![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: The Blind Assassin
Author: Margret Atwood
Published: New York: Doubleday, 2000
Page Count: 521
Total Page Count: 29,753
Text Number: 86
Read For: my own enjoyment, checked out from the library
Short review: A book of nested storylines, The Blind Assassin is the story of two sisters: one dies suddenly, and the survivor tells their stories. The surviving sister, Iris Chase Griffin, writes down her life story through commentary on her daily life and reflections back to her childhood; interspersed are newspaper clippings and abstracts from her sister Laura Chase's posthumous novel The Blind Assassin in which an upper-class woman falls in love with a blue-collar man who tells her a science-fiction story whenever they meet. The complex narrative structure makes for a slow build up of plot but ultimately a rich, complex, and meaningful portrait of the Chase family and the events that lead to the downfall of the family name and Laura's suspect death. As always, Atwood is an accomplished author: she manages to make the book's complex, convoluted narrative structure work and writes characters that are gritty and realistic at the same time that they are complex and larger than life. The plot unfolds in natural but dynamic turns that make for engrossing reading, and Atwood's approach to her characters mixes cynicism and empathy in such a way that their stories are realistic, meaningful, and entirely unromanticized. By the end, The Blind Assassin is a realistic but dramatic story about two women's lives in which they are both powerful and powerless, in which they both leave a legacy and are forgotten.
( Long review. )
Review posted here at Amazon.com.
Author: Margret Atwood
Published: New York: Doubleday, 2000
Page Count: 521
Total Page Count: 29,753
Text Number: 86
Read For: my own enjoyment, checked out from the library
Short review: A book of nested storylines, The Blind Assassin is the story of two sisters: one dies suddenly, and the survivor tells their stories. The surviving sister, Iris Chase Griffin, writes down her life story through commentary on her daily life and reflections back to her childhood; interspersed are newspaper clippings and abstracts from her sister Laura Chase's posthumous novel The Blind Assassin in which an upper-class woman falls in love with a blue-collar man who tells her a science-fiction story whenever they meet. The complex narrative structure makes for a slow build up of plot but ultimately a rich, complex, and meaningful portrait of the Chase family and the events that lead to the downfall of the family name and Laura's suspect death. As always, Atwood is an accomplished author: she manages to make the book's complex, convoluted narrative structure work and writes characters that are gritty and realistic at the same time that they are complex and larger than life. The plot unfolds in natural but dynamic turns that make for engrossing reading, and Atwood's approach to her characters mixes cynicism and empathy in such a way that their stories are realistic, meaningful, and entirely unromanticized. By the end, The Blind Assassin is a realistic but dramatic story about two women's lives in which they are both powerful and powerless, in which they both leave a legacy and are forgotten.
( Long review. )
Review posted here at Amazon.com.
