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Cat's Eye
Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman—but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories.
462 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1988
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About the author
Margaret Atwood
669 books89.9k followersMargaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.
Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.
Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,859 reviews
June 20, 2018
i know for a fact that books were written and published after this one, but i can't for the life of me understand why.
come to my blog!
come to my blog!
June 15, 2019
"This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance."
The scary thing is that you stay a child inside that accumulation of life. You take your childhood with you when you enter the grown-up world, and as much as you try to pretend that you are free and light as a feather, you carry the heavy weight of having been a child wherever you go.
This is the story of a grown-up woman, an artist, who dares to go down memory lane and remember the abusive friendships, the feeling of dependence, of helplessness, of hatred and admiration merged into the odd feeling of wanting to belong even if belonging means being in acute pain. It tells the everyday tale of a sensitive child under the spell of a bully. It explores how selectively we can choose to forget in order to be able to live on, and how inconvenient it can be for us to suddenly remember what we chose not to know anymore:
"You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."
I loved this novel to bits when I first read it, and it scared me out of my comfort zone. It was one of the most intensely revealing reflections on childhood and its impact on grown-up life I have ever encountered, simply because the story is so common, and so universal, and so typical. The idea of confronting a childhood bully with one's memories is terrifying, especially as one can never trust the mind to behave as a grown-up when confronted with deeply hidden childhood fears and wishes. A bullied child won't ever forget the feeling of powerlessness or the humiliation and the wish to change the pattern of perceived failure. But the bully will have her own reality, unconnected to the all-absorbing memories of the hurt child:
"She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her."
My guess is that most bullies are too one-dimensional to accept a reflection of themselves that might not be favorable, and that it remains the role of the weaker and more sensitive (more intelligent!) human being to understand the mechanisms behind evil group behaviour: "Whoever cares the most will lose". But that is only part of the truth. Looking back with hindsight, a new pattern is formed, and the negative memories become fruitful for personal development.
They are the roots for a rich inner life, and the message I read between the lines in Cat's Eye is that your experience can't be changed or undone, but it can be turned into creative power, and it can feed your understanding of the world. It can help you keep your inner child active beyond childhood, and drive your ambition. You can sculpt a life out of the clay you are given, and turn it into your individual artwork. If you dare to look into the cat's eye of your memories, that is.
You carry your cat's eye marbles with you, shiny, cold, hard, difficult to trade and play with, but beautiful and magical at the same time, a visual and tactile proof of your existence:
Recommended to those who are brave enough to face the true life of children, often too hard to retrospectively bear for grown-ups.
The scary thing is that you stay a child inside that accumulation of life. You take your childhood with you when you enter the grown-up world, and as much as you try to pretend that you are free and light as a feather, you carry the heavy weight of having been a child wherever you go.
This is the story of a grown-up woman, an artist, who dares to go down memory lane and remember the abusive friendships, the feeling of dependence, of helplessness, of hatred and admiration merged into the odd feeling of wanting to belong even if belonging means being in acute pain. It tells the everyday tale of a sensitive child under the spell of a bully. It explores how selectively we can choose to forget in order to be able to live on, and how inconvenient it can be for us to suddenly remember what we chose not to know anymore:
"You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."
I loved this novel to bits when I first read it, and it scared me out of my comfort zone. It was one of the most intensely revealing reflections on childhood and its impact on grown-up life I have ever encountered, simply because the story is so common, and so universal, and so typical. The idea of confronting a childhood bully with one's memories is terrifying, especially as one can never trust the mind to behave as a grown-up when confronted with deeply hidden childhood fears and wishes. A bullied child won't ever forget the feeling of powerlessness or the humiliation and the wish to change the pattern of perceived failure. But the bully will have her own reality, unconnected to the all-absorbing memories of the hurt child:
"She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her."
My guess is that most bullies are too one-dimensional to accept a reflection of themselves that might not be favorable, and that it remains the role of the weaker and more sensitive (more intelligent!) human being to understand the mechanisms behind evil group behaviour: "Whoever cares the most will lose". But that is only part of the truth. Looking back with hindsight, a new pattern is formed, and the negative memories become fruitful for personal development.
