The Blind Assassin

I've started and stopped this book a number of times before finally following through. I don't know whether it is particularly complex, or if it is just hard for me to follow the sci-fi subplot, or if I am just dumb. But now that I've finished it I really really liked it, and Atwood is a master of prose, etc.

“Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.”

This book is about two sisters from a family that once held high esteem in the village they grew up in. A family that once had money. The book moves through the two World Wars of the previous century as the sisters grow up. The book is written as if the elder of two is writing down her memoirs as an 80-year old lady. The sadness keeps building as the story progresses. Sadness piled upon sadness.

I love reading Atwood, and this is no exception, it is a very funny (the laugh-out-loud kind of funny), and interesting read with a large and colourful vocabulary. At the bottom of this review I'll share all of the words that stood out to me, because they were being used in different way that I am used to, or because I think I should use these more, or because hitherto I simply was not aware of their existence. The start of the book confused me somewhat though as I am not really one for reading the blurbs on the back. And in this case it would have at least helped me place the characters a bit. It didn't really matter though. I think the book was meant to be read with people leafing back to find clues they first missed. And that was something I really enjoyed. Being surprised and finding myself leafing back to find what became clear later on.

If you don't like descriptions of an upper-class lady about attire and decoration this book is probably not for you. If you do not mind, you learn a great deal about terms for all kinds of decoration material that was used at the beginning of the previous century. As well as learning about different kinds of dresses, veils and the such.

Here are some quotes I enjoyed; interspersed is a list of words that stood out to me.

52:
History as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not
this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past
in which nothing smells.

55:
Why do we always assume at such moments that everyone in the
world is staring at us? Usually nobody is.

fractious

propitiatory

95:
At the very least we want a witness.We can't stand the idea of our
own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

102:
Now I think it was more complicated than that. It may have been a warning. It may also have been a burden. Even if love was underneath it all, there was a great deal piled on top, and what would you find when you dug down? Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baneful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones. A talisman of sorts, this love, but a heavy one; a heavy thing for me to carry around with me, slung on its iron chain around my neck.

caul

145:
...many people take a
curatorial interest in their own scars.

hector

162:
We didn't learn very much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery.

inane

169 the button factor picnic:
More and more I feel like a letter – deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one

windfall

181 loaf givers:
It was the purpose in life of older people to thwart me. They were devoted to nothing else
...
I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron, with her
sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with Hour, and
from what I knew about Circe and Medea, the only things they'd ever
cooked up were magic potions, for poisoning heirs apparent or chang-
ing men into pigs.As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so
much as a piece of toast. I wondered where Mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas, about ladies and cookery both.

compunction

tippler

souse

dowdy

doily

beg off

erstwhile

lascivious

voracious

bas-relief

stodgy

aplomb

fob off

pinko

breviary

tawdry

glassine

purloin

inert

sibilant

216: the attic
(Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes
one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

porphyry

paunchy

228 Imperial Room:
It was God, looking down with his blank, ironic searchlight of an eye.
He was observing me, he was observing my predicament, he was
observing my failure to believe in him. There was no floor to my room: I was suspended in the air, about to plummet. My fall would be endless - endlessly down.
Such dismal feelings however do not often persist in the clear light
of morning, when you are young.

indenture

trousseau

truss

242: The Tango
They were new money,
without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as if they'd
covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

244: The tango
Sex may go nicely with many things, but vomit isn't one of them.

sequin

chiffon

epicene

suds

wallow

filigree

effluvium

283: steamer trunk
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. 

nacreous

292: the fire pit
Well, they bill by the minute, these lawyers, just like the cheaper whores.

waylay

frump

portcullis

yokel

jaunty

cupola

marcel

303: postcards from Europe
The French hotel had a bidet, which Richard explained to me with
the trace of smirk after he caught me washing my feet in it. I thought,
they do understand something the others don't, the French. They
understand the anxiety of the body. At least they admit it exists.

304:
The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets.

insouciance

dulcimer

taffeta

bouffant

ermine

chiffon

nostrum

biddy

stevedore

specious

impecunious

quoits

379: the ashtray
the rich have always been kleptomaniacs

poultice

emery

corundum

riffle

traipse

pinafore

patina

garish

sheen

q.t.

insouciant

gambol

layette

belfry

morass

tatty

maquillage

stolid

abstemious

lugubrious

verisimilitude

scurrilous

bilious

508: victory comes and goes
But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep

harridan

518: the other hand
The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret in misery and yearning to try the story for it, long it's twisted road.

A family saga as narrated by a woman in her 80s, a perfectly ordinary woman with no talent or ambitions. It is like a road trip, this book; and this sassy grandma with an overactive imagination is driving us around, really slowly, taking all the sinuous side roads and detours, stopping every now and then to describe with exceptional vividness what we would have passed by unnoticed. In other words, it is long. I had to slog through most of it, but I don't regret it in the least.

The first line of the book fixes the pivot around which the rest of the tale is spun.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

“Mother is with God,” Laura said. True, this was the official version, the import of all the prayers that had been offered up; but Laura had a way of believing such things, not in the double way everyone else believed them, but with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her

“Laura, what are you doing?” I said, “That's the Bible.”
“I'm cutting out the parts I don't like.”

