Atwood Rides Again

I finished Cat's Eye at work this morning - why, yes, it was quite the busy shift - and it was disquieting. Primarily, I think, because Atwood was playing with circular themes. As I read, images, phrases, people, kept circling through the scenes; events that occured one way at a certain point came back and played out differently again. Completed, it was as though I was looking at one of those spiral-graph toy pictures. The ones where you clamped the piece of paper inside and then ran your pencil round and round the different designs until you emerged with a sheet that looked like a cross between a Christmas snowflake and blueprints for a gear. Unless the paper slipped, and then it came out as a young child's scribblings of a mountian or trees or the sun. The brilliance of Atwood is that at times it looks as though she's slipped, that her pencil has gone careening after an errant tree, but then the picture joggles and steps back later and you see that there's an even larger circle that needed that tree to connect.

Is this rambling? It seems like rambling - confused and elated, which is how I finished the book. Then, as I was conveniently already in a library and had an hour left of my shift, I looked up 'Atwood, Margaret.' Now I'm reading Alias Grace. If Cat's Eye was playing with circles, this one is a play on forms. Already, I've flipped from narrative to poems, letters to drawings, newsprint. I don't have a grasp yet on what else she is playing with, my shift ended too soon for once, but I'm already intrigued. I like a writer who is having as much fun writing a work as I am reading it.

As there's already been a murder and an insane asylum in the book, I don't think I'm improving my 2008 vibes too much. For that, a happy note: I noticed this morning, as I was shivering and attempting to speed up the car's defrosting by the powers of my eyes burning through the steering wheel alone, that ice is not really solid. When it's forming, I mean. Goodness knows it's solid enough when you're trying to peel it off of a car. It forms, though, from little snowflakes of ice, chips of water that splay across the surface until they meet another frozen pattern and another. Then they all, apparently, form a union and fight for the right to never leave the window of your car. Things are so much prettier alone.