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“With [The Blind Assassin], Ms. Atwood offers
added certification to her lofty position in world literature…[It] is marked by
lyrical writing and the intricacy of the narrative. The reader is repeatedly
caught by surprise…Almost to the last page, the book retains its sense of
mystery.”
— New York Times
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“A literary high-wire
act…Big and ambitious…A sweeping family saga.”
— Newsweek
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“Brilliant…Opulent…Atwood
is a poet…as well as a contriver of fiction, and scarcely a sentence of her
quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that
becomes enormous.”
— John Updike, New Yorker
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“Chilling…Lyrical…[Atwood’s]
most ambitious work to date.”
— Boston Globe
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“Grand storytelling
on a grand scale... Sheerly enjoyable.”
— Washington Post Book World
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“Expansive…A tour de
force…[The Blind Assassin] is in the
best tradition of gothic melodrama.”
— Chicago Tribune
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“Ingenious…Atwood
performs a spectacular sleight of hand, fashioning a bewitching, brilliantly
layered story of how people see only what they wish to.”
— Entertainment Weekly
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“Brilliant…bountiful…Meticulously
furnished with the clothing, cuisine, and locutions of the period…Capacious,
audacious.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
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“Enthralling…Unforgettable…Iris
Chase is a brilliant addition to Atwood’s roster of fascinating fictional
narrators. Not only is her story sinuously complex, but she is entertaining
company.”
— Time
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“Complex and rich in
period detail…[A] stylish family saga.”
— People
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“The Blind Assassin has enough mysteries to keep even a casual
reader engaged…There is a steely quality to Ms. Atwood’s writing that’s a bit
scary but also exhilarating; no one gets away with anything.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“Assured…A harsh
portrait of class warfare and sexual exploitations, a knowing satire of pulp
fiction and literary cultism, and an unflinching meditation on the uses of art,
all wrapped up with Atwood’s customary aplomb.”
— Chicago Sun-Times
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“Atwood’s best novel
to date…It’s a fair bet that The Blind
Assassin will join that list of novels that stand beyond the reach of
criticism.”
— Denver Post
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“Rewarding…Intricate…Atwood
continues to stretch the bounds of fictional technique.”
— Seattle Times
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“Sexy, readable,
far-fetched, and intelligent…Atwood brings style and substance together to make
a beautiful plaster cast of all the proprieties and constriction of the
bourgeois colonial town that, in the decades after the war, British Toronto
still was, and adds to it the vivid colors of human cruelty, love, and sin.”
— Elle
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“Bewitching…A killer
novel…Atwood’s crisp wit and steely realism are reminiscent of Edith Wharton…A
wonderfully complex narrative.”
— Christian Science Monitor
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“Hauntingly powerful…Margaret
Atwood is one of the greatest writers alive…[Her style is tight, authoritative,
and as glittering and hard as a diamond…The
Blind Assassin is a novel of luminous prose, scalpel-precise insights, and
fierce characters…Atwood’s new work is so assured, so elegant and so
incandescently intelligent, she casts her contemporaries in the shade.”
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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“Intricate, haunting…The Blind Assassin…is the kind of story
so full of intrigue and desperation that you take it to bed with you simply
because you can’t bear to put it down…Atwood has achieved an astonishing feat.
It’s one thing to write an accomplished novel; it’s another entirely to spin a
tale so brilliantly that the reader internalizes it.”
— Harper’s Bazaar
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“An intricately
structured, often poetically rendered novel that’s also graced by [Atwood’s
mordant wit…So flush is The Blind
Assassin with knowing, telling details, it’s almost possible to [finish]
the book feeling the author has again slipped the bonds to create a fiction
more persuasive than reality.”
— Daily News
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“The Blind Assassin is by far the most intricately plotted of Atwood’s
novels to date, a puzzle designed to beguile the reader much as the tales of
Scheherazade beguiled King Shahryar.”
— Oregonian
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“Vintage Atwood—furious,
funny, brilliant, and subversive…Atwood achieves an almost impossible
combination—a hall of mirrors, with cutting insights at every turn, cloaked in
a dreamy, all-enveloping atmosphere that seduces the reader with every sentence…Iris
Chase Griffen is one of the most memorable in a long line of dangerous, driven
Atwood women…In The Blind Assassin,
[Atwood’s] talents are on full display.”
— Times-Picayune
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“Entirely convincing…Atwood
is wonderfully perceptive.”
— Economist