Book Review: The Blind Assassin

Title: The Blind Assassin

Author: Margaret Atwood

Rating: 5 of 5 STARS

Finished: April 17th

Own: Yes

Why chosen: TBR Reading Challenge (alternate)

Highly, highly recommend this story within a story within a story. I've yet to read anything by Atwood that I didn't love and learn from. I won't review the story but just leave you with an encouragement to put this on your to-be-read list.

I tried to read this novel from a standpoint of trying to learn from Atwood's writing style. Here are some of my favorite lines, passages, and phrases. She is truly a master at her craft!

...treetops feathery with new leaves

...strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink in spilled water

...hospital-corridor green

...the whiteness of his teeth shows up like a scratched match flaring

Dried, lotioned and powderd, sprayed like mildew...

Still, the body must be hosed down, to get the smell of nocturnal darkness off the skin...

The words I write feather at the edges like lipstick on an aging mouth.

The summer heat has come in earnest, settling down over the town like cream soup.

My bones have been aching again...They ache like history: things long done with, that still reverberate as pain.

But in household like ours, there's often more in silences than in what is actually being said - in the lips pressed together, the head turned away, the quick sideways glance. The shoulders drawn up as if carrying a heavy weight. No wonder we took to listening at doors...

The leaves from the maples hang from their branches like limp gloves...

Her love for us was a given - solid and tangible, like a cake. The only question was which of us was going to get the bigger slice.

Reenie had braided our hair tightly and pulled it back, with one stiff black grosgrain ribbon at the top of each braid and one at the bottom: four severe black butterflies for each of us.

There was mist that day, rising from the river, swirling like skim milk in the air...

He wanted the lacy, frilly, somewhat murky edges trimmed off us as if we were lettuces, leaving a plain, sound core.

Arithmetic had entered the picture, with its many legs, its many spines and heads, its pitiless eyes made of zeroes.

Anger vibrated in the air like heat.

But over my head in what? Not water; something thicker. Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

It was night, with a fingernail moon.

...flavourless as an angel's buttock.

...the shoe of aging is beginning to pinch. Soon you'll regret all that sun-tanning. Your face will look like a testicle.

...plump yellow teeth like the kernels on a half-eaten cob of corn.

The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.