The Blind Assassin

A family saga as narrated by a woman in her 80s, a perfectly ordinary woman with no talent or ambitions. It is like a road trip, this book; and this sassy grandma with an overactive imagination is driving us around, really slowly, taking all the sinuous side roads and detours, stopping every now and then to describe with exceptional vividness what we would have passed by unnoticed. In other words, it is long. I had to slog through most of it, but I don't regret it in the least.

The first line of the book fixes the pivot around which the rest of the tale is spun.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

“Mother is with God,” Laura said. True, this was the official version, the import of all the prayers that had been offered up; but Laura had a way of believing such things, not in the double way everyone else believed them, but with a tranquil single-mindedness that made me want to shake her

“Laura, what are you doing?” I said, “That's the Bible.”
“I'm cutting out the parts I don't like.”

Iris

I kicked off my shoes, threw myself down on the endless cream-colored bed. It had a canopy, with muslin draped around as if on safari. This, then, was where I was to grin and bear it - the bed I hasn't quite made, but now must lie in. And this was the ceiling I would be staring up at from now on, through the muslin fog, while earthly matters went on below my throat

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read...Otherwise you begin excusing yourself

"I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I have set down, but because of what I have omitted"