E-book
The blind assassin
Record details
- ISBN: 9781551994949 (electronic bk.)
- ISBN: 1551994941 (electronic bk.)
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Physical Description:
remote
1 online resource - Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: Toronto, Ontario : Emblem Editions, 2001.
Content descriptions
| Source of Description Note: | Description based on online resource; title from READ title page (Overdrive, viewed Feb. 28, 2014) |
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| Genre: | Electronic books. Fiction. |
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Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 June 2000
/*Starred Review*/ Stories spin within stories in this spellbinding novel of avarice, love, and revenge. It begins in Toronto in 1945 when Laura Chase, 25 years old, drives a car off a bridge. Iris Chase Griffen, her older sister and wife of a wealthy and conniving businessman, seems more concerned with the proper attire for her trip to the reporter-ringed morgue than with her sister's fate, but readers should never underestimate an Atwood heroine's capacity for self-discipline and subterfuge. Iris has had to perfect the art of self-abnegation ever since her mother's death, when her father, a compassionate manufacturer, asked her to look after Laura. Sheltered and naive, the girls were ripe pickings for Richard, to whom their father handed over his business and family property, including 18-year-old Iris, and Alex Thomas, a labor activist implicated in arson and murder, who may or may not be Laura's lover. Atwood, whose wit, metaphorical descriptions, and elegant characterizations are breathtaking in their beauty and resonance, weaves an intriguing trifurcate narrative. Newspaper articles document Canada's Red scare, the political and industrial jockeying for war profits, and high-society goings-on. Iris' wry memoir, which she is writing in the present at the end of her difficult life, reveals at long last the wrenching truth about herself and Laura amid hilariously acerbic commentary on the inanities of contemporary life. And then there are the most mysterious sections, chapters from Laura's posthumously published novel, The Blind Assassin, an erotic and poignant story of illicit love between a socialite and a radical fugitive, who charms his lover with fantastic stories about the planet Zycron, where a blind assassin falls in love with a mute sacrificial virgin. Aptly enough, figurative forms of blindness and silence are both bane and antidote in the thwarted lives Atwood conjures so masterfully. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 2000)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2001 September
Best bets for book clubsThe month of September offers excellent fiction titles for reading groups. BookPage's selections, all newly published in paperback, are listed below.
The Blind Assassin
By Margaret Atwood
This Booker Prize-winning novel blends elements of romance, suspense and - believe it or not - science fiction into what may be Atwood's most original work yet. Opening the narrative is '40s socialite Iris Chase Griffen's account of her sister's mysterious death. As the story unfolds, Atwood surprises readers by inserting a novel within the novel, a sci-fi book written by the dead sister herself, Laura Chase. But the story of Iris takes on a new dimension when her husband, a well-known industrialist, is discovered dead on a sailboat. The book's structure and scope are expansive, but the various narrative strands are in good hands, and Atwood's ambitions overwhelmingly succeed. A reading group guide is available online at www.anchorbooks.com.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
By Michael Chabon
Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows Joe Kavalier, an artist skilled in the art of escape, Houdini-style - a talent that gets him safely out of Nazi-ridden Prague in 1939. Kavalier makes it to New York City, where he teams up with his cousin Sammy Clay, a writer who is looking for a partner to design the art for a new comic book. The duo find themselves sitting on a gold mine when they create a host of superheroes - the mighty Escapist, the powerful, nocturnal Luna Moth - who fight Hitler and his evil forces. But off the page, the complexities of the real world beckon, as Kavalier struggles to raise money to bring his family to America, and he and Clay both come under the sway of Rosa Saks, a seductive muse who changes their lives forever.
The Years with Laura Diaz
By Carlos Fuentes
An epic novel from a master of the form, Fuentes' latest unfolds Mexican history through the eyes of Laura Diaz, whose experiences before and after that country's revolution provide the foundation for this remarkable book. Born in 1898 on a coffee plantation near Veracruz, Laura - a complex and seductive leading lady - enjoys a childhood of wealth and privilege. But she forgoes the traditional path for women of her upbringing and becomes involved in the Mexican revolution, marrying beneath her to a hero of the working class and raising a family. Spanning nearly a century, this unforgettable novel is as rich and varied as the Diego Rivera mural that graces its cover. A reading group guide is bound in the book.
Wild Life
By Molly Gloss
Set in 1905 on the Washington state frontier, Gloss' novel tells the story of Charlotte Bridger Drummond, an independent single mother who survives by writing dime novels featuring tough women much like herself. Charlotte's mettle is tested when her housekeeper's granddaughter goes missing, and she volunteers to join the search - a quest that resembles the plot of one her own adventure stories. Charlotte gets lost in the woods and is on the brink of starvation when she is saved by an unusual group of wild mountain folk. Shedding normal human conventions of behavior and language, she takes to their ways - all too well. It's a transformation from which Charlotte never fully recovers, one that alters her personal life and her writing life forever. A reading group guide is bound in the book.
Paris to the Moon
By Adam Gopnik
Gopnik, who was assigned by The New Yorker to cover Paris as a foreign correspondent, spent five years in the City of Light writing the columns that are collected here. The transplantation of the author - who calls himself a "comic-sentimental essayist" - and his family from one culture to another yields wonderfully readable results. Covering local and national events, as well as the fixations of the bourgeoisie, the pieces, presented through the eyes of an expatriate, have all the charm of the city itself. Along the way, readers learn what it's like to raise a family in France, a country unlike any other. Entries from Gopnik's own journal add a personal element to the book, and his observations on the differences between New York and Paris are always provocative. A reading group guide is bound in the book.
