- •620017 Екатеринбург, просп. Космонавтов, 26
- •Contents
- •Revision
- •The blind assassin Text 1
- •Questions and tasks
- •The Doom of the Darnaways
- •Questions and tasks
- •The blind assassin Text 2
- •The great gatsby
- •Questions and tasks
- •Questions and tasks:
- •Cheap at half the price
- •Questions and tasks:
- •The story of an hour
- •Questions and tasks:
- •References:
The blind assassin Text 1
By Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age.
The Blind Assassin is her award-winning, bestselling novel. Set in Canada, it is narrated from the present day, referring back to events that span the twentieth century. Time Magazine named it the best novel of 2000 and included it in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923.
The novel centres on the protagonist, Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, who committed suicide shortly after the Second World War ended. Iris, now an old woman, recalls the events and relationships of her childhood, youth and middle age, as well as her unhappy marriage to Richard Griffen, a rival of her industrialist father. Interwoven into the novel is a story within a story, a secret affair attributed to Laura and published by Iris about Alex Thomas, a politically radical author of pulp science fiction who has an ambiguous relationship with the sisters.
The book is set in the fictional Ontario town of Port Ticonderoga and in the Toronto of the 1930s and 1940s. It is a work of historical fiction with the major events of Canadian history forming an important backdrop to the novel.
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She has a single photograph of him. She tucked it into a brown envelope on which she’d written clippings, and hid the envelope between the pages of Perennials for the Rock Garden, where no one else would ever look. She’s preserved this photo carefully, because it’s almost all she has left of him. It’s black and white, taken by one of those boxy, cumbersome flash cameras from before the war, with their accordion-pleat nozzles and their well-made leather cases that looked like muzzles, with straps and intricate buckles. The photo is of the two of them together, her and this man, on a picnic. Picnic is written on the back, in pencil—not his name or hers, just picnic. She knows the names, she doesn’t need to write them down. They’re sitting under a tree; it might have been an apple tree; she didn’t notice the tree much at the time. She’s wearing a white blouse with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a wide skirt tucked around her knees. There must have been a breeze, because of the way the shirt is blowing up against her; or perhaps it wasn’t blowing, perhaps it was clinging; perhaps it was hot. It was hot. Holding her hand over the picture, she can still feel the heat coming up from it, like the heat from a sun-warmed stone at midnight. The man is wearing a light-coloured hat, angled down on his head and partially shading his face. His face appears to be more darkly tanned than hers. She’s turned half towards him, and smiling, in a way she can’t remember smiling at anyone since. She seems very young in the picture, too young, though she hadn’t considered herself too young at the time. He’s smiling too—the whiteness of his teeth shows up like a scratched match flaring—but he’s holding up his hand, as if to fend her off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera, from the person who must be there, taking the picture; or else to protect himself from those in the future who might be looking at him, who might be looking in at him through this square, lighted window of glazed paper. As if to protect himself from her. As if to protect her. In his outstretched, protecting hand there’s the stub end of a cigarette. She retrieves the brown envelope when she’s alone, and slides the photo out from among the newspaper clippings. She lays it flat on the table and stares down into it, as if she’s peering into a well or pool—searching beyond her own reflection for something else, something she must have dropped or lost, out of reach but still visible, shimmering like a jewel on sand. She examines every detail. His fingers bleached by the flash or the sun’s glare; the folds of their clothing; the leaves of the tree, and the small round shapes hanging there—were they apples, after all? The coarse grass in the foreground. The grass was yellow then because the weather had been dry. Over to one side—you wouldn’t see it at first—there’s a hand, cut by the margin, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass as if discarded. Left to its own devices. The trace of blown cloud in the brilliant sky, like ice cream smudged on chrome. His smoke-stained fingers. The distant glint of water. All drowned now. Drowned, but shining. |