The Blind Assassin: A Novel, Cover may vary Paperback – August 28, 2001

Cut to the Chase:A novel within a novel with little stories nested in between, this is an intricately woven tale about two sisters’ loves and lives, spanning over six decades. There are three distinct sections to this novel: a series of flashbacks by an octogenarian who initially claims she’s unsure who she is or why she’s cataloguing all of this, a series of local newspaper articles detailing the social events, political ambitions, and deaths of some of the more prominent characters, and a novel (also titled The Blind Assassin) that switches between detailing a love affair between a wanted man and a socialite and a fantastical science fiction story about an ancient destroyed world where virgins are still sacrificed and the woven blankets are measured by how many children lost their sight weaving them. If I had to be picky, I would say that yes, some of the twists are a little predictable, but overall, this is, in my opinion, Atwood at her best — it’s thoroughly well-written, crafted, thoughtful, provocative, and masterful. Rereading it now, almost a decade later, it is still my favorite work by her.Greater Detail:Our two main protagonists are Laura Chase and Iris Chase Griffen, the wealthy daughters of Captain Chase, an alcoholic war veteran who runs a button factory more by moral principles than economic realities. They’re more or less raised by a loyal servant named Reenie after their mother passes away (complications from childbirth), with their father slowly running the business into the ground, and neither of them really trained for life outside of their sprawling estate. Though the tone with which they interact with one another is often quite pitiless, these are both strong, engaging characters, struggling to make sense of the world around them.We begin with Laura’s death: though it is officially ruled an accident, witnesses say she drives off the cliff on purpose, and one of the leading threads of the story is for us to find out how we got to such a pivotal point. We learn that Iris had a novel by Laura published posthumously, and that this book ended up being quite scandalous (for the time period). Detailing an illicit love affair between a socialite and a science fiction pulp writer, it’s something that her sister Iris notes (in the present) would hardly turn heads now, but at the time, was racy and divisive enough to inspire hate mail and censorship, as well as memorial awards decades later. Further, the book had personal ramifications for the characters in sometimes surprising ways, triggering a suicide and other reveals.Some of the parts with Iris in the present feel a little slower relative to the pacing and urgency with which the characters interact in the novel-within-a-novel setting, but overall, it’s nicely juxtaposed throughout, and though these are women who have survived a series of tragedies, sometimes by judging themselves and others quite mercilessly, you feel for them both — the way they’ve purposefully and accidentally influenced, loved, protected and hurt each other, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes with no awareness whatsoever.I read and loved it a decade ago, when it first came out, and though I’ve since read almost everything (from poetry to her novels) by Atwood, this remains my favorite — its plot feels the most ambitious, and the relationships and characters detailed, sharp and unforgettable.Comparisons to Other Books and Authors:One of the things I’ve loved about both Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut is that they tend to tread and blend the lines between science fiction and what’s more traditionally considered literary fiction. The novel-in-a-novel part of this are the free-form, grammar-be-damned styles that Vonngeut, or perhaps Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, might use. This has been balanced wonderfully by the more lethargic present-time ruminations, and the generational tension and stories mired in decades of familial history is similar to Empire Falls by Richard Russo. I still think it’s Atwood’s most successfully ambitious and balanced work, with protagonists more deserving of empathy than our lead in Alias Grace and technically far more well crafted than Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.c booknosh.com reviews

“The Blind Assassin” has a twist or two, but Atwood has wrapped the story in so many layers of deliberate writing that they are telegraphed well in advance. I feel like the Duke in “Amadeus” who tells the genius there are too many notes. I enjoyed the book, but it felt over long, yet oddly ended too soon.

