I'm glad I read this book but I had some intensely mixed emotions it. The Blind Assassin is a structurally complicated (read: unnecessarily gimmicky) work that sets out to tell three eventually converging stories. These three parts of the narrative vary dramatically in quality. 
 Part One: Flashbacks to protagonist Iris's early life, written in memoir form from the perspective of Iris as an old, justifiably embittered women. These chapters are uniformly excellent. 
 Part Two: Elderly Iris in the present reflecting on her current life. Good but repetitive (this section can be summarized as "get off my lawn" written in more highfalutin prose). 
 Part Three: The novel within a novel "The Blind Assassin" (view spoiler)[ supposedly (hide spoiler)] written by Iris's doomed sister Laura. This is tedious, almost incomprehensible garbage. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad writing experiment that should have been jettisoned by the editor before publication. You can skip these chapters without missing a beat, and I would encourage anyone who reads this book to do so. 
 There are also faux newspaper articles sprinkled throughout the text to provide some exposition. 
 There was enough that worked about this book that I am happy I read it, but the parts that don't work are really terrible. Iris's story without the "Blind Assassin" segments is more than strong enough to carry a book without the obnoxious, annoying and unnecessary book within a book. 
 Read this and prepare to alternate between "this is awesome" and "please make it stop."