PDF Ebook The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
By downloading this soft documents e-book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood in the online web link download, you remain in the very first action right to do. This website truly offers you simplicity of how you can get the very best e-book, from finest vendor to the new released publication. You could locate much more e-books in this website by checking out every link that we give. One of the collections, The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood is among the very best collections to sell. So, the first you obtain it, the first you will certainly obtain all good regarding this book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
PDF Ebook The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood. In undertaking this life, lots of people consistently aim to do and get the best. New understanding, experience, session, as well as every little thing that could improve the life will be done. Nevertheless, many individuals often feel perplexed to obtain those things. Feeling the limited of experience as well as sources to be much better is among the does not have to own. Nevertheless, there is a really easy point that could be done. This is what your educator always manoeuvres you to do this one. Yeah, reading is the answer. Checking out a book as this The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood and other recommendations can improve your life high quality. How can it be?
To conquer the problem, we now supply you the innovation to download the book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood not in a thick printed data. Yeah, reading The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood by online or getting the soft-file only to review could be one of the means to do. You could not really feel that checking out a publication The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood will work for you. However, in some terms, May individuals effective are those that have reading habit, included this kind of this The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood
By soft data of the publication The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood to read, you might not need to bring the thick prints almost everywhere you go. Whenever you have ready to review The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood, you can open your kitchen appliance to review this book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood in soft documents system. So simple as well as fast! Checking out the soft documents e-book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood will certainly give you easy means to read. It could likewise be quicker due to the fact that you can review your e-book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood almost everywhere you really want. This on the internet The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood can be a referred publication that you could appreciate the solution of life.
Considering that e-book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood has fantastic perks to review, lots of people now grow to have reading practice. Supported by the established innovation, nowadays, it is easy to obtain the e-book The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood Even the publication is not existed yet in the marketplace, you to look for in this internet site. As what you can locate of this The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood It will actually reduce you to be the initial one reading this publication The Blind Assassin, By Margaret Atwood and get the benefits.
Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist.
For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious.
The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a- novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.
Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be--but, in fact, much more.
The Blind Assassin proves once again that Atwood is one of the most talented, daring, and exciting writers of our time. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it is destined to become a classic.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #644823 in Books
- Published on: 2005-05-17
- Released on: 2005-05-17
- Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 15
- Dimensions: 5.90" h x 1.50" w x 5.10" l,
- Running time: 1020 minutes
- Binding: Audio CD
Amazon.com Review
The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret Atwood's most ambitious work unfolds--a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire novel-within-a-novel--we're reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be: 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. Meanwhile, Atwood immediately launches into an excerpt from Laura Chase's novel, The Blind Assassin, posthumously published in 1947. In this double-decker concoction, a wealthy woman dabbles in blue-collar passion, even as her lover regales her with a series of science-fictional parables. Complicated? You bet. But the author puts all this variegation to good use, taking expert measure of our capacity for self-delusion and complicity, not to mention desolation. Almost everybody in her sprawling narrative manages to--or prefers to--overlook what's in plain sight. And memory isn't much of a salve either, as Iris points out: "Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them." Yet Atwood never succumbs to postmodern cynicism, or modish contempt for her characters. On the contrary, she's capable of great tenderness, and as we immerse ourselves in Iris's spliced-in memoir, it's clear that this buttoned-up socialite has been anything but blind to the chaos surrounding her. --Darya Silver
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Atwood's Booker Prize–winning novel, with its 1930s setting and stories within stories, is well suited to audio dramatization. O'Brien has simplified and streamlined the structure so that it jumps around in time less and makes clearer parallels between past, present and the whimsical internal novel. Some dialogue has been added, while many meditative and descriptive sections are absent, but the new words blend gracefully with Atwood's own, and her elegant style remains intact despite the omissions. Abundant sound effects make the production much richer than many audiobooks; it sometimes seems like a movie without the visuals, with chirping birds, clinking silverware and the murmur of crowds filling in the background. Music that alternates between a lovely, slightly melancholy theme and an ominous one, helps highlight the shifts from the protagonist Iris's personal history to her retelling of the novel. The skills of the cast almost make such extras unnecessary: the three women who play Iris at different ages capture her brilliant but frustrated spirit perfectly, while the actresses for her troubled younger sister, Laura, find just the right blend of dreaminess and defiance. Though in some respects this adaptation is less intricate than the rather complicated original, the condensation serves it well, making the story more tightly wound and intense in a way that should attract listeners who may be put off by Atwood's writing. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Library Journal
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 notDnothing will dampen the pleasure of getting there. Highly recommended.
-DBeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Be wary of hot, intelligent, passive-aggressive women
By Ethan Cooper
The narrator of THE BLIND ASSASSIN is Iris Chase, who is 83, one of two survivors of a wealthy family, the widow of an ambitious conservative politician and businessman, and the sister of Laura Chase, the author of a single acclaimed novel who died young. In telling the story of the blind assassin, Iris primarily inhabits three states of mind.
o She is the old Iris at the beginning of each chapter. This Iris is infirm, dependent on the goodwill of others, and writing a book. She is also highly regretful about the past and her own character and truly misses her granddaughter, from whom she is estranged. Suitably, this old Iris begins each chapter with a few observations about the weather.
o She is the passive-aggressive daughter of a wealthy but doomed businessman and the wife of an older man who was seeking a trophy wife. When recalling this person, Iris describes a young woman, dominated by her husband and hateful sister-in-law, who hides her intelligence and tends to lie her way out of difficult situations. This Iris tolerates (barely) sex with her husband.
o She is a competitive and not always admirable sibling. She also keeps herself going through an affair with a man who is a class enemy—a possible Commie!—of her husband. In this affair, Iris is in her twenties, aware that she is an attractive female, and enjoys sexual frisson and interplay with her lover. IMHO, this Iris is Atwood at her best, with this Iris showing how women pursue, enjoy, and take risks with sex. This stuff is hot.
