Cat's Eye

I just finished re-reading Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, I seem to be revisiting Atwood while in Denmark, which is partly owing to the reading selections available to me and partly because I finally read Oryx and Crake last year and it has made me want to revisit Atwood. Cat’s Eye is about a painter who returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her work and while in the city of her childhood she revisits the past and remembers childhood and childhood relationships. Since reading Oryx and Crake I seem to find clues that Atwood was heading in that direction for some time, the father in Cat’s Eye and his predilection for the doom humanity has wrought upon itself is a natural precursor to the world of Crake.

Beyond that I have also been going through a ‘retrospective’ of my own along with Atwood’s Elaine, remembering childhood friends, wondering how we all make it through relatively unscathed. At times the neuroses of the character became my own and I feared for my children too, when us adults are just faking it what chance for our children? Elaine remembers that those in charge were older and were supposed to know what they were doing, but then, as she got older those in charge were closer to her age and she knew…

My retrospective involved googling someone I grew up with, opening an e-mail from a high- school friend (I’m on the list, they are business related, I don’t always open them), and one morning on the bus I got lost in thoughts about my high-school job. Suddenly I was feeling quite strongly about Ron and Linda who were my bosses in the produce department at Calbeck’s. They were really good to me, not like the hockey coach guy who took over from them and had me written up for having an ‘attitude problem’, funny Ron and Linda never had any complaints. Who had the attitude problem?    

I can almost let go of that anger now, but replacing that anger is disappointment, I am out of Atwood and feel that it is unlikely I will stumble upon an English copy of Surfacing any time soon.