tI don’t trust the light in this book. I don’t trust the personnel on the switches. I think that most of them came straight from a based-on-a-book-by-Nicholas-Sparks movie set. One of the most insightful comments I ever heard about that particular saccharine mini industry was about how the majority of these movies seem to perpetually take place at “magic hour”. That is, the hazy twilight hour which is made even more hazy by classic southern settings where the heat shimmers and the light fades in between however many magnolia trees they can cram onto the set. They take the Barbara Walters special cameras with their pot of Vaseline, focus them on the Romantic powers of nature and call it God. With the help of some painfully crooned adult contemporary ballad about the power of a Good Woman’s Love, of course.tI want to be clear. Based on my experience with this novel (my only Atwood read to date), I would not for a moment class Margaret Atwood with Nicholas Sparks as a writer or as an observer of humankind. Atwood’s writing has at least around 1000 times fewer moments where you expect Caruso to rise from the grave and wail over the dead body of a character’s fairy tale hopes and dreams, and not once is there a moment where Love overcomes the workings of science and biology to triumph due to the single minded devotion of a man who Just Won’t Give Up. Her writing is more delicate and she comes through with a few amazingly written observations about memory and the craft of storytelling itself. My favorite quote from the book is about this:"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.""All of them?""Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from wolves, fighting the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. No other decent stories exist."She’s also not afraid to get into the down and dirty of aging and some of the little moments that make up a life as those who get older and older get poorer and more friendless with each passing day. She’s also got some good commentary about how and why the mythos that get built up around Important Authors can be completely ridiculous, and the weight that we try to make them carry.tHowever. And this is unfortunately a big however, despite the clear intellect and purpose behind this experiment with the autobiography and journal form, this novel ultimately failed for me. To be honest I felt that the ideas ended up being rather cliché, the “twist” was easy to guess, many of the characters were vague and the majority of the book was painfully overwritten. This book needed to be either a hundred pages shorter, or two hundred pages longer. She needed to decide whether she was writing a middlebrow novel about Coming to Peace With Our Families or whether she was really going to go down the rabbit hole and really talk about how crazy it was in that period where the Old Order fell and people got vicious and confused about class, gender, domesticity and religion. Because it was fucking crazy. You can make your arguments for Napoleon, the Hundred Years’ War, WWII or even September 11 if you are so politically inclined, but the Great War is my vote for the ultimate game changer. It was All Over and Goodbye to All That, but it was said at so many different volumes and with so many different degrees of clarity and decision that it became this mess that you couldn’t disentangle and nobody could talk about because there was so much you Don’t Talk About and so much you had to anyway. It’s all in your face and people who went and those who didn’t don’t understand. It’s even more confusing when you live in the Middle of Nowhere Canada and the fighting hasn’t been anywhere close to you. What’s the big problem? Why is this war not like all those other wars that we learned about in school? So many questions and no language to ask them with or reason to know that these are the questions to ask, not really.tI think that’s what this book was supposed to be about. If you look at it from a plot perspective, as a sequence of events of what happened to the two sisters who star, that’s exactly what it was about. It tracks pretty perfectly as a history of the period from my high school history tests. A family of industrialists, on