The Blind Assassin
When I put together my 2005 Book List, the book I was most looking forward to reading was Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Atwood is a masterful writer, unmatched, I think, on the contemporary fiction scene, and The Blind Assassin, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, is considered by many her masterpiece.
Unfortunately, it took me some time to hunt down an affordable copy--English-language books can be had quite easily here in Sweden, but they often come with a hefty price tag--so I had to put off starting it until late into the year. Making matters more difficult, it's a bit of a complicated read (typical of Atwood books), and with a new baby and a demanding pre-schooler at home I didn't have the focus required to make a good go of reading it. Luckily, just when I was losing patience and on the verge of throwing in the towel with it, salvation came in the form of my oldest child's twice-weekly karate class. Leaving my younger two at home with my husband, I would drive my daughter to the dojo and sit on the sidelines with my book during her training.
I was soon deeply engrossed in the narrative, captivated by its myriad twists and turns, its intrigues and betrayals, its clever plot devices (including a novel-within-a-novel that adds a touch of the sublime). The opening line of the novel is, "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge," and from that inauspicious beginning the reader is launched into the lives of sisters Iris and Laura Chase, the pampered daughters of a Canadian industrialist. The story sprawls across nearly the whole of the twentieth century, but the bulk of the "action" takes place, alternately, in the 1930s and '40s and the late 1990s. Interspersed among the recollections of the narrator, an elderly Iris Chase, are the chapters of Laura's post-humously published novel, entitled The Blind Assassin, and newspaper and society-page clippings that round out the details of the sisters' lives.
Despite its broad scope, this novel is not so much an epic as a skillfully crafted mystery that will keep the reader guessing very nearly 'til the end. Ultimately, anything I write here simply cannot do it justice. You'll just have to take my word for it when I say it's one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. On second thought, don't take my word for it--do yourself a favor and add it to your own reading list.