In fact, for the first 30 self-consciously oblique pages, "The Blind Assassin" drags us through a pawn shop of incongruous objects: more obituaries about the accident-prone Chase family, furtive meetings between two unnamed lovers, ghastly battles on Zycron, and best of all, the old narrator's cranky patter about the indignities of modern life. Or the story of intergalactic warfare on the planet Zycron. Nor does the carefully fabricated obituary that follows. "Ten days after the war ended," the narrator opens, "my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." The flames of that deadly tragedy don't throw much light on Laura's motives. It's a killer novel, all right, but it can see exactly where it's going, even when we can't. The title of her latest book, The Blind Assassin, announces its recklessness right up front. She leaps from heights, crashes through walls, and flies through flames that more prudent writers would never dare. Margaret Atwood is the literary world's greatest stunt woman.
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