Monday January 22, 2018
Welcome to my new readers and thank you for your interest and support to those who have been following this blog since it started.
This time I suggest reading a thought-provoking book, winner of the Booker Prize in 2001.
Three stories are intertwined in this novel but in the end they become one.The main character, Iris Chastain, presents her life through intelligent feedbacks over certain shocking events such as her sister's, husband's and daughter's death.
Iris and Laura, her younger sister, live with their parents at Avilion where their father, Captain Chase, owns a button factory in Port Ticonderoga, Canada. During the Great Depression, the business fails, and Captain Chase arranges a marriage between eighteen-year-old Iris and Richard Griffin, a whealthy businessman in the hope that this arrangement saves de factory, but it does not. Meanwhile the relationship between the two sisters becomes more a more difficult until Laura's suicide at the age of 25. After that, Iris realizes through her sister's journals that Richard had been raping Laura for much of their marriage. Two years after her sister's death, Iris publishes Laura's novel, Blind Assassin, that is in fact her own novel and contains the other two stories that I referred at in the introduction.
Although this novel can be confusing at the begining, it is worth making an effort to finish the book because the narration takes the form of a gradual revelation, and you will discover eventually a thrilling, well-developed novel not out of social criticism.
Posted by Belén Sánchez at 22h.
OK, Belén ... thank you for your review and particularly thank you for reminding us that we can grow with a book ... that we often have to persevere so that we finally win the prize and we shouldn't give up too soon if a book looks hard at the beginning.
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