The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

[lightreads]

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The autobiography of a woman written at the end of her life, encompassing her girlhood as the familial wealth faded; her strange, ethereal sister; her marriage. And running through that, excerpts from her sister’s posthumously published science fiction cult classic.

Strange, beautiful, and just ever so slightly not quite. The genre-crossing here isn’t a gimmick. It’s done so well, it feels like the sort of expensive, avant-garde meal where the fish is sprinkled with pumpkin seeds and the martini is topped with a dash of habanero juice (mmm, that was tasty). Unexpected compliments.

And even though I didn’t think this quite came together into something coherent, it’s Margaret freaking Atwood, you know? She writes like – okay. You know how a lot of professional book reviewers toss the word “luminous” around when they don’t know what to say about a bit of contemporary fiction? Well, Margaret Atwood’s writing is luminous, and I mean that very specifically. I mean that when I read one of her books, I feel like there’s light coming off each page and illuminating me. (We’re pretending, for this exercise, that I actually read a printed copy of this book, which I in fact did not.) Just, her writing makes me think of all those words we use for qualities and textures of light – lucid, liquid, cool. So I honestly don’t care what she’s writing about, when you come right down to it.




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Comments

[brigid]

I love this book so much!

Sadly for other books, it's become my 5/5 rating, and few books measure up to it.

I disagree and think it was coherent, if rambling/sprawling in the way personal narratives/messy lives are rambly and sprawling (IE, it's the nature, not a flaw in technique or style). Interestingly, I'm reading "The Battle Of The Sexes In Science Fiction" and it's shedding some historic light on the era most of the book's action takes place in.

[lightreads]

Oh man, so I was flipping through reviews of this on goodreads and such, like you do. And I was totally shocked by the number of people who independently said, "this was nice, but I don't get why we had the excerpts from the book within a book. It would have been so much better without." And I was like 'what?!' because that makes no sense to me. The book within a book was amazing; I love the way this novel treated science fiction and eroticism like secrets. Secrets a woman would have to keep. The excerpts were so decadent, so otherworldly, but of course Laura was a pseud, of course it was all hidden even from the reader, the way a woman like Iris would be forced to hide her rich inner life.

/babble.

Anyway, the way I think this book didn't come together for me was at a higher meta level. I kept feeling like the nested tales that the lovers tell each other in Iris's book were reaching for something to do with gender and power and sex. There were obvious readings, but I didn't find them particularly interesting, and I kept feeling like there was something more the stories were supposed to be illuminating, except the pieces weren't lining up for me. Dunno. I'll probably reread it sometime, and then who knows what I'll think.