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Loading... The Blind Assassin (original 2000; edition 2000)by Margaret Atwood
Work detailsThe Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)
Every now and then I read something that puts the other books I've read and liked so much into a different perspective. Atwood is genius. I'm not really tempted to change any ratings or rethink anything (except updating my favorites - very much in need of such). I felt the way I felt for a reason. It's just impossible to compare something like this to most other things that I read. I want to say some things about the ending but I'm afraid to get spoilery. I'll just say that the characters are so well and intricately developed that it was the only way it could end. This was a hauntingly deep and moving story as well as an excellent insight into a portion of the history and society of the time. (  ) Yona | May 2, 2013 |  Excellent story in my opinion. It was intriguing, witty and melancholy. I wanted to change the destiny of the story so many times. I would think, no don't do that... what are doing... don't be so stupid... etc. even though I fully understood it was a different time in history and so culturally different in many ways. I enjoyed the authors writing style, I enjoyed the way she used the the different methods to tell the story, that to me is what kept the story so intriguing. ( ) Jolynne | Apr 27, 2013 | 3.5 stars Iris is an amazing characterization and is the reason for all the praise the novel gets. But I wanted more from all the other characters, in particular Alex Thomas. Richard and Winifred, the villains, are totally one dimensional. Atwood tends to go for something big and she really only achieves it with one character. (It was the same with Jimmy in Oryx and Crake. Hello, the title is Oryx and Crake and we don't even know if Oryx is "real" or a clone.) The ensemble gets lost. I want moral complexity from all the characters. Laura though is the best Dostoevsky character since Dostoevsky. As to the book's structure, and in particular the denouement, I knew from the get go Richard got Laura pregnant, but I did go through whole book assuming Alex wrote The Blind Assassin and that it was in the notebooks. I can't say Iris being the author shocked me much. From the middle to the end I found it quite slow, then all the loose ends start coming together far too fast for it to feel right. Again, Atwood is aiming high but falling a bit short. She can't quite handle the scrambled chronology interwoven with the metafiction of The Blind Assassin. Some of the characters are wooden and some of the characters are born in great detail only to vanish. Margot Dionne does an amazing job narrating. (  ) librarianbryan | Apr 23, 2013 | De gustibus non est disputandum, of course - however I have now ploughed my way though this, my second Margaret Atwood book-the first was Alias Grace- and I think it will be my last. I have tried, given the awards, the hype, the translations into upteen languages, to give this writer my best attention but I'm afraid can't see it. To me both books never rise above the sort of "fiction", one attempts to read on the beach or in bed with a cold. Books like these are sometimes called a "good read" but read alongside books like Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice to name a few, it is very apparent that literature they are not. There is a forced and constructed quality to both prose and structure, and an ultimate lack of significance to the purport of the whole edifice. Over 500 pages to say what? The merit of true literature is not arbitrated by taste, "good reads" are. (  ) lapassionata | Apr 13, 2013 | Incredible. I love Ms. Atwood. ( ) lizmcglynn | Apr 10, 2013 |
 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.  Ms. Atwood's absorbing new novel, ''The Blind Assassin,'' features a story within a story within a story -- a science-fiction yarn within a hard-boiled tale of adultery within a larger narrative about familial love and dissolution. The novel is largely unencumbered by the feminist ideology that weighed down such earlier Atwood novels as ''The Edible Woman'' and ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' and for the most part it is also shorn of those books' satiric social vision. In fact, of all the author's books to date, ''The Blind Assassin'' is most purely a work of entertainment -- an expertly rendered Daphne du Maurieresque tale that showcases Ms. Atwood's narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic. 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. Is contained in
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 Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:59:19 -0500) Told in the story within a story fashion, the reader learns about the mysterious death of one sister from her surviving sister. (summary from another edition) |
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