“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Alfred A Knopf (2001) (First published 2000)
540 pages

I have no idea what to say about this book. Perhaps literary fiction is just not my thing. I enjoyed reading it, though I was never really compelled to read on past my bedtime, and I liked finding the twists and turns to the plot, and how the stories within stories within stories were told in the book. I liked how the stories were slowly woven together at the end. I was impressed that Margaret Atwood managed to pull it off and have it all make sense. I really liked the way she repeated some passages to tie things together. And I love it when there are twists up to the end and you figure it out just before the author spells it out — I think that’s how it should be done. Enough clues to let the reader figure it out, but enough obfuscating to make it exciting, unlike some other books that I will grouse about later.

But! But. I found the story to move oh-so-slowly, and I found myself reading it at the same snail’s pace, despite how much I liked the way Atwood uses the language. This is the first library book I had to renew because I couldn’t finish it on time. The novel centres on Iris Chase, whose sister Laura commits suicide at the end of World War II, as Iris, now an old woman, recounts the tale of her life. Interwoven between Iris’s narrative are newspaper clippings and The Blind Assassin, Laura’s novel which was published posthumously.

For some reason the edition I read had some problems with the typeset — some “W”s came out as “fi”s and “fi”s as “W”s. It was distracting when one of your characters is suddenly called “finifred” and someone else is “Wghting” something. Hopefully that will get, or has been, fixed in later editions!

This book was also read for the Man Booker Challenge hosted by Dewey. This book wasn’t even on my original list; I suspect very few of the books on the original list will end up being read for that challenge. Actually, out of Margaret Atwood’s books, The Handmaid’s Tale has been recommended to me more often than this title, but I can’t seem to find a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale anywhere. I probably should poke the library and get it to add it to its collection.