Ostensibly, “The Blind Assassin” is the name of a science fiction story that the young Iris’s lover tells her, chapter by chapter, as they tryst in shabby hotel rooms or the tacky apartments of friends of friends. As her lover tells this story, a highly intelligent Iris is delighted, outraged, turned on, and playful while her lover, framed for a murder that occurred during a contentious labor strike, worries about who he can trust and the ubiquitous threat of arrest.
But midway through this book, Atwood drops this science fiction story, leaving this reader to wonder: Why name a long novel for what is really just a minor aspect of the book? Well, it turns out that THE BLIND ASSASSIN is more than a mere entertainment told to a lover. Instead, it is an apt description of a character that sometimes, irresponsibly, chooses not to see and at other times is nasty and vengeful.
In reading TBA, I also wondered how the young Iris could be passive, dominated, and dull in one context and risk-taking and hot in another. On this issue, Atwood once again demonstrates her great literary skill, with these two very different young women finally and convincingly contained within the personality of the complex Iris.
This is a fine novel and is highly recommended.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Densely Written... Story within a Story... One of my All Time Favorites!
By booknosh
Cut to the Chase:
A novel within a novel with little stories nested in between, this is an intricately woven tale about two sisters’ loves and lives, spanning over six decades. There are three distinct sections to this novel: a series of flashbacks by an octogenarian who initially claims she’s unsure who she is or why she’s cataloguing all of this, a series of local newspaper articles detailing the social events, political ambitions, and deaths of some of the more prominent characters, and a novel (also titled The Blind Assassin) that switches between detailing a love affair between a wanted man and a socialite and a fantastical science fiction story about an ancient destroyed world where virgins are still sacrificed and the woven blankets are measured by how many children lost their sight weaving them. If I had to be picky, I would say that yes, some of the twists are a little predictable, but overall, this is, in my opinion, Atwood at her best — it’s thoroughly well-written, crafted, thoughtful, provocative, and masterful. Rereading it now, almost a decade later, it is still my favorite work by her.
Greater Detail:
Our two main protagonists are Laura Chase and Iris Chase Griffen, the wealthy daughters of Captain Chase, an alcoholic war veteran who runs a button factory more by moral principles than economic realities. They’re more or less raised by a loyal servant named Reenie after their mother passes away (complications from childbirth), with their father slowly running the business into the ground, and neither of them really trained for life outside of their sprawling estate. Though the tone with which they interact with one another is often quite pitiless, these are both strong, engaging characters, struggling to make sense of the world around them.
We begin with Laura’s death: though it is officially ruled an accident, witnesses say she drives off the cliff on purpose, and one of the leading threads of the story is for us to find out how we got to such a pivotal point. We learn that Iris had a novel by Laura published posthumously, and that this book ended up being quite scandalous (for the time period). Detailing an illicit love affair between a socialite and a science fiction pulp writer, it’s something that her sister Iris notes (in the present) would hardly turn heads now, but at the time, was racy and divisive enough to inspire hate mail and censorship, as well as memorial awards decades later. Further, the book had personal ramifications for the characters in sometimes surprising ways, triggering a suicide and other reveals.
Some of the parts with Iris in the present feel a little slower relative to the pacing and urgency with which the characters interact in the novel-within-a-novel setting, but overall, it’s nicely juxtaposed throughout, and though these are women who have survived a series of tragedies, sometimes by judging themselves and others quite mercilessly, you feel for them both — the way they’ve purposefully and accidentally influenced, loved, protected and hurt each other, sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes with no awareness whatsoever.
I read and loved it a decade ago, when it first came out, and though I’ve since read almost everything (from poetry to her novels) by Atwood, this remains my favorite — its plot feels the most ambitious, and the relationships and characters detailed, sharp and unforgettable.
Comparisons to Other Books and Authors:
One of the things I’ve loved about both Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut is that they tend to tread and blend the lines between science fiction and what’s more traditionally considered literary fiction. The novel-in-a-novel part of this are the free-form, grammar-be-damned styles that Vonngeut, or perhaps Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, might use. This has been balanced wonderfully by the more lethargic present-time ruminations, and the generational tension and stories mired in decades of familial history is similar to Empire Falls by Richard Russo. I still think it’s Atwood’s most successfully ambitious and balanced work, with protagonists more deserving of empathy than our lead in Alias Grace and technically far more well crafted than Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
c booknosh.com reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful genre-bending novel
By Reid
I am a big fan of Margaret Atwood, though I haven't read all of her books I've loved every one I have read. This one is probably my favorite. It has a whole mess of layers, with a first-person memoir interrupted by both news clippings and excerpts from a novel within the world of the book. Not only that, but a significant portion of that novel is taken up with a man telling an epic sci-fi story to his girlfriend, so there are at least four layers of narrative.
This can be jarring at the beginning of the book as you swing between very different voices and genres of story, but as the book builds, these pieces intersect and inform each other, and by the end it comes together as one masterpiece. Along the way it offers remarkable insight into many topics, especially gender politics, class struggle, and 20th century Canadian history.
I won't give much away of the plot, but that's just because my words wouldn't do it justice. The writing and characters and structure are great enough that even though there are twists and turns, it does not depend on them. Whether you get anything spoiled for you or not, it will still be a joy to read.
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood PDF
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood EPub
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood Doc
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood iBooks
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood rtf
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood Mobipocket
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment