The Blind Assassin

The frame-tale—also known as a “story within a story”—is one of my favorite fictional devices, and Margaret Atwood’s deft handling of three separate storylines makes this book a truly astonishing read.

Though her characters are fictional, their story is set against a backdrop of major Canadian historical events of the 1930s and 1940s. The exterior tale carries Iris Chase, an unhappily married upper-class woman, from childhood to death, while the real author of the interior story—a novel about a pair of illicit lovers that contains an embedded science fiction tale (the eponymous Blind Assassin)—is one of the story’s biggest mysteries.… show more.

This book is peak Atwood for me, a meeting place of so many things that made me fall in love with her as a reader: her dry humour; her playful approach to language; the wonderful ping-pong between the past and the present, the burning, smouldering heart that lay at the core of all her protagonists.

But the novel is also deeply in love with (and critical of!) the increasingly proliferate ways our hypermedia culture is able to tell a story, and this book's opening pages are a perfect primer for Atwood’s multi-thread account of her protagonist’s sister’s suicide and their… show more.

This book is actually hard to describe, because there is so much in it to think about, but the reading experience is very straightforward and utterly compelling.

In the 1990s, Iris looks back on her sister Laura’s mysterious death just after WW2, while the rest of the story ranges across the 1930s and beyond, focusing on a beautiful love affair with a rebellious science fiction writer. The Blind Assassin of the title is a novel within the novel and it’s utterly gorgeous.

It’s a complex and stunning story all about stories – those we tell about ourselves and those we… show more.

Iris and Laura Chase, sisters, are motherless, growing up in the 1930s.

Iris, as an old woman, remembers her life and childhood, including a bad marriage. Within the novel is another novel, that Laura supposedly wrote and her sister, Iris published. Add to the mix that it is the story of a pulp science fiction writer named Alex, who was involved with both sisters.

This multi-layered novel reveals that it is Iris not Laura who is a story-within-a-story narrator. And we learn it was Iris who had an affair with Alex as well. Since Laura is not alive to tell… show more.