Product Description

Winner of the Booker Prize 2000, The Blind Assassin is a spellbinding novel that spans the decades between the First World War and the present, offering the sweep of an epic and the intimate focus of a family drama.

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious.

The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura'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.

Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be—but, in fact, much more.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #228278 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 641 pages

Amazon.com
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.

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Customer Reviews

Absolutely loved it!
All I need to say is I loved this book. I haven't read any of Atwood's other books but soon will. This was a book club choice and I read it over a weekend. I loved the intricate timelines, plot and suspense of it. Great book that I have since reccomended to friends.

Great read
Hands down, this is my favorite Margaret Atwood book. I was skeptical when confronted with the story-within-story thingy----hated, at first, to be dragged off into some other world----but it works. Beyond the structure, the prose is so good, the writing so crisp and ironic, that there is a treasure on every page.

A favorite, at the beginning, when our POV learns that her sister has committed suicide:

"I was furious with Linda for what she'd done, but also with the policeman implying that she'd done it...."

Atwood has an amazing gift for stating the obvious yet making it mean something more. Nothing she writes is ever beside the point, every page manages to inform character and let them drive the plot.

Can't reccomend this one highly enough.

One of Atwood's best
Before reading this I had read "Alias Grace" and half of "Handmaid's Tale," neither one did anything for me. Though the writing style was intricate and held depth I just couldn't find anything in the stories that I connected to. I thought that I would just never become a fan of Atwood's style or stories.

This changed, however, when I read "The Blind Assassin." It had been on my bookshelf for years but when I finally picked it up I discovered that the tale was inventive, complex, and utterly haunting.

The story is pretty much a recollection of events and memories that have haunted and effected the life of the novel's narrator, Iris Chase Griffen. Iris recollects the story of her family primarily focusing on her sister's death and analyzes how her story is (of course) intricately bound within the one she tells. Though she's sheltered and a bit ignorant of all the details Iris describes her family's secrets in an effort to understand her own life and take control of the past by passing on her family's secrets to her granddaughter (and us, Atwood's readers).

From my point of view, the story is haunting ghost story. Iris tries to untangle past events and understand how they have effected the course of her life as well as that of her sister. Iris seems determined to pass on her family's secrets (its "skeletons in the closet" or "ghosts in the attic") so that her reader(s) will have full knowledge of the past and be allowed to make of the truth what he or she will.

The novel is haunting and inescapable. I couldn't put it down and I wish I hadn't finished it. This is one of those novels you'll have to read over and over again.