might have taken her aside and said: your writing is wonderful, my dear, but you're spoiling the story. I fully appreciate that we live in the age of text messaging and Twitter, and that attention spans are at an all-time low. The fashion of the day is less detail, not more. But beautifully written prose can still captivate an audience when used in an appropriate way. And that's where my problem lies.
Is each word, phrase, sentence and paragraph beautifully written? Yes. Are they all appropriate for the mood of the story? Absolutely. Are they all necessary? Not so much.Pace is part of a writer's craft as well. And the level of detail in this book spoils the story.
The blind assassin is a wonderful novel, but takes time and patience to get through. I could have lived with at least a hundred pages less of it.
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