PARTICULARLY CATS

Novelist Doris Lessing can recall "a hundred incidents involving cats, years and years of cats"—and does so in a memoir that reaches across continents and the years, and extreme feline states. She writes most particularly of her own two cats, the exquisite grey, part Siamese, part street, with her willful charm, who after an only-kittenhood never gave way to the "steady, obstinate, modest" black who invaded the household to stay. A change of scene from domestic strife comes with other memories: of the gentle Persian who kept her company in illness and herself succumbed to pneumonia, of her father on the grim mission of shooting a roomful of cats when the South African homestead was overwhelmed with them, of the more merciful recovery from a mineshaft of an outcast cat's kittens and a restoring of the brood to the family hearth. Mrs. Lessing is a keen mistress, alert to the intricacies of catly involvement and her qualities as a novelist are everywhere evident. Particularly cat lovers.