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The Blind Assassin
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 26 mins
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Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride is inspired by "The Robber Bridegroom", a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic proportions, and sets her loose in the lives of three friends.
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Complex story of deception by a "Jezebel".
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Written by: Margaret Atwood
Publisher's Summary
Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2000
For the past 25 years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishment as never before, creating a novel that is both entertaining and profoundly serious.
The novel opens with these simple resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as you expect to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel within a novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When you return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.
Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, you will discover that the story Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be - but is, in fact, much more.
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Team Awesomeness
- 2019-10-28
Horrible performance. like a translator on news
barely got through it. the reader was awful. she sounded like those flat translator voices on government channels or parliamentary coverage. As well, she mis-pronounced some key words like Yonge Street "YAWN-J" and Spadina "SPA-DEENA"....annoying.
11 people found this helpful
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- Mary McDonald
- 2018-09-04
Just not my thing
I found it very boring and was unable to get through it. Maybe if I would have stuck with it, it might have got better. ( at least for me )
3 people found this helpful
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- Blythe
- 2019-08-18
Multilayered, melancholy plot
This is a great book, a book with layers on layers and a reveal at the end that makes me realize that if I went back and reread the entire book again now with the full knowledge of the plot, I would see so much more in the story than I did the first time through.
However, it's also a sad book, a book about old age and unhappy marriage and the breakdown of family relationships, so I know I probably won't go back and reread it to get the full extent of appreciate out of the story that I'm pretty sure is possible.
The book tells a story on many layers; it's old-aged Iris telling the story of her childhood with her sister Laura and then her unhappy marriage to Richard. It's the story of The Blind Assassin, a book written by Laura and published posthumously, in which a woman meets a lover who is a pulp SF writer and who tells her the story of the planet Zycron and the pulp SF tales that take place thereon, ostensibly the story of a blind assassin and the girl he rescues, but I now suspect there is a high degree of reflection in these stories of what's happening in the outside world of Iris and Laura, although I didn't know enough to catch it all the first time through. Laura is the most nebulous character all throughout, it's always hard to tell what she's really thinking and doing since we only see her through her sister's eyes, and her sister's eyes. Only at the end do all the remaining loose ends get tied together and we finally understand what each character's place is within the novel and how they all fit together.
Like I said, I think that if I reread the book now, having just finished it, I'd find layers and layers more, and discover that in a way, Atwood was telling the whole story all along, we just didn't know enough to see it until the end of the novel. But, it is also such a melancholy story and left me with such a sad feeling for really almost all the characters in it, that I'm not sure I want to go back and revisit the story again.
2 people found this helpful
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- BLP
- 2021-09-22
Not her best work
A very difficult story to listen to. Love Margaret Atwood, but this story left me confused.
It is not my type of story
1 person found this helpful
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- Woldemichael
- 2020-03-12
Not an Atwood fan but this book changed my mind.
I think Margot Dionne's narration has a lot to do with it. It was fantastic.
1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 2019-06-23
Takes some time to get into
Fantastic book but the first 200 pages were a little slow. The book really picks uo once you get into the flow of the various timelines and stories.
1 person found this helpful
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- S
- 2022-09-18
Incredible story
As an avid reader of Margaret Atwood, I have read and listened to many of her novels, and loved every one of them- but this is the only one that has made me cry at the end. Full on sobbing, as a matter of fact. While listening to this book (in every spare minute, I was hooked) I was fully enthralled by the beautiful and complex work of art that Atwood had created. All I could think about, and the only thing I wanted to talk about, was Iris and Laura, and the Blind Assasin and the planet Zycron.
This book has many layers to it- Atwood does a fantastic job of foreshadowing and hinting.
This novel was a bit less grisly than some of Atwood’s stories, but still it was at times horrifying, in a “the horrifying truth” type of way.
Altogether, this story is by far my favourite Margaret Atwood novel thus far, and Iris and Laura will be on my mind for a long time.
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- Judy
- 2022-03-21
Not a fan
This was a oddity so sad not enjoyable. I’ll not buy another by this author
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- Matt
- 2022-03-18
Beautiful, Tragic, Resonant
What initially appears to be a series of disconnected events coalesces into a truly engaging and emotionally charged story.
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- Chantal
- 2022-01-04
new favourite of MA
complex, and riveting the whole way through. I was asking questions the whole way through, and they were all satisfyingly answered in the end.
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- SusieH
- 2018-06-11
Slurpy Narrator Distracts from Otherwise Excellent Storybat
This story within a story within a story is tantalizingly teased out in startling prose. Atwood is not a master, she is THE master. Unfortunately, the narrator has a painfully annoying slurping habit (she sucks in loudly to take a breath in a manner that leaves you with the feeling she has the microphone lodged inside her mouth— it made me want to throw my phone in the river) her voice is nice, although her “character” voices are a bit affectatious: deep voices for men, high pitched one for young girls, hard to take seriously—she did well with the “plain folk” accents for Reenie and Myra though). Also I’m pretty sure she mispronounced Spadina.
1 person found this helpful