Word: laura
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...someone who lunges to glory swathed in a get-up resembling a bee-keeper's outfit, French fencer Laura Flessel-Colovic has had no problem establishing herself as one of France's most chic and photogenic sports personalities. Since first grabbing attention with a pair of gold medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, she has wowed sports fans with graceful and tenacious swordswomanship, adding three world championship titles to a list of international laurels. Away from her foils, the stunning 28-year-old has enhanced her celebrity status with flourishes of wit and charm that have made her a star...
...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...
What links this string of fatalities? The answer, it turns out, is Iris Chase Griffen--Laura's elder sister, Richard's wife, Aimee's mother. Now in her 80s, Iris realizes that she is the only person left alive who knows the circumstances behind these deaths. Having been warned by her doctor that her heart is weak, the old woman begins, reluctantly, to write down what she remembers: "After all I've done to avoid it, Iris, her mark, however truncated: initials chalked on the sidewalk, or a pirate's X on the map, revealing the beach where the treasure...
This novel, Iris reveals, was published shortly after her sister's death, and, after an initial furor about its sexual content, gives Laura Chase a posthumous literary fame that endures into the late '90s. "Laura touches people," Iris writes...
...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...