Margaret Atwood – The Blind Assassin

One of my life’s goals has always been to become an eccentric billionaire, or at the very least, a weird millionaire. I wouldn’t be mad about either outcome. I’m pretty sure Oprah is a billionaire, and she’s always telling people what books they should read, so as a stepping stone to billion-icity-ness, I’m going to start doing that. How is telling people what to read going to get me more money? I really don’t know. Maybe the author of one of these books will come across The Shlog and be like, “Wow, thanks for telling people about my book! Here, have a little bit of money.” That happens a couple hundred times, and I have amassed a small fortune. It’s elementary economics. Anyways, I’ll be periodically introducing a different Blook (Blog Book) and giving a brief overview.

I’ve been reading through the Time Magazine 100 Best Novels list, and am currently on The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, published in 2000. Picked up a copy at the Salvation Army for fiddy cent. Not too shabby of a deal for 521 freaking pages. Here’s the synopsis:

There’s like this old chick, and she’s writing down stuff about her life or something. And her sister drove a car off a bridge right after WWII ended, and it’s the ’90s now, I think. Time kind of keeps jumping around, and there’s also newspaper clippings interspersed within the story, to show things that were happening to the old chick’s family at the time, because her dad had a button factory and they were rich. Also, the sister that drove off the bridge wrote a sci-fi book, and it got published after she died, and every few chapters or so there’s part of that book thrown into the mix as well, so basically, you’re reading two books. Her sister’s book is called The Blind Assassin, and I think that might be what the real book is named after. If it isn’t, that would be a really weird coincidence. There’s probably some metaphors used in the book as well, because I think that’s something that a lot of authors do, is use metaphors. I’m too dumb to pick up on those though, I just like looking at words. I’m only about halfway through, but I’m guessing the old chick is probably going to die at the end, because she keeps talking about how crappy her heart is. Maybe that’s a metaphor right there. But if an idiot like me realized that, then it probably isn’t. But I guess it could be. Maybe it has something to do with the ramifications of a lifetime of eating opulent delicacies, but that might not work because in the part I’m at, the Depression is going on, and they’re not really rich anymore. Anyways, welcome to The Shlog Blook Club.