Club Protocol Release: The Blind Assassin KINDLE MOBI Atwood, Margaret H.A.

Margaret Atwood’s 10th novel The Blind Assassin(2000) is what ancient Norse people would have recognized as a saga, though of course shorter on heroics than the Icelandic tales of Eric for example.
Atwood’s aged narrator, Iris Chase at 80+ years old, observes, that in life “there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
The Blind Assassin loads up on losses at the outset. The first part of the book is a scrapbook of obituaries: Iris’s sister, her husband, her sister-in-law, her daughter. Only when the coffins are laid out does Iris start her story.
Why, in her 80s, does she feel the need to get it all out on paper? Maybe history’s been aching in her bones too long, or maybe the secrets she’s harbouring sense, like seafaring rats, that the time has come to abandon ship. Maybe it’s just what happens to people near the end: the old wounds open and an invisible blood of story pours forth.
The death among deaths is that of Iris’s younger sister, Laura. In 1945, 10 days after the world stops warring, she drives a car off a Toronto bridge. An accident? Suicide? At 25, Laura had a troubled soul, a restive heart, a mouth full of questions. Also, it seems, a novel called The Blind Assassin, which Iris arranges to have published posthumously, is included as a novel within the the story of Iris Chase, a Roman à clef to put it in literary terms and we read Laura's story as it weaves in and out of Iris’s narrative.
Laura’s story is a novel within a novel; but the The Blind Assassin contains yet a 3rd inner novel. A nameless couple makes their illicit love in a series of pre-sullied rooms belonging to other people. After each entanglement they lie back, and the man, a pulp writer, spins a tale of the Planet Zycron where the far-famed city of Sakiel-Norn is marked for destruction for its opulence, its worship of false gods, its child sacrifices.
Despite these side stories, it is with the story of her long dead sister -- Laura’s story -- that Iris takes her revenge upon family and the society in which she has lived, and which lays behind the tragedy of Laura.
Buried within proprieties and silence for most of her life, Iris, at the end of the novel, finally declares her intent is that she wishes only to rise up and be seen. And perhaps for any of us, it is never too late to for that.

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