The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
New York: Nan A. Talese (Doubleday), 2000
First U.S. Edition
521 pages
This is the first book by Margaret Atwood that I have read--a lapse on my part, because she is a well-known and highly regarded writer. I definitely recommend The Blind Assassin. It is an intricate story--two stories, really, that play off one another and come together at the end. The principal story is the first-person account of the life of Iris Chase Griffen. Writing late in life, when she is in her 80's with her health failing, she gives the story of her life because, she says, if she does not, no one will know the truth. Though she writes in the 1990's, most of the events she relates occur much earlier, before the end of WWII. However, she also devotes considerable time to describing her day to day life as she writes, thus offering a sort of diary that counts almost as a third principal story interwoven with the other two.
Iris Chase Griffen had a younger sister, Laura Chase, who died, we learn in the first sentence of the book, in an auto accident immediately after the end of the war in Europe. We are told that she wrote a novel which was published after her death and which over the years has received considerable acclaim. Throughout The Blind Assassin, portions of Ira Chase Griffen's autobiography alternate with portions of Laura Chase's novel, also called The Blind Assassin, which thus becomes a novel within a novel. The interplay between the two stories is punctuated by newspaper accounts of events relating to the characters in the story--marriages, deaths, and special occasions. As the book progresses, the two stories become increasingly interconnected, and we (I, at any rate) begin to suspect that the situation is more complicated than we at first supposed. Nevertheless, the precise relationship between the two storiess remains in some respects mysterious until the very end, when the plot takes some surprising turns.
I enjoyed this novel partly for the story, which becomes progressively more interesting as different parts of it are revealed (not always in strict chronological order), but also for the writing. It is beautifully written, and there was no place where the writing did not carry me forward.
First U.S. Edition
521 pages
This is the first book by Margaret Atwood that I have read--a lapse on my part, because she is a well-known and highly regarded writer. I definitely recommend The Blind Assassin. It is an intricate story--two stories, really, that play off one another and come together at the end. The principal story is the first-person account of the life of Iris Chase Griffen. Writing late in life, when she is in her 80's with her health failing, she gives the story of her life because, she says, if she does not, no one will know the truth. Though she writes in the 1990's, most of the events she relates occur much earlier, before the end of WWII. However, she also devotes considerable time to describing her day to day life as she writes, thus offering a sort of diary that counts almost as a third principal story interwoven with the other two.
Iris Chase Griffen had a younger sister, Laura Chase, who died, we learn in the first sentence of the book, in an auto accident immediately after the end of the war in Europe. We are told that she wrote a novel which was published after her death and which over the years has received considerable acclaim. Throughout The Blind Assassin, portions of Ira Chase Griffen's autobiography alternate with portions of Laura Chase's novel, also called The Blind Assassin, which thus becomes a novel within a novel. The interplay between the two stories is punctuated by newspaper accounts of events relating to the characters in the story--marriages, deaths, and special occasions. As the book progresses, the two stories become increasingly interconnected, and we (I, at any rate) begin to suspect that the situation is more complicated than we at first supposed. Nevertheless, the precise relationship between the two storiess remains in some respects mysterious until the very end, when the plot takes some surprising turns.
I enjoyed this novel partly for the story, which becomes progressively more interesting as different parts of it are revealed (not always in strict chronological order), but also for the writing. It is beautifully written, and there was no place where the writing did not carry me forward.