I have read lots of novels, and Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is not quite like anything I’ve ever read. I also have a whole stack of novels that I was planning to read after finishing this one, but to move on to something else right away seems wrong somehow. This is the kind of novel that stays with you and that needs to simmer. I have been left with a strong impression, but I’m not sure how to even articulate what that is. There is so much going on in this novel, and for me, that’s a good thing. Some people enjoy genre fiction – mystery, sci-fi, romance, etc. – with its reliable conventions, while others are always searching for a piece of literature that’s unique. If you fall into the latter group, I highly recommend this novel.As most reviews of the novel mention, this is a layered narrative that engages and plays with multiple literary genres. Ultimately, though, The Blind Assassin is a family drama told (mostly) by Iris Chase Griffen. The details of this drama, but even more so the style in which Atwood chooses to have Iris relay the story of her family, make this an exceptional and thought-provoking read (though sometimes, purposely, evasive even in the purported act of revealing). Stories about relationships between sisters are nothing new and the domestic drama has long been associated with female authors, often to their detriment. Here, though, Atwood elevates this story of the rise and fall of a once (briefly) powerful Canadian family by setting it against a backdrop of international conflict (World Wars I and II) and placing it parallel to a fictional, campy story of intergalactic conflict. What could be one woman’s quiet, calmly recalled family memoir becomes epic, and not just because she grew up in a house named Avilion with stained glass images of Tristan and Isolde.Within the campy science fiction story (the story within the story of Chase’s Blind Assassin) on the planet Zycron is where we meet the novel’s namesake, the blind assassin, but he is more important to the novel as a symbol of both the lack of vision and perspective that often handicaps our more central characters and the unintended ways in which they cause pain to even those closest to them as a result of that lack of vision, than he is a character in his own right. The Blind Assassin is also the title of Laura Chase’s only novel, published posthumously in 1947. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I think that disappearance of the blind assassin character from the Zycron story when the male writer publishes it (within the novel The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase, within the novel The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood) is key. At this point, somewhere nestled in the middle of Atwood’s novel, the female lover in Chase’s novel begins to take control of a story that had been told almost exclusively to her by her male lover. The woman decides that the blind assassin will run away with the sacrificial virgin whom he is supposed to kill before going on to wreak even greater havoc on the corrupt civilization that was set to execute this virgin. The woman never seemed thrilled about the idea of sacrificing the young girls to begin with, and now she saves this young woman’s life and wants to give her some version of a happy ending. The woman and her lover talk about where the story could go from there, and the male writer attempts to work the kinks his lover has thrown into the story into the narrative in a way that makes sense to him. Eventually, when the woman finds the published story (after her lover has been sent off in Europe to fight in a war), she realizes that her part of the story has been cut. The lovers do not escape. There is no happy ending. This, of course, corresponds to some details of the story of the Chase sisters, but I don’t want to give too much away here. This episode makes me wonder about Iris Chase’s vision at the end of the novel, as she concludes her life story and that of her family. Although she seems clear-minded and rid of the illusions that clouded her perspective as a young woman, Atwood plants enough doubt in the reader’s mind throughout the novel about blind spots and narrative reliability and the distortion of memories that we just can’t know for sure. Once you get far enough into Atwood’s novel to figure out who the man and woman in Chase’s novel are meant to correspond to, you have to wonder what the relationship between these two characters was like from the man’s perspective (whose we only get through multiple filters), how much of the woman’s version is clouded by what eventually happens in their lives, by the passage of time.I suspect I will continue to think about this novel and may eventually want to revisit it so that I can better understand why this novel resonates so much with me. For now, I recommend it as a rich, unique meditation on not just family, romantic love, loss, and history, but on the act of storytelling itself.

I wanted to like The Blind Assassin more than I did because I've heard such amazing things about Margaret Atwood, but I think I started with the wrong book of hers.I definitely had a slow start with The Blind Assassin. I liked the writing but the story didn't draw me in until 75-100 pages in. However, I'm glad I stuck with it because as the story progressed and the pieces started fitting together, I ended up enjoying the book. I did have the ending pretty much figured out before it happened, but it all came together perfectly, and I did like the ending. I thought there was a little bit of revenge that Richard deserved.While this book wasn't my favorite, I'm definitely intrigued to read more by Atwood.