the ascendant throughout the Gilded Age, risen from nothing in the New World. This same family marrying into (buying into) the Old Order and building themselves massive monuments to what they think is Taste, then raising their families to do the same but with the addition of Good Protestant Work Ethic. The effects on the next generation of huge amounts of wealth with no social nets required by the government. Intergenerational conflict and fracture. Slow decline. The next generation after that born into conflict and then a war started by two generations with something to prove. The End of It All. The rise of women, the breakdown of men, violence as a solution, hiding the rags with the sparkling ashes from trunks left over from Gilded grandpapa, bust, and the End, Redux. After which, nothing really matters except the Fall. However, when the fall is all there is, it matters. So this is a fifty year long reveal of how the Fall happened. And of course, the whole structure of the book itself is based around the stories that we tell ourselves about all this. The public ones (the interspersed newspaper clippings), the memories of our day to day lives we might tell a close friend or colleague (the bulk of the conventional prose), and then the stories that we tell in bed to each other that contain our most private truths that we do not tell to anyone or we tell everyone, heavily under wraps (the science fiction story segments). So the bones of this are solid. I’m there on that. But the skin surrounding it isn’t, and the parts don’t add up to a greater whole. The way that Atwood writes was really off-putting to me, and made me think that her priority was not really exploring all this great material she gave herself, but with providing a pretty, literary package for it, and offering us the Mystery of the Twilight. Someone in the comments below mentioned that Atwood was originally a poet before she moved to prose, and that makes sense to me. And however much I enjoy poetic prose, I like it when it is used to pull out nuances and make that punch to the gut really count. What I don’t like is what Atwood used it for here. Every feeling, every atmospheric description, every dress, every spoken tone must have its metaphor. Every similie you could possibly think of under the sun had its day. It was incredibly distracting. Every bad shoe was like a boat, every morning bathed in butter, or you know, whatever better metaphors Atwood came up with. It was very rare to find her characters experiencing something as itself, or being in the moment and stating, “I saw a car. The car was red. It turned left.” Oh no. You can bet it’ll be something like, “I turned my eyes upwards to see a moving object rolling down the street like inevitable fate. It’s color was like the capes of the toreadors trying to enrage a bull, and it moved inexorably toward me until suddenly, like an unexpected rough breeze, its motion turned sharply away.” While I appreciate the effort… y’all know what I’m saying. I just pictured Atwood running around town doing her errands with some napkins or a little notebook, writing down metaphors as they occurred to her about how green looks at precisely this moment of the morning. And then moving on to the next sentence and cycle, rinse, repeat. While I appreciate her powers of observation (even if I think some of her metaphors were rather tortured), it really distracted me from the point of the book. It turned it into a Nicholas Sparks novel for me. Because all this dwelling on metaphor and similie, especially in the section about the author’s childhood, made it seem like Atwood was creating this big bed of comfortably romantic words for us to lay down on, words which could really make you avoid what was going on here. She did the same thing when she started to describe certain painful scenes in the narrator’s life. She picked out these big moments in a woman’s life, and you could tell that she had a preconceived metaphor about the way these things happen to women (getting married=sacrificial lamb, ‘becoming a proper woman’= being trussed up like a goose), and she carried it through doggedly. I wish that I hadn’t guessed how the narrator was going to react in each