L'Assassí cec (2000)

Odi et amo – I hate and I love. Catullus’s famous paradox was not meant to describe books, but it neatly sums up my reaction to Margaret Atwood’s pluri-prizewinning novel “The Blind Assassin”.

The 20th century is coming to an end and Iris Chase, now in her eighties, knows that her days are numbered too. She decides to write her memoirs for the benefit of her estranged granddaughter Sabrina. Her tale starts chillingly: Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. Having given us a glimpse of her tale’s dark ending, Iris takes us back to the Chase siblings’ protected childhood in the (fictional) Southern Ontario town of Port Ticonderoga, where their father is a respected factory owner. The business goes through a hard time and is bought out by the Griffen family, whose upcoming scion Richard Griffen eventually marries Iris. It is an unhappy match which holds within it the seeds of tragedy.

Iris’s recollections form the main narrative strand of the novel and, set as they are in the unsettled decades between the two World Wars, they give the book the feel of a historical novel or a family saga, rendered more authentic through references to actual events. This being Atwood however, the structure of the novel soon becomes increasingly complex. We learn that Laura Chase has become a literary sensation thanks to her posthumously published roman-a-clef “The Blind Assassin”, extracts of which are interspered with Iris’s story. Laura’s novel is apparently autobiographical, chronicling her love affair with one Alex Thomas, a Communist-leaning writer of pulp fiction. As if this novel-within-a-novel were not enough, Alex spices up the lovers’ encounters with storytelling, which spawns a third narrative strand – a quasi-scifi tale about the exploits of a “blind assassin” in the fantastical Planet Zycron. The Baboushka-dolls structure underlines this (meta-)novel’s obsession with the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, truth and deceit.

Atwood’s novel has been described as a postmodernist masterpiece and I have little hesitation in agreeing with this appraisal. Its potentially convoluted structure is deftly handled, leading to an effective climax in the final chapters. The dialogue and narrative voice are perfectly pitched and hardly a page goes by without the reader chancing upon an arresting image, observation or turn-of-phrase. Yet, I often found myself viscerally hating the novel and it took me a real effort to finish it. Why?

I think that it’s mostly down to the novel’s or, to be exact, Iris’s worldview. Her bitterness poisons all the characters, who invariably come across as scheming, manipulative and cruel or, at best, short-sighted and naive. Even Laura, who has little time for material trappings and is one of the more “spiritual” figures in the book, has the nasty habit of entering into “pacts” with God. Which, it must be said, He consistently breaks.

Indeed, the novel’s world is one in which everything is subject to negotiation and everything is up for sale. This applies particularly to the women who, like the bosomy figures in Alex Thomas’s pulp stories, are merely chattel in a male-dominated society.

Yes, I know – Atwood is making a very valid point here. And, yes, I do appreciate that sometimes an argument needs to be strongly (and unsubtly?) presented for it to strike home. And I know as well that one should not mistake a character’s point of view with that of the novel and still less with that of the author.

But the fact remains that I found the novel’s bleakness suffocating, its dark humour and glinting brilliance merely rubbing salt into this reader’s wounds. At the risk of sounding like an Eastenders fan who rants at the actor playing the baddie, I’ll give a miserly two stars to this dazzling novel which I hated ... and loved.
( )

A giudicare dalle recensioni entusiastiche penso di far parte di una ristretta minoranza, ma questo libro non mi è piaciuto un granché.
Ci ho ritrovato tutti i difetti che avevo riscontrato ne Il racconto dell'ancella, senza che a compensare ci fosse una trama altrettanto suggestiva o un messaggio così potente.
Innanzitutto la scrittura è fredda, formalmente perfetta ma senza un briciolo di drammaticità; questo ovviamente si riflette sui personaggi, che non riescono mai a diventare tridimensionali, sono l'archetipo perfetto dell'ideale che devono simboleggiare: l'affarista senza scrupoli, la ragazza illusa ed ingenua e così via. Capisco che probabilmente sia un effetto voluto, ascrivibile al fatto che la narrazione è solo ed unicamente dal punto di vista di Iris, ma ne esce fuori un racconto in cui non ci si emoziona mai davvero. Le parti su Sakiel-Norn sono affascinanti ma poco approfondite, l'autrice sembra quasi dimenticarsene ed arrivati alla fine non si capisce quale sia la loro funzione se non fornire un titolo stravagante al romanzo.
Forse però l'aspetto che mi ha infastidito di più è la prolissità: seicento pagine scandite da un ritmo lento e ripetitivo, un'eterna introduzione in attesa del colpo di scena che era prevedibile sin dalle prime righe. Ho sperato fino all'ultimo che ci fosse dell'altro, ma invece era davvero tutto lì.
Naturalmente riconosco che la Atwood dal punto di vista tecnico ha fatto un lavoro certosino, intersecando vari piani di lettura in una complicatissima struttura ad incastri: agli amanti della bella scrittura e della perfezione formale questo libro non può non piacere; per chi come me ricerca un coinvolgimento più viscerale, con personaggi forti ed una storia solida alle spalle, la delusione è dietro l'angolo.
Buon libro, non per tutti. ( )

took me a while to get into the story, but i ended up liking it quite a bit. MUCH longer than i was expecting! ( )

It was intriguing and strange. ( )

I have an idea for a game of the Blind Assassin bingo. Before you read the book for the first time, think of 9 awful life-destroying things that can happen to an individual. Write them in 3 rows of 3. Every time one of these things happens to one of the two main characters you cross it off, see how many pages it takes you to get bingo.

What a book. I'm so glad it's over. Reading it was like a traumatic experience, right from the very beginning. It starts out bad and gets worse.

It's beautifully written. The main characters are engaging, their problems are real and relatable. The feeling of being trapped and helpless is is present on every page.

While reading it I'd wished I'd never started it. It gave me "free floating anxiety" for weeks. But now I feel as though Laura and Iris are my friends. I want to keep them with me. ( )