Posts tagged with "book dart" - Faerye Net

The Blind Assassin

2008-09-26T22:10:10+00:00

I haven’t made a habit of reposting my book reviews from book cataloging websites here (I now review everything I read for the first time.) However, I just finished reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Now, I have read another book this good recently: I perused Mrs. Dalloway this Spring. However, I had been prepared for Mrs. Dalloway — everyone told me how fabulous that was. Everyone told me The Blind Assassin was good, but it blew me away.

So, here is my review, also posted on LibraryThing and Goodreads.

I’ve already been an Atwood admirer for a few years, but The Blind Assassin is too gorgeous to merely admire. I love it. Where it isn’t exquisite, it’s precise. It moves expertly between the dry, the brutally truthful, and the passionate, and brings the keenness of the author’s eye to them all. Atwood describes both the elusive and the everyday with a transforming grace.

All that is merely on the level of prose, of paragraph. Her narrator is human, complex, and honest. The other characters are interesting, Laura chiefly so, of course, and I appreciate the way Iris acknowledges and interrogates her own inability to do others’ characters justice. I particularly appreciated the way that Atwood drew us into the book with the mystery of Laura, and then gradually made us (well, me, at any rate) fonder and fonder of Iris. A beautiful literary bait and switch.

All this and a compelling plot. Really, if I try to think of something wrong with this book, the first thing that swims to mind is that it’s more than a little intimidating to a young author. My consolation is that she was 61 when it was published. I still have some years to practice.

Here are some quotes from the book:

She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.

Recent uses of Book Darts, part V

2008-08-21T11:17:51+00:00

I’m reading VALIS by Philip K. Dick.

“Basically, Sherri’s idea had to do with bringing Fat’s mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.”

“Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.”

Recent uses of Book Darts, part IV

2008-05-23T11:14:08+00:00

“There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, ‘Mistakes were made,’ you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.” – Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

“The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.” – Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

“All moralizing implies some knowledge of the future.” – Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

“They’ll never know it’s actually possible for a boy to be so boring you’d agree to kiss him just to get him to shut up.” – Alice Hoffman, Local Girls

“Sam laughed. ‘I’m very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I’m a liar.’” – Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

“It would be nice if there were some one thing constant and unchanging in the universe. If there is such a thing, then it is a thing which would have to be stronger than love, and it is a thing which I do not know.” – Sam, Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

Recent uses of Book Darts, part III

2007-07-23T16:19:59+00:00

“Fiction begins where human knowledge begins — with the senses—and every fiction writer is bound by this fundamental aspect of his medium.” – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.” – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“It’s said that when Henry James received a manuscript that he didn’t like, he would return it with the comment, ‘You have chosen a good subject and are treating it in a straightforward manner.’ This usually pleased the person getting the manuscript back, but it was the worst thing that James could think of to say, for he knew, better than anybody else, that the straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject.” – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“To me the fairy tale is like the sea, and the sagas and myths are like the waves upon it; a tale rises to be a myth, and sinks down again into being a fairy tale.” – Marie-Louise von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

Recent uses of Book Darts, part II

2007-06-13T21:22:47+00:00

You’ll doubtless be shocked to know that I’m in the midst of original fiction for this website. Standalone, even! In the meantime, here are more quotes I’ve saved with Book Darts of late:

“I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.” – Dr. Maturin on friendship, Patrick O’Brian, Post Captain

“Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Unfortunately, it is precisely the men or women of genius who mind most what is said of them.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, also quoted in Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Wood

Recent uses of Book Darts, part I

2007-06-02T22:19:53+00:00

“In order to become a Sacred Wood, a wood must be tangled and twisted like the forests of the Druids, and not orderly like a French garden.” – Umberto Eco on ‘cult’ texts, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

“Likewise, to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.” – Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.” – Patrick O’Brian qua Stephen Maturin, Master and Commander

Oooh, I absolutely looooove Book Darts!