"The Blind Assassin" Post 2b

"The Blind Assassin", though an excellent read, is an extremely depressing book. Iris' family, like all families, has its own tragedies, but it is its inability to prevent them or even to do anything that makes it so hard to read. She and Laura are constantly being trapped: in their roles in the town as the children of the factory owner, in their father's unrealistic business practices, in their ensuing debt in which they have no training to prepare them for, in Mr. Erskine's teaching (where they are unable to go to their father), and finally in Iris' marriage. The writing also adds to the general mood: it is so straightforward and truthful, but not blunt, just honest. Some of my favorite quotes from this section: 

"That's another thing: my father is now the heir, which is to say he's fatherless as well as brotherless. The kingdom is in his hands. It feels like mud"(76)

"But appearances are deceptive. I could have never driven off a bridge. My father could have. My mother couldn't" (80)

"My father has gone back to gazing out the window. (Did he place himself outside this window, looking in? An orphan, forever excluded - a night wanderer? This is what he was supposed to have been fighting for - this fireside idyll, this comfortable scene out of a Shredded Wheat advertisement: the rounded, rosy-faced wife, so kind and good, the obedient, worshipful child. This flatness, this boredom. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?" (81)

"But perhaps Laura wasn't very different from other people after all. Perhaps she was the same - the same as some odd, skewed element in them that most people keep hidden but that Laura did not, and this was why she frightened them" (89)

"I was sulky during these visits. I could see how ill she was, and I resented her for it. I felt she was in some way betraying me - that she was shirking her duties, that she'd abdicated" (93)

"(What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies" (94).