Malditang Librarian

The Blind Assassin: a novel by Margaret Atwood, Anchor Books ©2000 Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.  Imagine a braid: three strands interwoven to form a whole rope. This is The Blind Assassin: three stories intertwined to form a coherent whole. Iris Chase Griffen is now an old woman, she is the sole survivor of an old rich South Ontario (Canada) family. The book opens with a news item of her younger sister driving a car down a bridge, effectively committing suicide. Iris narrates her own frailty in old age, and writes about her childhood in the 1930s to the 1940s. Her mother died early, leaving both sisters under the care of their father and their caretaker Renee. Her father, a war veteran still suffering from trauma, doesn't prove to be a good father. Laura is a strange girl, who takes things literally and whose odd ways make her an anomaly. A young man enters the picture, Alex Thomas, who becomes a friend to both of them. Between I...

Book summary from   Publisher's Weekly :  Atwood writes in an autobiographical vein about Elaine Risley, a middle-aged Canadian painter (and daughter of a forest entomologist) who is thrust into an extended reconsideration of her past while attending a retrospective show of her work in Toronto, a city she had fled years earlier in order to leave behind painful memories. Most pointedly, Risley reflects on the strangeness of her long relations with Cordelia, a childhood friend whose cruelties, dealt lavishly to Risley, helped hone her awareness of our inveterate appetite for destruction even while we love, and are understood as characteristically feminine betrayal of other women that masks a ferocious betrayal of oneself. Atwood's portrayal of the friendship gives the novel its fraught and mysterious center, but her critical assessment of Cordelia and the 'whole world of girls and their doings' also takes the measure of a coercive, conformist society. Written from t...