6/4/2023 0 Comments The blind assassin review![]() It is very rare that I am beholden to a singular book the way I am with Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. By turns lyrical, outrageous, formidable, compelling and funny, this is a novel filled with deep humour and dark drama. ![]() As the invented story twists through love and sacrifice and betrayal, so does the real one while events in both move closer to war and catastrophe. During their secret meetings in rented rooms, the lovers concoct a pulp fantasy set on Planet Zycron. Sexually explicit for its time, The Blind Assassin describes a risky affair in the turbulent thirties between a wealthy young woman and a man on the run. Chief among these was the publication of The Blind Assassin, a novel which earned the dead Laura Chase not only notoriety but also a devoted cult following: as Iris says, she herself lives ‘in the long shadow cast by Laura.’ While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister’s tragic death. Laura Chase’s older sister Iris, married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but now poor and eighty-two, is living in Fort Ticonderoga, a town dominated by their once-prosperous family before the First World War. ![]() ![]() ![]() ‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ Thus begins The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s stunning new novel. ![]()
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