scene. It was one long, earnest song of It’s Hard Out There For a Lady. Waaaay too earnest. It’s also pretty funny out there for a lady. It’s also kind of boring, kind of rewarding, it’s also fascinating and distracting and a million other things. Nobody can be a martyr for that long, that consistently. I think this is why my favorite parts all came in the down-to-earth old lady sections where she talked about tripping over steps and her bowel movements. Yes, thank you! More about how its Rough Out There To Be A Person In General, please!tThe metaphors took over the novel to the extent that I think they did a pretty big disservice to the characters. The mysterious sister of the narrator, the (view spoiler)[supposed (hide spoiler)]
رواية حائزة على بوكر عام 2000 لكاتبة كندية مبهرة , ولابد لنا أن نثني على إبداع القلم الأنثوى الكندي فائق الجودة .وكعادة روايات البوكر , فهي رواية مرهقة للغاية , تحتاج من القارئ تركيز شديد لكي لا تفلت منه خيوط السرد الممتعة .ليس ذلك فقط , بل لابد من المرء التركيز بشدة للفصل بين أزمان الرواية المختلفة , والتي تشابكت مع بعضها بصورة من الظرف بمكان .كنت أرغب في كتابة سطور قليلة سهلة القراءة عن هذا العمل , ولكنه من الأعمال المعجزة التي تقيد يديك فتجبرك على أن تفيها حقها , حتى ولو كان إيفاء ذلك لحق في كتابة كٍم يليق بعظمتها , وقد تغني سطور قليلة عن كثيرة , ولكن ما بيدنا حيلة ولا نقدر على مقاومة السحر الذي تبثه فينا بعض الأعمال الأدبية .ببساطة مطلقة : هي تلك الروايات التي تحتوي بداخلها على أكثر من رواية , و كلهم يستحقوا الاهتمام , ففيها اختلفت الشخصيات والأحداث و الأزمنة ولكنها نسجت فيما بينهما رواية متكاملة البنيان يشد بعضها بعض . العمل به بعض من الفوضوية , تلك الفوضوية المحببة للنفس الجاذبة للعقل , و إضافة إلى تلك الفوضوية كانت هناك معرفة واسعة بحضارات الأمم القديمة (ولا سيما الفرعونية ) ليست مجرد معرفة عابرة , بل عمق واضح .الكاتبة ملمة للغاية بشخوص رواياتها , فكل شخصية منهم تشعر أن الكاتبة متقمصة لها , فعند الحديث بشخصية العجوز , نجد تعبير من أبلغ ما يكون تقول فيه :(لكنه قدر الجميع أن يتحولوا إلى مجرد أشياء طريفة في نظر أولئك الذين يصغرونهم . يستثني من ذلك إراقة الدماء . فهم يحترمون الحروب , والأوبئة , والقتل و غيره من أنماط المصائب والعنف . فإراقة الدماء تعني أننا كنا جادين فيما نفعل )ليس ذلك فقط , فالكاتبة لم تكن مجرد معبرة عن شخصيات , بل تعدت إلى أن تكون معبر أكبر التعبير عن مواقف فلسفية و حياتية عميقة , مواقف قد تعبر عنا و عن وجهة نظرنا في هذه الحياة ففي النهاية :( الحياة ليست إلى كومة من النفايات حتى عندما يعيشها المرء , وتزداد تفاهتها بعد الموت. ولكن إذا كانت كومة من النفايات فهي بالغة الصغر , فعندما تنظف المكان بعد المتوفي , تعرف كم هي قليلة أكياس القمامة التي تشغلها أنت نفسك بدورك )في ثنايا الرواية تدين واضح , تدين يتبعه معرفه بالنصوص المقدسة , وفي إطارٍ مساوٍ لخط التدين هذا يسير معه خط واضح من الإلحاد وما يشبه من التيارات المعاصرة كالشيوعية و اليسار المتطرف , وفي كلا الطرفين كان الكاتبة موفية الحق عادلة للغاية في عرض كلا الاتجاهين .العمل إنساني للغاية , عظيم في تقديم المشاعر الإنسانية في مختلف الظروف , ففي أحد ثنايا الرواية تصف الكاتبة لحظة لقاء بعد طول ابتعاد فتقول فيها :( قد يكون الوداع مفجعًا , لكن من المؤكد أن العودة أسوأ فالجسد لا يحتفظ بالملامح الحيوية البرّاقة للطيف الذي يلقيه الغياب . فالملامح الرئيسية يطمسها الزمن و البعاد , وفجأة يعود الحبيب وقت الظهيرة فيكشف الضوء الساطع في قسوة كل ندبة و جعدة و شعرة )ولا ننسى أن فوضوية الرواية شملت بعض شخصياتها , والتي لازمها بعض التطرف و الأفكار الشاذة , ولكن عند التدبر في معانيها نجد أنها أقرب إلى الواقعية منها إلى أي شئ آخر , ومن ذلك حديث لشخص لقيط خرج من ملجأ و اعتنق الشيوعية , فنجده يقول عندما سُأل عن هويته : (هويتي الحقيقية شخص لا يريد ان يعرف من هو في الواقع . فماذا يعني ذلك ؟ خلفية عائلية و ما شابه ؟ فكثيرًا ما يتخذ الناس عذرًا لتعاليهم أو نقائصهم . فكل ما هنالك أنني لا أتعرض لهذا الإغواء , فلا تكبلني تلك القيود , ولا يقعد بي شئ ... فعلى الأقل لا أشعر أبدًا بالحنين إلى الأهل والوطن . )أما التركيز على الشخصية التائهة في الرواية (الملحدة ) فكان له من البريق الكثير , فكلها أسئلة تطوف في أذهان كل البشر في كل زمان ومكان , ولكن يغلفها بعض التشدد من قِبل المجتع .في المجمل : عمل عظيم للغاية , عظيم لشخصياته الحيّة النابضة بين ثنايا الكتاب , عظيم بأحداثه الطبيعية الإنسانية التلقائية , والتي تصدمك بعنف في بعض الأجزاء كعادة الحياة .