More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...
Im ersten Drittel habe ich mich extrem gelangweilt. Dann habe ich ein bisschen in Rezensionen herumgelesen, um herauszufinden, ob es noch besser wird. Durch die dabei gefundenen Spoiler wurde es ein bisschen weniger langweilig, aber nicht viel. Am Ende ist es halt ein Buch darüber, wer jetzt eine verbotene Affäre mit wem hatte, und es gibt kaum ein Thema, das mich weniger interessiert.
This is a great book, a book with layers on layers and a reveal at the end that makes me realize that if I went back and reread the entire book again now with the full knowledge of the plot, I would see so much more in the story than I did the first time through.
However, it's also a sad book, a book about old age and unhappy marriage and the breakdown of family relationships, so I know I probably won't go back and reread it to get the full extent of appreciate out of the story that I'm pretty sure is possible.
The book tells a story on many layers; it's old-aged Iris telling the story of her childhood with her sister Laura and then her unhappy marriage to Richard. It's the story of The Blind Assassin, a book written by Laura and published posthumously, in which a …
This is a great book, a book with layers on layers and a reveal at the end that makes me realize that if I went back and reread the entire book again now with the full knowledge of the plot, I would see so much more in the story than I did the first time through.
However, it's also a sad book, a book about old age and unhappy marriage and the breakdown of family relationships, so I know I probably won't go back and reread it to get the full extent of appreciate out of the story that I'm pretty sure is possible.
The book tells a story on many layers; it's old-aged Iris telling the story of her childhood with her sister Laura and then her unhappy marriage to Richard. It's the story of The Blind Assassin, a book written by Laura and published posthumously, in which a woman meets a lover who is a pulp SF writer and who tells her the story of the planet Zycron and the pulp SF tales that take place thereon, ostensibly the story of a blind assassin and the girl he rescues, but I now suspect there is a high degree of reflection in these stories of what's happening in the outside world of Iris and Laura, although I didn't know enough to catch it all the first time through. Laura is the most nebulous character all throughout, it's always hard to tell what she's really thinking and doing since we only see her through her sister's eyes, and her sister's eyes. Only at the end do all the remaining loose ends get tied together and we finally understand what each character's place is within the novel and how they all fit together.
Like I said, I think that if I reread the book now, having just finished it, I'd find layers and layers more, and discover that in a way, Atwood was telling the whole story all along, we just didn't know enough to see it until the end of the novel. But, it is also such a melancholy story and left me with such a sad feeling for really almost all the characters in it, that I'm not sure I want to go back and revisit the story again.
This one took me a long time to get into -- throughout the first half, I felt like I was reading dutifully ("It's Margaret Atwood, you can't just stop reading a book by Margaret Atwood") and it took a long time to get through. But right around the halfway point the book starts making connections between three of the novel's separate stories (the narrator Iris and her sister Laura as children and young women, a novel within a novel, and the pulp sci-fi story contained within that novel) so that we begin to understand how the fourth story (Iris as an old woman) came about. From that point on, I was riveted.
The good: 1. It's Margaret Atwood. I don't think she could write a bad book if she tried.
2. I actually stayed up reading till 4am one night because I just couldn't put it down. It's been a …
This one took me a long time to get into -- throughout the first half, I felt like I was reading dutifully ("It's Margaret Atwood, you can't just stop reading a book by Margaret Atwood") and it took a long time to get through. But right around the halfway point the book starts making connections between three of the novel's separate stories (the narrator Iris and her sister Laura as children and young women, a novel within a novel, and the pulp sci-fi story contained within that novel) so that we begin to understand how the fourth story (Iris as an old woman) came about. From that point on, I was riveted.
The good: 1. It's Margaret Atwood. I don't think she could write a bad book if she tried.
2. I actually stayed up reading till 4am one night because I just couldn't put it down. It's been a long time since I was that invested in a book.
3. Margaret Atwood knows what words mean and how to put them together to form sentences that make sense and aren't trying too hard to be "literary". She just writes sentences that people might actually say using words that people might actually use. I realize this probably sounds like a strange thing to praise, but some writers don't know how (or don't want) to do this. It's nice to read a "literary" book that isn't bogged down with overreaching (and, uh, crappy) language.
4. It's mostly linear, but because it's narrated in the present by Iris as an old woman who obviously knows all of the events she's telling us about, sometimes we learn something important that hasn't happened yet, something so far removed from the current events of the story that it becomes a small mystery as to how Atwood will get us from point A to point B. Not just "what happens next?" but the more interesting question, "how and why did that happen at all?"
5. Iris and Laura are victimized and disempowered, but in very different ways. It's hard to be a woman in a patriarchal society, but that doesn't mean every woman has the same experience.
The bad: 1. It's over 500 pages long, and it took 250 pages to get into it. That's a lot of pages to read on faith.
2. The novel within the novel is celebrated as a modernist classic. But it lacks the characteristic features of modernist literature and was written after the modernist period is considered to have ended. It's also not really "a classic" (if nothing else, the pulpy sci-fi story-within-the-novel-within-the-novel would keep it from being a classic). Margaret Atwood is smart, I'm sure she knows lots about modernist literature and books that become classics. Is this supposed to be a comment about literary criticism and the publishing industry? I wasn't sure.
The stark writing in this novel is poetic -- and like poetry, it forces the reader to slow down and savor its rich descriptions and the implicit sorrow that becomes unveiled over the course of the story. It moved maybe a bit too slowly for me by the end, but I savored it nonetheless. I especially enjoyed the Zycronian tale that undergirds the love and tragedy of the novel.
Everyone finished it, though it was mighty long. No one raved about it - some hated it, while others liked it, but thought it flawed. Some liked the puzzle strewn through the book, and appreciated the challenge of putting the pieces together, while others stumbled over the chronological jumble, or found Atwood straining too hard at being clever. And everyone agreed that none of the characters were well-rounded - nor were they anyone whom you would enjoy meeting.