Copyright 2001 BookPage Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2000 July #1
Atwood's skillfully woven tenth novel is her most ambitious and challenging work to date, and a worthy successor to her recent triumph, Alias Grace (1996).It tells two absorbing stories that cast an initially enigmatic, ultimately pitilessly revealing light on each other. The central one is octogenarian Iris Griffen's bitter reminiscence of her life as the privileged daughter of a prosperous Ontario family, the Chases, and later as wife to Richard Griffen, the businessman who effectively inherits and firmly directs the Chase fortunes. The counterpart story, The Blind Assassin, is a strange futuristic tale that dramatizes in unusual (faux-Oriental) fashion a nameless woman's obsession with a science-fiction writer whose imaginings blithely mirror and exploit his "power" over her. This latter tale is published as the work of Iris's younger sister Laura, whose death in a 1945 automobile accident is judged by all who knew the sisters "as close to suicide as damn is to swearing." Newspaper items reporting notable events in the lives of the Chases and Griffens over a period of more than sixty years further enrich a many-leveled, smartly paced narrative that gradually discloses the nature and root causes of Laura's unconventionality and "madness," the full extent of Richard's compulsive aggrandizement and isolationism, and the price exacted from Iris for the "convenience" of her marriage. Intermittent echoes of Forster's Howards End sound throughout this bleak saga of political, social, and gender conflict. AndAtwood keeps our attention riveted by rendering her increasingly dramatic story in a fluent style distinguished by precise sensory description ("the thin, abstemious rain of early April") and thought-provoking metaphor ("Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown"). Furthermore, a bombshell of a climactic surprise (which we probably should have seen coming) lurks in the stunning final pages.Boldly imagined and brilliantly executed.Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; author tour Copyright 2000 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2000 August #1
Atwood does not mess around in her riveting new tale: by the end of the first sentence, we know that the narrator's sister is dead, and after just 18 pages we learn that the narrator's husband died on a boat, that her daughter died in a fall, and that her dead husband's sister raised her granddaughter. Dying octogenarian Iris Chasen's narration of the past carefully unravels a haunting story of tragedy, corruption, and cruel manipulation. Iris and her younger sister, Laura, are born into the privileged Canadian world of Port Ticonderoga in the early part of the 20th century. At 18, Iris is the marital pawn in a business deal between her financially desperate father and the ruthless, much-older industrialist Richard Griffen. When the father dies, the rebellious Laura is forced to move into Richard's controlling household, accelerating the tangled mess of relentless tragedy. At this point, Atwood brilliantly overlays a second story, an sf novel-within-a-novel, credited to Laura Chasen, that features nameless lovers trysting in squalor. Some readers may figure out Atwood's wrap-up before book's end. Worry not nothing will dampen the pleasure of getting there. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/00.] Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2000 July #4
Family secrets, sibling rivalry, political chicanery and social unrest, promises and betrayals, "loss and regret and memory and yearning" are the themes of Atwood's brilliant new novel, whose subtitle might read: The Fall of the House of Chase. Justly praised for her ability to suggest the complexity of individual lives against the backdrop of Canadian history, Atwood here plays out a spellbinding family saga intimately affected by WWI, the Depression and Communist witch-hunts, but the final tragedy is equally the result of human frailty, greed and passion.Octogenarian narrator Iris Chase Griffen is moribund from a heart ailment as she reflects on the events following the suicide in 1945 of her fey, unworldly 25-year-old sister, Laura, and of the posthumous publication of Laura's novel, called "The Blind Assassin." Iris's voice acerbic, irreverent, witty and cynical is mesmerizingly immediate. When her narration gives way to conversations between two people collaborating on a science fiction novel, we assume that we are reading the genesis of Laura's tale. The voices are those of an unidentified young woman from a wealthy family and her lover, a hack writer and socialist agitator on the run from the law; the lurid fantasy they concoct between bouts of lovemaking constitutes a novel-within-a-novel. Issues of sexual obsession, political tyranny, social justice and class disparity are addressed within the potboiler SF, which features gruesome sacrifices, mutilated body parts and corrupt, barbaric leaders. Despite subtle clues, the reader is more than halfway through Atwood's tour de force before it becomes clear that things are not what they seem. Meanwhile, flashbacks illuminate the Chase family history. In addition to being psychically burdened at age nine by her mother's deathbed adjuration to take care of her younger sibling, naïve Iris at age 18 is literally sold into marriage to a ruthless 35-year-old industrialist by her father, a woolly-minded idealist who thinks more about saving the family name and protecting the workers in his button factories than his daughter's happiness. Atwood's pungent social commentary rings chords on the ways women are used by men, and how the power that wealth confers can be used as a deadly weapon. Her microscopic observation transforms details into arresting metaphors, often infused with wry, pithy humor. As she adroitly juggles three plot lines, Atwood's inventiveness achieves a tensile energy. The alternating stories never slacken the pace; on the contrary, one reads each segment breathlessly, eager to get back to the other. In sheer storytelling bravado, Atwood here surpasses even The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace. BOMC main selection; author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
