I didn't quite get this book as I read it. I should have realized some things before they were revealed.
There are four narrative threads.
One: Iris, an elderly Canadian woman in ill-health, is writing her life story in the late 1990s, focusing on the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s--years of depression, war, labor unrest, and social upheaval. Iris is seemingly passive, someone that life happens to. I wouldn't call her an unreliable narrator, but she is circumspect, often alluding to things rather than making forthright statements.
Two: Newspaper clippings punctuate events related to Iris's life such as marriages, births, deaths, and social engagements.
Three: An unnamed couple meet secretly in whatever temporary lodgings the man can find. She seems to be wealthy, while he seems to be in some kind of political trouble--a wanted man.
Four: The Blind Assassin. The man tells the woman a story about children on the Planet of Zycron blinded by their work making carpets. Most of the children become prostitutes, and some become assassins. The Blind Assassin is also the name of a novel published by Iris's sister Laura.
I took my time reading this book. Atwood is such a good writer, I often stopped to re-read sentences and paragraphs and marked passages I especially liked.
Although I didn't understand it as I was reading, I came to appreciate Atwood's four-narrative approach. I remember seeing multiple narrators for the first time in Norah Loft's Jassy, one of my favorite books.
I've been going through the book to note passages I marked.
Here's one as Iris is working on her manuscript:
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?
Here Iris is betrayed by her own body.
Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.
At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.
After a bad dream.
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
I'm holding on to this book. It's well worth a re-read or two.
