 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book you chose for the last line.
Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood. This novel is about an artist, Elaine, who suffered bullying as a child from three girls who were ostensibly her "best friends." The story jumps back and forth in time between the child Elaine and the adult who is trying to make sense of it: why her "friends" were so cruel, why she continued to seek their friendship, and whatever became of Cordelia, the ringleader. In one particularly disturbing scene, they throw her hat into the water at the bottom of a ravine, tell her to go get it, and abandon her in the freezing Canadian winter. Elaine's experiences have left her mistrustful of women. When an interviewer asks her about her experiences of sexism in the art world, Elaine is dismissive - even though she absolutely has experienced sexism, including the cliched affair with a professor who cheated on her with another student. But to Elaine, the girls' cruelty disguised as "trying to help her fit in" was more harmful and insidious. One thing about literary novels about childhood: authors always seem to describe every single thing when setting the scene. I found myself thinking, "I don't care what the silverware looked like, can we get on with the story?" There are a lot of philosophical musings about the nature of time and memory, starting with the opening: Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once. What intrigued me enough to read the book was the ending line: Now it's full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as we once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of year ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by.
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