The Blind Assassin

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The Blind Assassin
First edition cover
Author	Margaret Atwood
Country	Canada
Language	English
Genre(s)	Historical fiction
Publisher	McClelland and Stewart
Publication date	September 2, 2000
Media type	Print (paperback and hardback), audio-CD
Pages	536pp
ISBN	ISBN 0771008635

The Blind Assassin is an award winning and bestselling novel by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. It was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2000. Set in Canada, it is narrated from the present day, referring back to events that span the twentieth century.

The book won the Booker Prize in 2000 and the Hammett Prize in 2001. It was also nominated for Governor General's Award in 2000, Orange Prize for Fiction, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2002. ^[1] Time Magazine named it the best fiction novel of 2000 and included it in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923.

1 Plot summary
2 Quotations
3 See also
4 References

[edit] Plot summary

The novel centres around the protagonist, Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, who committed suicide immediately after the Second World War. Iris, now an old woman, recalls the events and relationships of her childhood, youth and middle age, as well as her unhappy marriage to Richard Griffen, a rival of her industrialist father. Interwoven into the novel is a story within a story, a roman à clef attributed to Laura and published by Iris about Alex Thomas, a politically radical author of pulp science fiction who has an ambiguous relationship with the sisters. That novel itself contains a story within a story, the eponymous Blind Assassin, a science fiction story told by Alex's fictional counterpart to that novel's protagonist.

The novel takes the form of a gradual revelation, illuminating both Iris' youth and her old age before coming to the pivotal events of her and Laura's lives around the time of the Second World War. As the novel unfolds, and the novel-within-a-novel becomes ever more obviously inspired by real events, it becomes clear that Laura's novel isn't what it seems; it is eventually revealed that Iris herself, not Laura, was the novel-within-a-novel's author and protagonist.

The book is set in the fictional Ontario town of Port Ticonderoga and in the Toronto of the 1930s and 1940s. It is a work of historical fiction with the major events of Canadian history forming an important backdrop to the novel. Greater verisimilitude is given through a series of newspaper articles that comment on events and on the novel's characters from a distance.

[edit] Quotations

What had she been thinking of as the car sailed off the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon sunlight, glinting like a dragonfly for that one instant of held breath before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain. (4)

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love. (256)

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth... The living bird is not its labeled bones. (395)

In this daydream, Winifred and her friends, wreaths of money on their heads, are gathered around Sabrina's frilly white bed while she sleeps, discussing what they will bestow upon her. She's already been given the engraved silver cup from Birks, the nursery wallpaper with a frieze of domesticated bears, the starter pearls for her single-strand pearl necklace, and all the other golden gifts, perfectly comme il faut, that will turn to coal when the sun rises. Now they're planning the orthodontist and the tennis lessons and the piano lessons and the dancing lessons and the exclusive summer camp. What hope has she got? (439)

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you? (448)