من حيث شخصيات الرواية : فإنك ستعيش مع كل شخصية حالة معينة , تتراوح بين الحب و الكره والاحتقار و الاحترام , ستشعر أمام بعضها بالعظمة المطلقة , وعند البعض الآخر لن تطيق حتى اسمه , وكل ذلك يأتي في حبكة روائية شديدة المهارة و الإتقان و الاحترافية , احترافية الروائي المتمكن من أدوات روايته , فالشخصيات رغم تنافرها مرتبطة ببعضها البعض للغاية , فلا تخرج واحدة منهم على السياق الروائي المرسوم لها , فكلها تلعب الدور الذي خلقته لها الروائية .اختلاف زمن الرواية و تعدد شقيها بين الخيالي والحقيقي , وبين شقيها القديم والحديث , يشعرك أنك أمام آلة من آلات الزمن , فالكاتبة برعت للغاية في وصف الزمن المراد فيه الأحداث المختلفة .ولابد لي من الحديث عن الترجمة الجيدة للغاية (بحب أنا المترجم اللى يحط علامة التنوين على الحرف قبل الأخير ) بحسه فاهم بزيادة .في المجمل: عمل مرهق للغاية يجبرك على الاندماج بين ثناياه , عمل عظيم جدا يقدم لك ودهات نظر مختلفة ووجوه حية مختلفة من الحياة .
What do You think about The Blind Assassin (2001)?
First of all, I totally agree with all who adore Atwood's words. How do you describe them, so those who have not yet read a book by Atwood will properly understand? You read one of Atwood's sentences and the words mean more than what is said. Each sentence has several meanings; it us up the reader to interpret them. Many lines send your head into a twirl. How do people interact? What do you see if you observe carefully? Atwood says, "As for the dance, it was more like a battle than a dance." If there is a stare, is it a stare of hostility, jealousy or joy? What do you think of this line? "Romance means leaving things out." You must always read between the lines, Atwood's lines that is.Some lines make you chuckle. Iris "scooped (the peanut butter) directly from the jar with her forefinger. Why dirty a spoon?" And you? Have you never done this? Some lines create a tension, a feeling, "voices like liquid rope." Let me add here that the audiobook narration by Lorelei King is top-notch, superb. The voices sound here exactly as "liquid rope"! Children's and adults’, male and female, each character has a perfect intonation. Those told in first person, those in the third person, those in the crazy story within the story.Then there are the lines of Reenie, the loyal Chase family housekeeper. She is responsible for the running commentary on the family's shenanigans. Her lines are pitch-perfect: "Business is business and then there is funny business." or "Loose your temper and you lose the fight." I should remember that myself! She is the one who raised both Chase girls, Laura the younger and Iris the older. It is a bit pat, by that I mean the role that she plays, but I couldn't help but like her! Reenie advises Laura to, "Think twice." Wise Laura responds, "Why only twice?" You may think she is young and naive but she has a head on her shoulders, that young one!Enough about Atwood's words, I find them sometimes delightful, sometimes humorous, and often noteworthy. They say much more than what you take them for at first glance. This aspect of the writing I like VERY much.BUT, I have had huge problems with the story within the story, also called "The Blind Assassin"! Making it even worse, there is a third story within the second story. All these stories within stories are confusing. The so called "clever" point, that is to be made, is NOT convincing, as far as I am concerned. I do not find (view spoiler)[the relationship between Alex and Iris to be convincing. That Richard would commit suicide as a result of the book's publication, written either by Iris OR Laura, I find scarcely believable. (hide spoiler)]
—Chrissie
First thought was, I think this might have been a really good 350 page novel. Unfortunately it’s almost twice the size and as cluttered with random detail as an attic. In this sense it’s a typical Booker Prize winner (for me the only time the Booker judges have got even close to being on the money in the past decade is Hilary Mantel).Ostensibly The Blind Assassins tells the story of two sisters and their relationships with two men at either ends of the political spectrum – Iris marries the industrialist and fascist sympathiser Richard Griffen, her sister Laura is infatuated with a communist agitator, Alex Thomas. This all takes place in the years before WW2. The two girls grow up in an idyllic house called Avilion (Avalon was the island King Arthur was taken after being wounded and Atwood presents a