Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) Parts V-VI #MARM2025

Through the first quarter of the novel, I was thinking of this as the story of two lovers. My take would’ve failed the Bechdel test, and I think, now, it’s really a tale of two sisters: Iris and Laura Chase.

The girls would have passed, I think: even when she’s very young, when Laura throws herself into the creek, it’s because she hope to trade her life for her mother’s not for any love interest.

As we pass halfway, the chronology of Iris’s memories gains heft, and we fall into the rhythm of her remembrances, with only an occasional disruption (another newspaper article, another excerpt from Laura’s novel).

But Iris warns us: pay attention.

She questions Laura’s perspective: “I didn’t think she was lying as such, but neither was she telling the entire truth.”

And Reenie’s: “In fairness, Reenie may have invented those slurs on the Griffens. She sometimes attributed to people the histories she felt they ought to have had.”

She notes the fragmented photo of Alex Thomas, wherein “he’d thrust his hand up in front of him, as gangland criminals did to shield themselves from the flashbulbs when they were being arrested.”

And her own view of things in the past is untrustworthy too—or, at least, different from her understanding now: “Was it my belief that I was doing this only to spare her—to help her, to take care of her, as I had always done? Yes, that is what I did believe.”

MARM 2025 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Death by Clamshell” (November 4)
The Blind Assassin Parts I-IV (November 6)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Freeforall” (November 11)
The Blind Assassin Parts V-VI (November 13)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 86^th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Metepsychosis” (November 18)
The Blind Assassin Parts VII-IX (November 20)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Airborne: A Symposium” (November 25)
The Blind Assassin Parts X-XV (November 27)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

So I tried to slow, to take a second look—to consider what I might have missed while my attention was diverted.

This took me back, to the novel’s epigraphs: extermination, love, and story. We have Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007) and Sheila Watson (1909-1998), a Polish poet and a Canadian modernist, as well as an inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn. (I wrote briefly about Kapuscinski’s poems here, and Sheila Watson is best known for her beautiful and strange 1959 novel The Double Hook…but this quote comes from Deep Hollow Creek.)

In The Blind Assassin, we have parallels with all three of the epigraphs. Early in Laura’s novel, the lover imagines children blinded by “weaving their endless carpets” who find second careers as assassins, and he asks “If you had to cut throats or starve, which would you do?” And later, also in Laura’s novel: “He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever. Right. Yes, The usual choices.” And there is a library “with a marble Medusa over the fireplace—the nineteenth-century type of Medusa, with a lovely impervious gaze, the snakes writhing up out of her head like anguished thoughts.”

Three epigraphs: extermination, love, and story.

Question for anyone reading along:
Are there details in the story that have stubbornly lodged in your mind, whether because you sense their purpose or because they appear senseless (at this point, anyhow)?

Question for anyone:
“Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious,” Iris says. What novel’s beginning have you never forgotten? Whether because it’s sudden or insidious; an unforgettable image, or a quiet nudge that the story will be exactly to your taste?

Have you read, are you reading, would you read? I’ve kept my post spoiler-free, but feel free to mark your comment with a spoiler to reveal details if you wish!