Word: assassin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Thorpe, a mild fellow for an assassin, said quietly, as if in explanation, "When you race in front of Australians, you don't let them down." What a kid, what a race. What a show this was in Sydney. The land Down Under - big, friendly, sweating, lovable Australia - on top of the world...
...first blush, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (Doubleday; 521 pages; $26) seems determined to get its plot told telegraphically, chiefly through a series of newspaper clippings. A 1945 story reports on the death of Laura Chase, 25, who somehow drove a car off a Toronto bridge. An item two years later reveals the discovery of the body of Richard E. Griffen, 47, a prominent Canadian industrialist found dead of an apparent cerebral hemorrhage in the cabin of his sailboat. Then comes a fast-forward to 1975 and a note on the death of Aimee Griffen, 38, of a broken...
Included in Iris' memories, somewhat abruptly, are passages from a novel called The Blind Assassin, set in the 1930s, in which a wealthy woman carries on a clandestine affair with a man hiding out from the law, apparently because of his actions as a labor organizer. To keep her attention (when they aren't having sex), he invents and tells aloud a science-fiction tale about a planet called Zycron, populated by tyrannical Snilfards and subjugated Ygnirods. "I suppose this is your Bolshevism coming out," the woman teases...
...what does The Blind Assassin have to do with, well, The Blind Assassin? Iris also remembers the 1934 strike at her father's button factory and a handsome agitator named Alex Thomas whom she and Laura daringly hid for a time in the attic of their house. Is this "real" story the genesis of the Laura Chase novel? And how do we know that Laura wrote...
...back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I've set down, but because of what I've omitted. What isn't there has a presence, like the absence of light." This inexorable bubbling up of the unspoken makes The Blind Assassin unforgettable...