way of life at Avilion as something equally wounded and on the verge of expiring). The girls’ childhood was probably my favourite part of this novel which has many tiers and many stories within stories (too many). For me Atwood’s at her best when she isn’t trying to be too clever, when she drops her penchant for melodrama and rather self-defeating literary juggling acts. There’s also a novel within this novel. Alex Thomas to survive writes pulp fiction for magazines and invents Planet Zycron. For the most part Planet Zycron is pure silliness. Kind of fun as a narrative Alex makes up while in bed with his lover but wholly implausible as a novel that has received critical acclaim and is still in print fifty years later. Also, I’m afraid I’m not really a great fan of Atwood’s prose. Sometimes it reminds me of the literary equivalent of elderly people wearing teenage clothes. Like this this observation which starts off great but ends up like chewing gum. “Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off.” She’s also got an annoying habit of using two consecutive metaphors for the same observation. Or else using a metaphor that is so wacky that it creates more confusion than clarity - as when bread is described as ''white and soft and flavorless as an angel's buttock.” The central male character, Richard Griffin, is a feminist’s wet dream. He’s so conclusively vile that it becomes like a fancy dress costume. Impossible to take serious. Ditto, his sister Winnifred. A pair of 19th century monsters in a 20th century novel. Pantomime versions of the fabulously wicked Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle in Portrait of a Lady. Patriarchal male bullying has been done with so much more artistry and subtlety (and plausibility) – Casaubon with Dorothea in Middlemarch for example or the King Lear father in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres which I’m presently reading. There’s a strong element of feminist crowd pleasing in this utterly one dimensional portrait of patriarchal tyranny. Ironically it also serves to make you like Iris, his wife, less. The novel revolves on a central twist, you could almost say it’s the novel’s raison d’etre, and this is the clever and engaging part of this novel - the two sisters become the same woman with two contrasting fates: Iris conforms and survives at a ghastly price, Laura refuses to compromise and dies. The problem is all the clutter heaped around this fascinating central theme.
—Violet wells
I liked Cat's Eye, and expected to like this book as well - but I didn't. This book has been more or less the bane of my existence since I picked it up one ill-fated traveling weekend. Sure, it's innovative in form, but I don't think there's much substance beneath it. I was bored by all four layers of this book, which are interspersed with each other in a pattern I couldn't quite crack: 1) the present narrative, as told by an elderly woman who has lost various family members to tragedies over the years, some under suspicious circumstances, most notably her younger sister Laura; 2) the narrator's recounting of those past events; 3) chapters of the novel Laura wrote involving a pair of lovers who meet in secret; and 4) the story WITHIN the novel within the novel, where the male lover tells the woman lover a science fiction story. I happened to think this structure was overkill, and I wasn't compelled by anyone or anything. I am not impressed by interesting ideas themselves if they are executed in a less than captivating manner, as I felt this book was.I would ordinarily quit a story like this and skip to the last page or chapter to figure out what happens. I didn't do that because I thought this wasn't that kind of book. I tore through the last 1/3 at lightning speed, reading chunks of pages at a time rather than words, though, only to find that as it turns out, I was wrong - there is a definite ending, and a twist at that. It doesn't make the book worth reading, in my opinion, unless you're that curious about the aforementioned strange literary organization. But it's good to know in case you get bored in the middle like I did - you can turn to the last few pages and get some satisfaction.
—bonnie
