He was observing me he was observing my predicament he was observing my failure to believe in him.
It was God, looking down with his blank ironic searchlight of an eye.
“It was as if the illuminated dome of the Royal York Hotel had been wrenched off and I was being stared at by a malign presence located somewhere above the black spangled empty surface of the sky. Atwood’s prose is lovely, her descriptions exquisite. Iris, though, finds herself cast out of her former life to live the rest of her years under her younger sister’s infamous shadow, haunted by her past at every turn.Īlternating between the present day and the past, A Blind Assassin reveals information bit by bit, sometimes using newspaper articles to fill in time gaps, sometimes using the younger sister’s posthumous novel within a novel, of the same title, to the same effect. The book, titled A Blind Assassin, becomes a cult hit, breeding speculation and rumor and inspiring young hearts everywhere with its story of forbidden love a story many suspect to be true.
A couple of years later, Iris publishes a book under her sister’s name, posthumously, and the ramifications to Iris’s husband and his family are devastating. Hidden where only Iris can find it, Laura leaves a collection of notebooks. In 1945, when Iris is a young wife to an industrial tycoon with a promising political future, her troubled younger sister, Laura Chase, drives a car over a bridge. Now, Iris has nothing to her name except a failing heart, regrets, and her secrets. Iris Griffen is a woman at the end of her life a life that began in a crumbling industrial empire at the end of the Gilded Age, where once her family held wealth, power and prestige. “History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.” – excerpt from The Blind Assassin From the beginning, I was hooked and drawn along as the story unfolds, layer upon layer.
Intrigued by her discussion and other aspects of the book, including that it won the Man Booker Prize in 2000, I bought it. The Blind Assassin is an example of a “story within a story”, something you might be familiar with if you’ve read Frankenstein or The Princess Bride. This book came to my attention while taking Atwood’s online writing course through Masterclass, where she explained the use of different literary devices.
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