For more than a quarter of a century, the outstanding Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (born 1939) has been creating works of remarkable originality and depth, repeatedly honored with prestigious literary awards. “The Blind Assassin,” which received the Booker Prize in 2000, is in fact several novels nested inside one another. Atwood takes the reader through the entire 20th century, and only at the end do we begin to understand: the story the author tells us is not quite what happened in reality. Or—more precisely—everything was much more terrible…
“The Blind Assassin” is a labyrinth of sorts for aesthetes. It begins with the death of Laura Chase, Iris’s sister, through whose name the narrative is told. Why did the twenty-five-year-old Laura step off a bridge? We’ll learn the answer only by finishing the book.
This book could be called a family saga, but besides the story of the Chase family, there is something more. The story of a man and a woman whose faces are hidden from us, and in the course of their meetings he tells her fairy tales about the inhabitants of other planets.