"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it." 
 A book in a book in a book. A story written in the folds of memories, a tale made of well-made lies and deceiving truths that slowly reveal themselves to the readers by a woman determined to tell the truth and, with that, get finally her revenge. 
 This multilayer story is encased in the memoir written by Iris, the last survivor of a glorious Canadian family of factory owners now in ruin. The solitary walks in her old home town, full of the vestiges of the past, stir both happy and painful memories which Iris will tentatively put on paper for the posterity. 
 It is a tiring and agonizing work which goes back to Iris and her sister Laura's childhood and youth in the years between the two Wolrd Wars. 
 The tale starts almost brutally, without preables: 
 "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. ..". 
 In the following page, a newspaper extracts reports the death of Iris's husband, Richard, two years after Laura's passing, apparently from natural causes. 
 Two clear and essential narrations which lead the reader to think he has the situation all figured out. 
 To this official sources the author gradually alternates the protagonist's narration, who goes back to her well-off childhood marked by the death of her mother and the drunk instability of her father, which left on Iris' shoulders the responsibility of the family while Laura grew up rebellious and oblivious of the external world, indifferent to what the appearances required until the impact with adulthood will shatter this somewhat safe environment causing opposing but equally dramatic reactions from the girls. 
 Between all this, The blind assassin, the scandalous novel written by Laura and published posthumous in which is narrated the story of the hidden relationship between a high society woman and a young political radical, wanted by the police.And inside this, the novel inside the novel, the sci-fi tale that the Blind Assassin's protagonist tell his lover during their rendezvous. 
 Again, at the center of Atwood novel there is a woman oppressed by a patriarchal society which imposes a model of good daughter, wife and mother to which women should happily conform themselves. 
 Iris and Laura are two antipodal kind of women, the first a numb slave of social conventions, the second ostensibly indifferent to them but none of them will escape a doomed destiny. 
 Both are looking for some kind of rebellion, but whatever their choice it will be just a short term victory, both dragged down, in Atwood's perspective, by their sentimental, feminine nature. The author seems to suggest that the only way not to be trumped by society is suppress every feeling and be heartless, like a man. 
 The whole book is magnificently written, with a style that can be hushed, melancholy and gently poetic like in Iris' memories but also cynical and matter-of-fact as in The Blind Assassin or rough and brutal as in the pulp novel inside the novel. 
 The more than 600 pages flow smooth and easy and the only critic I can move to this book is the mono-dimensional villains who are simply evil without any possibility of redemption. 
 The opposite can be said for the two protagonists, even though Laura becomes too easily the victim to be sacrificed while Iris's passivity makes almost impossible to side with her despite the wrongs suffered. Her insistent pleas to the "circumstances" which would have prevented whatever action on her part just raise incredulity and irritations, on the other hand I don't think Atwood was trying to create an idealistic heroine but to show all the unpredictable consequences of our actions and how naif it is to classify our choices simply in "good" and "bad".