The Blind Assassin

I've started and stopped this book a number of times before finally following through. I don't know whether it is particularly complex, or if it is just hard for me to follow the sci-fi subplot, or if I am just dumb. But now that I've finished it I really really liked it, and Atwood is a master of prose, etc.

“Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.”

This book is about two sisters from a family that once held high esteem in the village they grew up in. A family that once had money. The book moves through the two World Wars of the previous century as the sisters grow up. The book is written as if the elder of two is writing down her memoirs as an 80-year old lady. The sadness keeps building as the story progresses. Sadness piled upon sadness.

I love reading Atwood, and this is no exception, it is a very funny (the laugh-out-loud kind of funny), and interesting read with a large and colourful vocabulary. At the bottom of this review I'll share all of the words that stood out to me, because they were being used in different way that I am used to, or because I think I should use these more, or because hitherto I simply was not aware of their existence. The start of the book confused me somewhat though as I am not really one for reading the blurbs on the back. And in this case it would have at least helped me place the characters a bit. It didn't really matter though. I think the book was meant to be read with people leafing back to find clues they first missed. And that was something I really enjoyed. Being surprised and finding myself leafing back to find what became clear later on.

If you don't like descriptions of an upper-class lady about attire and decoration this book is probably not for you. If you do not mind, you learn a great deal about terms for all kinds of decoration material that was used at the beginning of the previous century. As well as learning about different kinds of dresses, veils and the such.

Here are some quotes I enjoyed; interspersed is a list of words that stood out to me.

52:
History as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not
this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past
in which nothing smells.

55:
Why do we always assume at such moments that everyone in the
world is staring at us? Usually nobody is.

fractious

propitiatory

95:
At the very least we want a witness.We can't stand the idea of our
own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

102:
Now I think it was more complicated than that. It may have been a warning. It may also have been a burden. Even if love was underneath it all, there was a great deal piled on top, and what would you find when you dug down? Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baneful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones. A talisman of sorts, this love, but a heavy one; a heavy thing for me to carry around with me, slung on its iron chain around my neck.

caul

145:
...many people take a
curatorial interest in their own scars.

hector

162:
We didn't learn very much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery.

inane

169 the button factor picnic:
More and more I feel like a letter – deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one

windfall

181 loaf givers:
It was the purpose in life of older people to thwart me. They were devoted to nothing else
...
I found it difficult to picture Helen of Troy in an apron, with her
sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cheek dabbled with Hour, and
from what I knew about Circe and Medea, the only things they'd ever
cooked up were magic potions, for poisoning heirs apparent or chang-
ing men into pigs.As for the Queen of Sheba, I doubt she ever made so
much as a piece of toast. I wondered where Mr. Ruskin got his peculiar ideas, about ladies and cookery both.

compunction

tippler

souse

dowdy

doily

beg off

erstwhile

lascivious

voracious

bas-relief

stodgy

aplomb

fob off

pinko

breviary

tawdry

glassine

purloin

inert

sibilant

216: the attic
(Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes
one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

porphyry

paunchy

228 Imperial Room:
It was God, looking down with his blank, ironic searchlight of an eye.
He was observing me, he was observing my predicament, he was
observing my failure to believe in him. There was no floor to my room: I was suspended in the air, about to plummet. My fall would be endless - endlessly down.
Such dismal feelings however do not often persist in the clear light
of morning, when you are young.

indenture

trousseau

truss

242: The Tango
They were new money,
without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as if they'd
covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

244: The tango
Sex may go nicely with many things, but vomit isn't one of them.

sequin

chiffon

epicene

suds

wallow

filigree

effluvium

283: steamer trunk
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. 

nacreous

292: the fire pit
Well, they bill by the minute, these lawyers, just like the cheaper whores.

waylay

frump

portcullis

yokel

jaunty

cupola

marcel

303: postcards from Europe
The French hotel had a bidet, which Richard explained to me with
the trace of smirk after he caught me washing my feet in it. I thought,
they do understand something the others don't, the French. They
understand the anxiety of the body. At least they admit it exists.

304:
The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets.

insouciance

dulcimer

taffeta

bouffant

ermine

chiffon

nostrum

biddy

stevedore

specious

impecunious

quoits

379: the ashtray
the rich have always been kleptomaniacs

poultice

emery

corundum

riffle

traipse

pinafore

patina

garish

sheen

q.t.

insouciant

gambol

layette

belfry

morass

tatty

maquillage

stolid

abstemious

lugubrious

verisimilitude

scurrilous

bilious

508: victory comes and goes
But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep

harridan

518: the other hand
The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret in misery and yearning to try the story for it, long it's twisted road.

A family saga as narrated by a woman in her 80s, a perfectly ordinary woman with no talent or ambitions. It is like a road trip, this book; and this sassy grandma with an overactive imagination is driving us around, really slowly, taking all the sinuous side roads and detours, stopping every now and then to describe with exceptional vividness what we would have passed by unnoticed. In other words, it is long. I had to slog through most of it, but I don't regret it in the least.

The first line of the book fixes the pivot around which the rest of the tale is spun.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

“Mother is with God,” Laura said. True, this was the official version, the import of all the prayers that had been offered up; but Laura had a way of believing such things, not in the double way everyone else believed them, but with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her

“Laura, what are you doing?” I said, “That's the Bible.”
“I'm cutting out the parts I don't like.”

Iris

I kicked off my shoes, threw myself down on the endless cream-colored bed. It had a canopy, with muslin draped around as if on safari. This, then, was where I was to grin and bear it - the bed I hasn't quite made, but now must lie in. And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read...Otherwise you begin excusing yourself

"I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I have set down, but because of what I have omitted"