Word: assassine
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...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...
Margaret Atwood's 10th novel should equal or surpass the popular appeal she achieved in The Handmaid's Tale (1985) while maintaining her consistently high literary achievements. English professors will relish the postmodern trick--a novel with a novel within a novel--that gives The Blind Assassin (Doubleday; 521 pages; $26) its title. The less theoretically inclined can simply kick back and marvel at Atwood's gripping tale, which stretches from World War I almost to the present moment. At the center are two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase, daughters of a wealthy Canadian manufacturer who is ruined during...