TEASER TUESDAYS — CAT’S EYE — SEPT. 13

Welcome to another Teaser Tuesdays, hosted by Should Be Reading.

Here’s how it works:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.

Today I’m sharing from Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood.  I’ve been on an Atwood kick lately.

Herself the daughter of a Canadian forest entomologist, Atwood writes in an autobiographical vein about Elaine Risley, a middle-aged Canadian painter (and daughter of a forest entomologist) who is thrust into an extended reconsideration of her past while attending a retrospective show of her work in Toronto, a city she had fled years earlier in order to leave behind painful memories. Most pointedly, Risley reflects on the strangeness of her long relations with Cordelia, a childhood friend whose cruelties, dealt lavishly to Risley, helped hone her awareness of our inveterate appetite for destruction even while we love, and are understood as characteristically femininea betrayal of other women that masks a ferocious betrayal of oneself. Atwood’s portrayal of the friendship gives the novel its fraught and mysterious center, but her critical assessment of Cordelia and the “whole world of girls and their doings” also takes the measure of a coercive, conformist society (not quite as extreme as in the futuristic The Handmaid’s Tale ). Emerging “the stronger” for her latecoming understanding of herself, Risley in the final pages rises above the ties that bound her, transcendently alive to the possibilities of “light, shining out in the midst of nothing.” BOMC main selection.

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This excerpt comes after the narrator tells us that her brother described that “time is not a line but a dimension….”

Teaser:  But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.  You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water.  p. 3

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I love Atwood’s style of writing.  I’m also rereading The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’ll share from that book another day.

What did you discover today?  Please share….