Friday Memes and 'The Blind Assassin' by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood has been one of the most inspirational female authors of the 20th and 21st century and unfortunately it took me quite long to get rid of the bad impression that reading The Handmaid's Tale in highschool left me with. Nothing is fun when you have to do it in school. I bought The Blind Assassin a week or so ago and have been very slowly working my way through it. So far I'm enjoying it very much.

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

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 are hosted by Gilion over at Rose City Reader and Freda over at Freda's Voice respectively.


Book Beginnings:

'The Bridge 

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens.' p.1

The opening of The Blind Assassin is one of the most well-known ones out there but I like the way that the rest of the sentences continue to show how heavily this still weights on the mind of the narrator, like the 'chunks of the bridge'.


Friday 56:

'But Laura never paid much attention to that kind of reasoning. She was more interested in forms - in what things were in themselves, not what they weren't. She wanted essences.' p.56

It's not the most spectacular of teasers but I quite like this description of Laura, of her desire to know the way things are, rather than what they're not. Also, the line 'She wanted essences.' is beautiful, I think!

So, what are you