Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Cat’s Eye is another one of my shelf-sitter books that made the move west with me ten years ago from Philadelphia. My book group of fond memory had read Handmaid’s Tale, and at least one member recommended Cat’s Eye. I bought it on sale, and have since read Alias Grace, and left the older book to gather dust.
It’s good to know that good books will wait for me. Once I began, it was if the narrator reached out of the pages, grabbed my hand, and wouldn’t let go till the end. It’s a small paperback, so I could take it with me, and I read little bits whenever possible. It’s the story of an established painter of a certain age, Elaine, who becomes immersed in painful memories when she returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her work. The story unspools both in the past and the present, but Atwood pulls off time shifts in the narrative seamlessly. Around the age of ten, Elaine had three friends. Bad things ensued, in the manner of young girls. I had forgotten, until this book, how cruel young girls could be. The teen years were nothing compared with the pre-pubescent ones. Atwood captures the power and potential horror of younger girls’ behavior with skill.
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
I found this book powerful, moving and even frightening. Set in the everyday world of the forties through the eighties, it was more emotionally frightening, perhaps, even than the dystopian Handmaid’s Tale.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Cat’s Eye is one of my favorite Atwoods, or even one of my favorite books of all. Excellent, and yes, frightening.
May 7th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Read this one earlier in the year, and thought it was quite good. I have a love-hate relationship with Atwood, I think largely due to my first exposure to her being in the form of “Lady Oracle” at the age of 15. HATED that book! But “Cat’s Eye” I enjoyed much more, because by and large I thought the characters were more authentic and I could actually relate to them (at the not-so-tender age of 24, I found myself dealing with a real-life Cordelia (in her younger days) of my own). Subsequently, I found the childhood portion of the novel most compelling and personally resonant. As the narrator ages, I thought she became less sympathetic (which I think is the point, that she slowly embodies traits of her previous aggressors and turns the tables) and more the typical Atwood female “protagonist”, who is as despicable as she is admirable. Something I’ve never been able to shake since my first Atwood novel (not that I’ve read that many, mind you) is the sense that the traits Atwood thought made her character “ballsy” are in fact the ones that annoy me the most. As with other early Atwood, the book feels (out)dated to me when it comes to women’s issues, and I feel that Atwood’s voice is one that does not represent me as a woman… but she nailed childhood dead on. I guess that nasty little girl relationship is something that really is timeless.
May 11th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
This is my fourth Atwood after Handmaid’s Tale, Robber Bride, Alias Grace. I’ve liked and admired them all. I think my favorite is Alias Grace. You make an excellent point, Steph–her heroines are decidedly flawed and often unsympathetic and the men are even worse. But her writing and storytelling always carry me through.