The Blind Assassin

In her 10th novel, Margaret Atwood creates an elderly woman named Iris Griffen, who looks back on her life life of privilege and wealth in Ontario, Canada. Alongside Iris's story, we read a bizarrely futuristic novel about obsession, written by her sister Laura, who seems to have committed suicide in 1945. The two stories are enhanced by newspaper accounts about these two women and their families over half a century, and by a stunningly unexpected ending.

"Atwood writes an entertaining and bracing tale, fun to read, forgettable when finished." - Dianne C. Jackman (Nation, 12/11/00)

"For three days I could hardly put the book aside. Still, the novel sometimes verges close to the sentimental and often sounds like a pastiche of period writers....As for craftsmanship, the plot miters are perfect (though only the obtuse will fail to guess the two big revelations in the final pages); the voices, especially that of the elderly Iris Chase, quite mesmerizing; and the prose as touching or funny as Atwood wishes it to be. Yet as sheerly enjoyable as THE BLIND ASSASSIN is, I can't help but feel that the book may be just a little too easy somehow, that it covers its ground expertly b - American Academy of Family Physicians (Washington Post Book World, 9/3/00)

"If we apply the old Forsterian standard that round characters are ones 'capable of surprising in a convincing way,' Atwood's new novel, for all its multilayered story-within-a-story-within-a-story construction, must be judged flat as a pancake. In THE BLIND ASSASSIN, overlong and badly written, our first impressions of the dramatis personae prove not so much lasting as total....[T]he two parts of Atwood's big new book feel like separate projects that have been soldered together rather than thematically connected. Worse still, nothing in either part gives a reader much desire to forge connecti - Alger Morton Fitch (New York Times Book Review, 9/3/00)

"THE BLIND ASSASSIN...possesses the unusual lyrical sensuousness that distinguished ALIAS GRACE (1996), Atwood's last major work. A complex rumination on narrative, it is as elegant and dynamic as its predecessor, but more contemplative and more edgy--and much more witty." - Jane H. Ohlmeyer (London Review of Books, 10/5/00)

"The novel is largely unencumbered by the feminist ideology that weighed down such earlier Atwood novels as THE EDIBLE WOMAN and THE HANDMAID'S TALE, and for the most part it is also shorn of those books' satiric social vision. In fact, of all the author's books to date, THE BLIND ASSASSIN is most purely a work of entertainment--an expertly rendered Daphne du Maurieresque tale that showcases Ms. Atwood's narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic." - John R. Oneal (New York Times, 9/8/00)

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