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Since everyone was raving about it, I decided to read The Blind Assassin. I didn't care for it. Here's why:

1. I had the ending predicted within the first 10 pages of the book. I knew she'd murdered Richard as soon as that article on his death appeared. I just didn't know why.
I also knew it could not have been Laura that wrote that book, unless she miraculously became smart as an adult. The fact that she took everything literally and had a loose, or naive perhaps may be a better word, grasp on reality, really smacked of mental deficiency, like autism or some such.
I figured out she was the girl in Blind Assassin about halfway through the book.

2. I did not connect with Iris in the slightest. Until the end of the book, she was just, it seemed, a do-nothing spoiled rich girl with zero ambition, zero drive, and zero care for much in life. I can't stand people like that. Usually if the book doesn't have a strong female character, if there are female characters in the book, I have a really difficult time finishing it. (I hadn't really thought much about that before, until I read this book, but I can very honestly go through my fiction collection right now and point to the strong females in them. I think this may be a result of growing up on American Girl and Dear America.) I know Iris is supposed to be the protagonist, but I could not make myself care for her. Reenie could arguably be presented as the strong woman in this story, but she's a tertiary role.

3. In fact, I think the only character I actually really got interested in was the blind assassin himself, but that got dropped abruptly from the storyline. I get the analogy- that the blind assassin is Alex Thomas, living in the shadows, fighting battles that aren't his own, and that Iris is the girl with no tongue, deprived of her voice in the world by others. Which I think is why it was left out of Alex's published version. But I don't see it as a powerful enough analogy to carry the whole book.

So that's my two cents. Please feel free to debate me.

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That's sort of interesting because I never really thought about any of the specific people in the story and honestly can't remember what I thought about them as characters- I think I really ended up feeling my way through the book in first person and not thinking about those people. I remember the atmosphere and the tone of the book way more than the people- it just made me feel a certain way that I really loved. Somehow I feel like having to know the answer was just... secondary to the journey, I liked the way the book made me feel when I read it. Maybe it was a very emotional, illogical thing and that wasn't working for you, I don't know. There's really no debating like or dislike, I guess.

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I guess I'm in the same camp as

blue_crow on there's no real debating with like versus don't like. I can say why I liked it, and that's about it.

I really liked Laura, and I didn't see her as autistic. She is naive, but I think I saw her more as like

trovia's Hot Dog: her brain just works in such a strongly visual way that her thoughts don't translate well into words, and it's especially hard for a word-centered thinker like Iris to understand someone like that. And while I got mad at Iris a lot, I found the fact that she was willing to put down a lot of ugly things on paper for her granddaughter instead of whitewashing her past, that she was finally willing to confess her own story in her own voice instead of letting newspapers and fictional characters and the pseudonym of her sister tell it for her, gave her an interestingly structured growth arc.

I guessed in the first ten pages that Iris was the author, too, but I almost immediately brushed aside that first instinct, figuring the similarities I was seeing in Iris's thoughts and *The Blind Assassin* chapters was a flaw in Atwood's style, that it was Atwood's voice peeking through in both of them too much, and unintentional. So, when I was vindicated at the end, it was oddly somewhere between a surprise and a "aha! I knew it!"

But my absolute favorite part is the mastery of the structure and how it works with the theme of storytelling, which is a huge theme of Atwood's. Unusual structure and the power of storytelling are two of my...maybe four major literary kinks (three being memory and four being allusion and/or music, come to think of it), so this book kind of had me at "hello." ;) I loved how all three strands of the novel--the newspaper clippings, Iris's long letter to her granddaughter, and *The Blind Assassin*--essentially told the same story. Yet it was such a different story each time because of the teller, and you needed to see all three to understand any one of them in any meaningful way.

So, maybe that turned out to be more than two cents. ;) Out of curiosity, have you read anything else by Atwood?

That's one thing I did like about the story was the multi-layered structure. It was a different approach, and it worked.

I haven't read anything else by Atwood. I just kept seeing this one mentioned over and over on my FL, so I thought I'd start with this one.

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