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Loading... The Blind Assassinby Margaret Atwood
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Two very different stories expertly woven into one beautifully tragic tale about two sisters. This is my second book by Margaret Atwood and I have to say that I am strongly considering devoting my entire 2010 reading year to locating and consuming everything she has written. Handmaid's Tale got me with the compelling story line, but this one was more about all the nuanced details and descriptions--just masterful writing from beginning to end. A definite recommend. (  ) dele2451 | Dec 6, 2009 |  The Blind Assassin is a story that winds slowly through the lives of a wealthy Canadian family before, during, and after The Depression. The majority of the book is told from the perspective of Iris Chase, an elderly woman reflecting and writing about her life and her family. With her thoughts, the book skips between her 1930’s and 1990’s. At irregular intervals, Iris’s reflections are interrupted by clippings from newspapers and from a novel (also titled ‘The Blind Assassin’) which is written by the sister of Iris, Laura Chase. Though the technical writing in this book was superb, the frequent changes of perspective made the pacing feel off and the characters less sympathetic. The first three-fourths of the book is an extremely slow read that sags with the weight of too many metaphors. Many of the metaphors were quite good, clever even, as they should be. But when there is a metaphor or simile in every other paragraph, they become unwelcome. So much filler designed to increase word count. The last quarter of the book finally picked up the pace and delivered a moving end to the story. Ultimately, I found myself thinking through most of the book that the science-fiction story told by a character within Laura Chase’s novel was better than the novel written by Laura Chase or Iris Chase. Perhaps this was Margaret Atwood’s intent, perhaps not. (  )2  Trai | Nov 27, 2009 | This book makes you work carefully to understand the complexity of the storyline. Not many books successfully do this. Great for people with an analytical mind. ( ) fsutton | Nov 24, 2009 | I'm giving this book four and a half stars because I both love it and hate it. To explain that confusing notion, I've made a list of pros and cons:PROS: amazing technical ability on the authors part. really cool structure. great language, very cool writing. impressive control of the story.CONS: characters are all whiny, self centered, and annoying. the plot twist is easy to see coming from two hundred pages before its announced. the plot twist doesn't come until you've invested 500 pages, and even then it's not that shocking. pacing. long. slow. tedious. I'm TORRRRNNNNNNNN. (  ) maryjanemanolos | Nov 7, 2009 | An exploration of social norms, family values, and life in Canada in the 1930's. Atwood's characters are rich and complex. There's a "story within a story (within a story)" structure here, and my one criticism is that the deeper stories are not that interesting except when they inform the larger one. An enjoyable read, nevertheless. (  )1 jorgearanda | Oct 21, 2009 | 
 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 (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 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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