THE BLIND ASSASSIN
By Margaret Atwood
Ms. Hen came across this book because it appeared it her
house one day. Her chicken brother brought it to the house and never read it, and left
it on the table. It took her a long time to get around to read it, but she was
happy she finally did, because it swept her into a different world.
This novel is a novel within a novel, then another novel
within another novel. The story winds around in different directions, with
multiple characters at different times in their lives. The story is told by
Iris Chase Griffin, an elderly woman looking back on her life who is in the
process of writing a book for her granddaughter to read after she is gone.
The story surrounds Iris’ relationship with her sister Laura
and their family. Iris and Laura’s mother dies in childbirth when they were
very young. The girls remember their mother dying from the kitten that was
inside her. Reenie, the housekeeper, raises the girls in place of their mother.
Their father is the heir to a button factory that amassed the family fortune.
They live in Fort Ticonderoga in Ontario, outside of Toronto.
Laura was always a scatterbrained girl, who grows up to be a
young woman who is not quite together. Iris marries a man because her father
wanted her to keep the family money. Iris is unhappily married, and immediately
after her honeymoon, her father passes away.
The novel within the novel is THE BLIND ASSASSIN, written by
Laura Chase, a noir piece about a woman and a man having a love affair in
squalid rooms. The novel within this novel is the story
that the man tells the woman that he is writing: a blind assassin rescues a
mute sacrificial virgin from being raped and slaughtered, which all takes place
on another planet.
The story of the blind assassin is the core of the novel.
But Ms. Hen never finds out what happens to the characters. The man never told
the woman the real end of the story. He told her rumors that could have
happened, but never a definitive ending.This confused Ms. Hen, but she understood why it moved that
way. Real life doesn’t have an ending. It just keeps going on and on.
The other novel within the novel is the one that
octogenarian Iris is writing about her childhood. We go with eighty-three year
old Iris through her daily life, walking to the donut shop, reading the
perverse graffiti on the walls in the bathroom, trying to make sure she doesn’t
fall and hurt herself.
Iris is a person who has suffered in her life, and Ms. Hen
feels sorry for her. Some people have bad luck: they get mixed up with the wrong
people, and they never get to love to the extent that they should have loved.
Iris never finds true peace, but she has secrets. She has her traveling trunk
that held her trousseau that hides all her memories. She plans on leaving the
trunk to her granddaughter when she died. She wants the truth of her past to be
known.
Ms. Hen loved this book. It is many different stories at
once, and the sadness of the characters holds depth. Ms. Hen doesn’t remember
the last time she read such a many-faceted novel that brought her to multiple
places. Ms. Hen gives this novel an enthusiastic five feathers up.
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