Book

[happybat]

Where was I?

The bell had rung. The throat was slit. The door was opening.

Oh. Right, then.

So, I'm probably about the only person on the face of the planet who didn't read this one when in came out in.. oh, 2001? I'd loved The Robber Bride, you see, so much that I couldn't bear to read any more of her stuff in case it wasn't quite as good. Which is daft, really, when you think about it.

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

The Blind Assassin was grabbed in a rush while running for a train. The train took an extra two hours to arrive at its destination, and I didn't care. The two main plot twists were blatantly obvious after about the first twenty, thirty pages, and I didn't care. In fact, I suspect, given what Atwood can manage on a good day, this was done on purpose - threadbare literary conventions exposed before your very eyes!

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that it. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

All of them?

The story is about two sisters; about the nature of exposure and betrayal. It's about the self mutilation involved in being good; about being free, and the costs that lays you open to... Whether it is possible, in old age, to reflect on your life without crippling regret. Whether it is better to resist or to accept what the rest of the world wants to make of you... All addressed in agile, skillful prose that moves deftly from lyricism to modernism to ugliness with barely a stutter.

But such messages can be dangerous. Think twice before you wish, and especially before you wish to make yourself into the hand of Fate.

(Think twice, said Reenie. Laura said, Why only twice?)

This is not to say that I found it flawless. Much though I was glad of the length, under the circumstances, I do feel that she could have said as much with a fair few less words. I liked the texts-within-the-text a lot, and could have stood rather more of them, although I can understand why she was moderate. You could feel her glee at playing at a modernist writer (who claims not to be a writer at all) playing at writing pulps. And some of it is just beautiful...

Reverie intrudes at intervals.
   She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
   In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door, and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

And some might even be true.