Iris

I kicked off my shoes, threw myself down on the endless cream-colored bed. It had a canopy, with muslin draped around as if on safari. This, then, was where I was to grin and bear it - the bed I hasn't quite made, but now must lie in. And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read...Otherwise you begin excusing yourself

"I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I have set down, but because of what I have omitted"

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin starts with the end at the beginning: Iris Chase's sister, Laura, drives off a bridge in Iris's car. From that point on, we get three threads of story: (faux) newspaper accounts related to Iris's life, Iris looking back on her own life as an old woman and telling the story that leads up to what happened with her sister, and a story-within-a-story, called “The Blind Assassin”, about a pair of secret lovers weaving a science fiction tale about a pair of secret lovers. Unveiled early on in the narrative through the newspaper accounts, it is revealed that shortly after her sister's death (which is ruled an accident), Iris's husband died. And then their daughter grew up with drug problems and succumbed to them, leaving her own child behind. And then that grandchild was raised not by Iris, but Iris's sister-in-law, who also died. Iris is old, and alone, and has no reason to hold on to her secrets anymore. So she starts to write.

She starts with the story of her grandparents, and the button factory her grandfather started in their small Canadian town, the profits from which rendered him suitable enough marriage material for her grandmother, from a society family in decline. When their three sons went off to war, only Iris's father came back. His wife, Iris and Laura's mother, was never especially healthy and died from complications from a miscarriage. Her father tries to keep the family business together through the Depression, but the Chases find themselves unable to even maintain their own finances, and that's how Iris finds herself married off to Richard, an older industrialist, in a deal that's supposed to keep the factory open and what's left of the family afloat. Instead, the entire Chase family capsizes, in their own ways.

Margaret Atwood is an incredibly gifted author. To pull off the narrative structure of the book, with its intertwining threads and mysteries, is a fiendishly difficult task, but to do it while writing so beautifully and powerfully is the work of a master. It is a little jarring at the beginning, when you're first getting used to the path the book is taking you down, but it works. There were so many passages in this book that I marked, struck by how gorgeous the phrasing was. The characters, particularly Laura and Richard, were vivid, and Iris herself is someone we gradually come to understand as she tells her story and feels so real that when the book and her story end, the loss feels unusually poignant.

This is an incredible book: sad, yes, but told with such skill and in a way that keeps you wanting more and more...I had a hard time putting it down at night. I'm kicking myself that this is only my second Atwood and I'm really looking forward to getting into more of her work. As a heads up to potential readers, there is some really heavy stuff in here: parental death, spousal abuse, sexual abuse/rape...I think Atwood handles this material with sensitivity and grace, but it's something to be aware of. I'd recommend this book strongly, particularly for mature readers (there's nothing gratuitous, but there's a lot of darkness and I think it's a work that's best appreciated with a little life experience behind the reader).

I expected the book to come as billed: “An intricately intertwined set of narratives hiding a shocking family mystery.” Instead it was
1. Snippets of an interesting science fiction story, told by unknown lovers, padded with
2. An excruciating story of two young, insipid, girls and their coming of age. The beginning of the lives of the girls was interesting to develop setting and character, and their adulthood (the end of the time described in this part) was predictable, but at least relevant. However, for the middle 300 pages, this becomes an interminably long day-by-day description of everything that they ate and wore. In addition, because these girls are so completely insipid we are treated to the details of how they hate absolutely everything and aspire to nothing, which is a little less than endearing. However, this is still not the most insufferable of the three parts, because the remainder of the book is
3. The nominal framing device. Less a story on its own and more to remind us how “clever” Atwood is in her prose style, this framing device seems to consist of determining how many ways the narrator can find to remind us that she's old and her heart bothers her. She goes to eat donuts. She reads the graffiti on bathroom stalls. She has chest pain, a lot. She tries to do her laundry. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Even without much in the way of plot (that which there is having been telegraphed 300 pages in advance), this book could have had literary merit if the characters had been at all interesting. But instead Laura and Iris are the most frustrating characters known to my literary world. For example, Iris complains bitterly about getting married away to a rich man, for which one may have sympathy, had she not spent the proceeding 100 pages explaining how she wanted to be rich and she expected to marry money to get there. Laura is flighty and “spiritual,” and disobedient, in such ways as to be maximally irritating but accomplish nothing. However, if Laura ever directly told anyone anything there wouldn't really be a book, so there is that.

The other most frustrating part of this book is the “unknown lovers” framing device for the Blind Assassin story. It is obvious to the reader who the unknown lovers are; however the characterization in this segment is so drastically different from that of the others (in that the female protagonist of this section, unlike every other female character in this book, has opinions, expresses them and acts on her will.) It is unclear whether this is done in a futile attempt to obscure the identity of the unknown lovers, or because the story is being told by an unreliable narrator (which makes little sense, given the final identity.)

Addendum, 12/11 - having finished Oryx & Crake it feels nothing short of criminal that Margaret Atwood spent time writing this book when she is clearly capable of so much more.

I'm disappointed I decided to pick this up on audible. I should have known that with Atwood's work it would need to be read.

With that being said it was a perfectly enjoyable performance on the audio, it's just that it was very muddied with the amount going on. Reading would have been better to follow along. At one point I actually had to google the story because with the audio I was having trouble grasping that it was a story within a story, that had a story within that story.... (crazy).

I would certainly buy this book and read it instead of listening one day, there were plenty of things I really loved in it.

So 3.5 stars with audio, if you're interested in this book, PLEASE READ IT.

I think Atwood might be one of the smartest writers out there. Each of her books that I have read have been so unique, with well-defined characters. This one is a bit of a mystery, which I liked, and the story was as elegantly told as her others. The “twist” wasn't as exciting as I expected, so the end fell a little flat for me but still a very good read.