They are the roots for a rich inner life, and the message I read between the lines in Cat's Eye is that your experience can't be changed or undone, but it can be turned into creative power, and it can feed your understanding of the world. It can help you keep your inner child active beyond childhood, and drive your ambition. You can sculpt a life out of the clay you are given, and turn it into your individual artwork. If you dare to look into the cat's eye of your memories, that is.
You carry your cat's eye marbles with you, shiny, cold, hard, difficult to trade and play with, but beautiful and magical at the same time, a visual and tactile proof of your existence:
Recommended to those who are brave enough to face the true life of children, often too hard to retrospectively bear for grown-ups.
November 13, 2014
I look at the progression of 5-star ratings by friends - mostly women - and wonder if it is a womanly weakness to rate a book 5 stars which deconstructs the world from the female perspective? Is this visceral urge something to be ashamed of, something you must suppress to show due deference to 'standards' of literary appraisal?
But then why don't I feel conflicted enough while handing out my 5 stars to those modern masterpieces written mostly by dead, white men? All those narrative voices that busy themselves with the righteous task of pondering the depths of colonialism and oppression and class conflict and what other sociopolitical fuckups have you while simultaneously omitting out one half of the human race's points of view - books that throw in a woman character as the obligatory object of patronizing love or lust or as a lifeless plot device, turning her into a mere accessory meant to embellish the life of the male narrator whose word is the truth by default while the sanctity of all else is subject to skepticism.
Or is this a failing of civilization that a large majority of readers will simply glance at that blurb or the reviews which make it sound as if this were solely about the private world of girls, spot that glaring 'feminism' label and dismiss the possibility of reading this? One would think that even a literary treatment of the 'private world of girls' is a subject so outside the sphere of all humanly concern that it warrants the level of universal apathy it generates.
This is not so much the story of an ageing female painter (Elaine Risley) - a relic of the pre-feminism mode of life - told in snatches, as much as it is an account of the relationships which molded and shaped her character and the enduring trauma of childhood bullying which manifested itself in nearly all her life choices, flawed as they were. Not so much a fictionalized outpouring of her discontent with her declining youth and whitening hair as much her rivetting blow-by-blow dissection of the world and the people around her through the years. And because I know Atwood stringently avoids any associations with the term 'feminist' or any group identity which seeks to shoehorn her writing into some exclusive compartment, I'll merely say it also includes some of the most cutting, precise and unbiased observations about every issue of major importance. Wars, terrorism, racism, religious bigotry, sexism, misogyny, art and art criticism, motherhood, the politics of relationships...you name it and Elaine has startling new wisdom to offer on that topic, however time-worn.
The complexity of relationships between women of nearly all ages is often a difficult thing to fully comprehend let alone commit to paper. Generally, we find it easier to communicate with men. While with other women you are forever grasping at straws, unable to determine which layer of superficiality you are dealing with and which of your layers of feigned cordiality or fabricated fellow feeling may win their favor. But Atwood, the mistress of the craft that she is, has brought the private, secretive world of female bondings alive and demolished one of the greatest pop culture stereotypes ever - that of the mean girl. So believe the reviewers who have confessed to having a Cordelia-like frenemy in their lives - someone who understood them better than a lot of people while simultaneously doling out emotional torment in devious ways. I'm no exception. Once you come across a Cordelia in your life - no matter how much you may have loathed her at times - it's hard to dull the edges of the memory of your involvement with her. She looms larger than life at the back of your mind and fades into the distance of years. Try as you might you cannot forget her. And neither could Elaine.
But then why don't I feel conflicted enough while handing out my 5 stars to those modern masterpieces written mostly by dead, white men? All those narrative voices that busy themselves with the righteous task of pondering the depths of colonialism and oppression and class conflict and what other sociopolitical fuckups have you while simultaneously omitting out one half of the human race's points of view - books that throw in a woman character as the obligatory object of patronizing love or lust or as a lifeless plot device, turning her into a mere accessory meant to embellish the life of the male narrator whose word is the truth by default while the sanctity of all else is subject to skepticism.
The naked women are presented in the same manner as the plates of meat and dead lobsters, with the same attention to the play of candlelight on skin, the same lusciousness, the same sensuous and richly rendered detail, the same painterly delight in tactility. [] They appear served up.
