

S'està carregant… L'Assassí cec (2000)de Margaret Atwood
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Booker Prize (2) » 80 més Unread books (39) Historical Fiction (43) Top Five Books of 2013 (155) Female Author (39) Best family sagas (16) Female Protagonist (59) Unreliable Narrators (13) Favourite Books (601) Metafiction (37) Books Read in 2013 (69) Top Five Books of 2014 (881) 2000s decade (16) Books Read in 2015 (478) Canada (9) SHOULD Read Books! (59) Tagged Suicide (6) Books tagged favorites (266) Older People (10) To Read (615) Allie's Wishlist (32) Women Writers (5) Protagonists - Women (10) Speculative Fiction (22) Secrets Books (60) Abuse (54) Feminism (16) Women's Stories (17) Family Stories (126) Best Love Stories (55) Domestic Fiction (9) No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. 3.5 stars - I came into this book with very high expectations and I sincerely wish it lived up to those expectations. Alas, for me it did not. This was Atwood's first Booker winner, and I don't think it was the controversial win that The Testaments was this year. The Blind Assassin was seen as a compelling story within a story metafiction kind of book. Which it is and does quite well. The story of Iris and Laura, two sisters living in pre-WWII Canada is interesting and has the kinds of twists and turns that pulls the reader in and makes you want to keep reading. But the length of the book got me down. If the entire book was necessary, I wouldn't complain but that is not the case. So much could have been left out or written in a more concise way. I don't find favorites typically on the Booker winners list and this one is no different. ( ![]() I'm reading all the Booker Prize winners. Follow me at www.methodtohermadness.com Two young women, raised in relative isolation, meet an attractive, mysterious young man. What happens next involves sex, secrets, and sacrifice. In The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood weaves together multiple story strands as skillfully as A.S. Byatt does in Possession: the view from the present and the vintage love story are interspersed with news articles about war in Europe and local tragedy that enhance the threatening mood. Fans of the author of The Handmaid's Tale will recognize recurring motifs: Atwood's cunningly analytical take on language; religious delusions; the ways society exploits women; and the ways women resist. Her science fiction also makes an appearance in the pulp stories penned by the mysterious young man. This is a masterful novel, with a reveal as slow and enticing as a skillful burlesque show. I am so grateful this project required me to reread it. I hope that Atwood wins the Nobel Prize in literature soon, as the most recent winner Kazuo Ishiguro said she should have. This took me literal years to finish, mostly because it's not a genre that I particularly care for (literary fiction). What kept me going was the promise of a great twist at the end, and while it *was* narratively satisfying...it wasn't that unexpected? Now here is a piece of work that restores all faith in books and authors. It is like slipping into another landscape, a sepia world with a chilling undertow. A narration in a female voice. An unfolding of one tragedy after another but told with a resoluteness and compassion to make it bearable. The Blind Assassin refers to a story within the story and provides moments of enlightenment and doom in this exercise in the tyranny of the inevitable. I loved it and would whole heartedly recommend it. Definitely a winter book, rain lashing against the window, fire roaring, the sofa, a blanket and some chocolate and maybe some brandy. An outstanding portrayal of control and adversity, and freedom of choice as it was perceived from one end of the 20th Century to the other.
Margaret Atwood poses a provocative question in her new novel, "The Blind Assassin." How much are the bad turns of one's life determined by things beyond our control, like sex and class, and how much by personal responsibility? Unlike most folks who raise this question so that they can wag their finger -- she's made her bed, and so on -- Atwood's foray into this moral terrain is complex and surprising. Far from preaching to the converted, Atwood's cunning tale assumes a like-minded reader only so that she can argue, quite persuasively, from the other side. In her tenth novel, Margaret Atwood again demonstrates that she has mastered the art of creating dense, complex fictions from carefully layered narratives, making use of an array of literary devices - flashbacks, multiple time schemes, ambiguous, indeterminate plots - and that she can hook her readers by virtue of her exceptional story-telling skills. The Blind Assassin is not a book that can easily be put to one side, in spite of its length and the fact that its twists and turns occasionally try the patience; yet it falls short of making the emotional impact that its suggestive and slippery plot at times promises. Ms. Atwood's absorbing new novel, ''The Blind Assassin,'' features a story within a story within a story -- a science-fiction yarn within a hard-boiled tale of adultery within a larger narrative about familial love and dissolution. The novel is largely unencumbered by the feminist ideology that weighed down such earlier Atwood novels as ''The Edible Woman'' and ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' and for the most part it is also shorn of those books' satiric social vision. In fact, of all the author's books to date, ''The Blind Assassin'' is most purely a work of entertainment -- an expertly rendered Daphne du Maurieresque tale that showcases Ms. Atwood's narrative powers and her ardent love of the Gothic. In her ingenious new tale of love, rivalry, and deception, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood interweaves several genres — a confessional memoir, a pulp fantasy novel, newspaper clippings — to tease out the secrets behind the 1945 death of 25-year-old socialite Laura Chase. Nearly 20 years ago, in speaking of her craft, the novelist Margaret Atwood observed that ''a character in a book who is consistently well behaved probably spells disaster for the book.'' She might have asserted the more general principle that consistent anything in a character can prove tedious. If we apply the old Forsterian standard that round characters are ones ''capable of surprising in a convincing way,'' Atwood's new novel, for all its multilayered story-within-a-story-within-a-story construction, must be judged flat as a pancake. In ''The Blind Assassin,'' overlong and badly written, our first impressions of the dramatis personae prove not so much lasting as total. Pertany a aquestes col·leccions editorialsTEAdue Tea (1113)
A science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in a dingy backstreet room. Set in a multi-layered story of the death of a woman's sister and husband in the 1940's, with a novel-within-a novel as a background. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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