|
Loading... The Blind Assassinby Margaret Atwood
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  shakey | Feb 9, 2010 |  This is my first Atwood and I'm speechless. I now understand why there are "Atwoodian's" in the world. The complexity of this novel is mindblowing on more levels than I can count. I'm convinced even the pace of the story was planned as the story unfolds. Atwood is a superior literary craftsmen and I'm on to the rest of her work! (  ) ddelmoni | Jan 28, 2010 | One word: *yawn*. Okay, not technically a word, more of an action. But this book was severely lacking in characters of any substance. The structure of the book was beautiful, and Atwood knows how to string a sentence and how to use her words (the one thing I loved about the novel). When I read a piece of fiction I want decent characters. They don't necessarily have to be likable, but they have to be more than an empty shell. (  ) nataramozer | Jan 12, 2010 | Excellent book. A little hard to get into, but well worth the effort. A story of a women's life, but I made some assumptions that I altered throughout the book and still had a little surprise at the end. Highly recommended ( ) Danacn | Jan 10, 2010 | Mini-Review: Iris Chase Griffen is 83 years old and lives alone with only two close friends to check on her. Most of her family is either deceased or estranged. She is in declining health and feels the need to tell her granddaught Sabrina the story, the true story, of her life and the interwoven lives of her sister, Laura, her husband, Richard and a mutual acqaintenance, Alex Thomas. This memoir with a novel within it and a novel within that novel shapes the story in an entertaining and clever fashion. I felt that the stories were trains on converging tracks and I was to wait for the collision that was bound to occur. Naturally, the memoir of an 80 year old woman is going to be lengthy but this novel proceeds quickly in that Ms. Atwood slips in newspaper artlcles of events that have taken place in the future and the reader desires to continue forward to discover the details surrounding the event. Many of Atwood's characters are unlikeable and downright irritating yet the simplicity and mysteries of Laura capture you and don't release you till the story's conclusion. (  ) Carmenere | Jan 9, 2010 | 
 Margaret Atwood poses a provocative question in her new novel, "The Blind Assassin." How much are the bad turns of one's life determined by things beyond our control, like sex and class, and how much by personal responsibility? Unlike most folks who raise this question so that they can wag their finger -- she's made her bed, and so on -- Atwood's foray into this moral terrain is complex and surprising. Far from preaching to the converted, Atwood's cunning tale assumes a like-minded reader only so that she can argue, quite persuasively, from the other side. In her tenth novel, Margaret Atwood again demonstrates that she has mastered the art of creating dense, complex fictions from carefully layered narratives, making use of an array of literary devices - flashbacks, multiple time schemes, ambiguous, indeterminate plots - and that she can hook her readers by virtue of her exceptional story-telling skills. The Blind Assassin is not a book that can easily be put to one side, in spite of its length and the fact that its twists and turns occasionally try the patience; yet it falls short of making the emotional impact that its suggestive and slippery plot at times promises.  In her ingenious new tale of love, rivalry, and deception, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood interweaves several genres — a confessional memoir, a pulp fantasy novel, newspaper clippings — to tease out the secrets behind the 1945 death of 25-year-old socialite Laura Chase.  Nearly 20 years ago, in speaking of her craft, the novelist Margaret Atwood observed that ''a character in a book who is consistently well behaved probably spells disaster for the book.'' She might have asserted the more general principle that consistent anything in a character can prove tedious. If we apply the old Forsterian standard that round characters are ones ''capable of surprising in a convincing way,'' Atwood's new novel, for all its multilayered story-within-a-story-within-a-story construction, must be judged flat as a pancake. In ''The Blind Assassin,'' overlong and badly written, our first impressions of the dramatis personae prove not so much lasting as total. Margaret Atwood is the literary world’s greatest stunt woman. She leaps from heights, crashes through walls, and flies through flames that more prudent writers would never dare. The title of her latest book, The Blind Assassin, announces its recklessness right up front. It’s a killer novel, all right, but it can see exactly where it’s going, even when we can’t.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0385720955, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:25:02 -0500) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (1)
Throughout the novel, Iris Chase's story about her own life as daugher of a rich, widely respected button factory owner alternates with that of 'The Blind Assassin', a controversial book penned by her sister Laura Chase, who committed suicide in her twenties. 'The Blind Assassin' is a story of an affair between a young upper class woman and a man on the run in the 1930s, the man of whom is also writing a science-fiction about a Blind killer in a fantasy world. So its a story, within a story, within a story. Intense!!
As expected, Laura Chase's book begins to parallel Iris and Laura's upbringing and lives, but in the most unexpected way. Atwood strageically places old newspaper articles between each chapter to convey the facts about the Chase family from the 1910s up to the 1990s. The plot thickens continually and it is only at the end that the real truth about Laura's death and Iris's estrangement from her own family is revealed, with a major twist.
The way Atwood paces all three stories to keep us guessing is impressive. She allows certain parts of each story to echoe the others. (