The Imagined Library Books that were never written

The Blind Assassin  ·  Novel

The Blind Assassin

Laura Chase

Can I actually read this? Substantially. Long passages are reproduced in full. Extensive excerpts

A roman à clef issued under a dead woman's name, about unnamed lovers in rented rooms, and inside that a pulp tale of a blind assassin and a mute girl on the planet Zycron.

Goldman pretended to abridge a book that was never written. Iris pretends her sister wrote a book that Iris wrote. Both are lies about whose hand held the pen. Only one of them is a confession.

The extracts arrive without commentary, under a 1947 imprint, and they do the usual roman-à-clef work: a rich girl, a man on the run, rooms that smell of cheap soap, a planet invented to say what cannot be said in Port Ticonderoga. Readers of Atwood’s novel are meant to think they are reading Laura. They are reading Iris reading Laura, which is more accurate and less kind. Laura remains the public author. That was the point. A living industrialist’s wife could not have signed it. A dead girl could, and the dead girl had been owed a book.

The science fiction inside the roman à clef is not decoration. Sakiel-Norn is where Atwood puts the factory, the sacrifice, the girl who is not allowed to speak, and the man hired to end her. Pulp does the moral work the drawing-room cannot. Then Iris tells you, late, that she was the woman in the room. The assassin was never blind. The readers were.

On the readability rating. Long stretches of the inner novel are given. The 1947 object does not exist as a separate book. Atwood’s is the only edition, and it will not sit still.

In-world history

Laura Chase drives off a bridge in 1945. Two years later a novel appears under her name. Critics and a daughter take it for Laura's account of a radical named Alex Thomas. Late in life Iris Chase Griffen writes the memoir that is Atwood's novel and admits the inner book was hers: Alex was her lover; Laura was her collaborator only in the sense that the dead still occupy the living. Inside the inner book, the man tells the woman a serial about Sakiel-Norn, slave children woven blind, a sacrificial girl, an assassin who does not finish the job.

Why it matters

Atwood's book and Laura's book share a title, which is the first trap. The second is that Laura did not write it. Iris did, from an affair that was hers, and published it as her sister's revenge and her own confession, which is a lot of work for a title page.

Appearances

  • The Blind Assassin (2000) — Margaret Atwood Published 1947, in the fiction, as Laura Chase's posthumous first novel, by Reingold, Jaynes & Moreau, New York; written by her sister

Editions in our world

  • The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood (2000) The book you can buy contains the book Laura is supposed to have written. It is not a facsimile of a 1947 novel. It is Atwood performing one.

Connected volumes

Catalogue record

Category
Novel
World
The Blind Assassin
Imagined by
Margaret Atwood
First appearance
The Blind Assassin (McClelland & Stewart / Bloomsbury, 2000)
Readability
Extensive excerpts
Books Within Books Lost Manuscripts

Sources

  • Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (McClelland & Stewart / Bloomsbury, 2000). The inner novel is printed in extracts throughout.

Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06