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The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author)
by Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author)
Having absolutely loved Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale," I decided to try out "The Blind Assassin."
Verdict? It was... okay. The writing was really great, but everything else kind of bored me -- the characters, the plot, the novel within the novel within the novel. By the time the book worked itself up to its climax, I had long since lost interest. I was just trying to plod through and finish the thing.
At times, I was more eager to find out what happened to the blind assassin and the girl without a tongue in the sacrificial temple than I was to find out what was really going on between the Chase sisters. While I found Atwood's passages about old age and mortality touchingly beautiful, I also found them repetitive.
Yawn. This book took me over a week to finish. That's evidence of something... I'm not giving up on Atwood, but this one was a C+, at best, just for boring me.
Verdict? It was... okay. The writing was really great, but everything else kind of bored me -- the characters, the plot, the novel within the novel within the novel. By the time the book worked itself up to its climax, I had long since lost interest. I was just trying to plod through and finish the thing.
At times, I was more eager to find out what happened to the blind assassin and the girl without a tongue in the sacrificial temple than I was to find out what was really going on between the Chase sisters. While I found Atwood's passages about old age and mortality touchingly beautiful, I also found them repetitive.
Yawn. This book took me over a week to finish. That's evidence of something... I'm not giving up on Atwood, but this one was a C+, at best, just for boring me.
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Jennifer
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rated it 3 stars
Jan 10, 2009 11:19pm
Thank you, Alice! I felt exactly the same way about this book. I know it was "genius" but I felt her writing was more about showing off her literary talent that moving the story along.
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Ditto, Heather--people have recommended other Atwood books to me and I've just stayed away. I don't want to invest the (huge amount) of time.
I felt similarly, especially in the middle. The first and last hundred pages are really gripping, but I think the center could have been spliced down greatly - The Blind Assassin might have made a better novella than it did novel. (And a long novel at that.)
i concur. my review was pretty similar to yours, only more snarky i guess, pin-pointing more of my major gripes with the novel and not finding it up to par with some of her other work: especially the handmaid's tale, and oryx and crake.
