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Margaret Anne Doody

  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s tenth novel is both familiar and new. As it is an Atwood novel, we get eggs, a ravine, shit, snow, an ethereal double or sisterly doppelgänger, a bridge, a river, an act of violence – images and themes from her earlier fiction metamorphosed. The Blind Assassin also possesses the unusual lyrical sensuousness that distinguished Alias Grace (1996), Atwood’s last major work. A complex rumination on narrative, it is as elegant and dynamic as its predecessor, but more contemplative and more edgy – and much more witty.

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Margaret Anne Doody is John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She is the author of The True Story of the Novel