![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Two sisters, relics of an older time when women were merely decorative pawns, bought and sold to enhance the social position of the men in their lives. It is supposed to have been posthumously published by an unidentified pair of authors, then the author of this story-within-a-story is revealed as Iris’s dead sister Laura – but it’s not, and eventually it becomes clear that Iris wrote it herself, not Laura. She ponders her sister’s suicide and a parallel story, a strange fantasy novel, which seems to the reader at first to be completely irrelevant. She’s an old woman, remembering, setting the record straight (she says) for her grand-daughter, Sabrina. Iris is the narrator, but that’s not clear at first. The Blind Assassin is complex, and readers have to be content with ambiguity, but it’s well worth it. Atwood is one of the best writers of our time, and everything I’ve read of hers ( The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Oryx and Crake and The Penelopiad) has been terrific. March 31st, 2002īeware: lots of spoilers if you haven’t read the book. The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, won the Booker Prize in 2000. To see my progress with completing the Complete Booker Challenge, see here. An occasional series, cross-posting my reviews from The Complete Booker. ![]()
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