Or is this a failing of civilization that a large majority of readers will simply glance at that blurb or the reviews which make it sound as if this were solely about the private world of girls, spot that glaring 'feminism' label and dismiss the possibility of reading this? One would think that even a literary treatment of the 'private world of girls' is a subject so outside the sphere of all humanly concern that it warrants the level of universal apathy it generates.
Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.
This is not so much the story of an ageing female painter (Elaine Risley) - a relic of the pre-feminism mode of life - told in snatches, as much as it is an account of the relationships which molded and shaped her character and the enduring trauma of childhood bullying which manifested itself in nearly all her life choices, flawed as they were. Not so much a fictionalized outpouring of her discontent with her declining youth and whitening hair as much her rivetting blow-by-blow dissection of the world and the people around her through the years. And because I know Atwood stringently avoids any associations with the term 'feminist' or any group identity which seeks to shoehorn her writing into some exclusive compartment, I'll merely say it also includes some of the most cutting, precise and unbiased observations about every issue of major importance. Wars, terrorism, racism, religious bigotry, sexism, misogyny, art and art criticism, motherhood, the politics of relationships...you name it and Elaine has startling new wisdom to offer on that topic, however time-worn.
The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies-drive them on?
The complexity of relationships between women of nearly all ages is often a difficult thing to fully comprehend let alone commit to paper. Generally, we find it easier to communicate with men. While with other women you are forever grasping at straws, unable to determine which layer of superficiality you are dealing with and which of your layers of feigned cordiality or fabricated fellow feeling may win their favor. But Atwood, the mistress of the craft that she is, has brought the private, secretive world of female bondings alive and demolished one of the greatest pop culture stereotypes ever - that of the mean girl. So believe the reviewers who have confessed to having a Cordelia-like frenemy in their lives - someone who understood them better than a lot of people while simultaneously doling out emotional torment in devious ways. I'm no exception. Once you come across a Cordelia in your life - no matter how much you may have loathed her at times - it's hard to dull the edges of the memory of your involvement with her. She looms larger than life at the back of your mind and fades into the distance of years. Try as you might you cannot forget her. And neither could Elaine.
There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia's; as they always were.
May 7, 2020
“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. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
I have no doubt that much of what happens to us in childhood is directly related to the adults we eventually become. Like the protagonist Elaine Risley, memories of my own childhood bubble to the surface more often than I’d like. I reflect on these and attempt to make sense of how both the good and the bad moments have shaped me. Cat’s Eye, my fourth by Margaret Atwood, is one of my favorite sorts of books – a coming of age novel and a brilliant character study. The fact that it takes place in Toronto – a beloved weekend destination – adds the dollop of whipped cream to the already scrumptious sundae.
“I am left to the girls, real girls at last, in the flesh. But I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.”
Elaine grew up with a brother and never attended school for any substantial length of time. Her father was an entomologist, and much of their education occurred during their travels while he conducted his field research. Her mother was not like other mothers, wearing slacks, taking dance lessons, and skating at the local rink. When they buy a house in Toronto, she will be truly thrown into the merciless world of girls for the very first time. I can attest to the fact that it can be a very vicious realm indeed. Fortunately, I was never much of a victim, having decided to avoid the clutches of those that could do the most harm. But I witnessed it, and I can vouch that the cruelty of girls to one another hasn’t changed much over the years. The main difference now is that they can more easily broadcast their malice through various forms of social media. It’s even easier to be a bully now than it was before. It takes less time and effort to click a button than to confront someone in person and wield your weapons.
In Elaine’s day, prior to all the technology we are now blessed or cursed with, it only took a small gang of girls to decide which one would be the target. How much easier it is to inflict harm when said target is one of your own, a friend even. A friend you can manipulate more easily, as you hold her in your thrall. Here, the ring leader is Cordelia, Elaine’s ‘best friend’. She is assisted by her accomplices, Grace and Carol.
“With enemies you can feel hatred, and anger. But Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends, my girlfriends, my best friends. I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
The narrative is told by Elaine during her middle-aged years as she looks back to her childhood and young adulthood. She is now a successful painter and has returned to Toronto for a retrospective of her art work. The story alternates between these time periods and it does so very effectively. Many of her paintings reflect her early years. I always find the artist’s background and creative process to be rather intriguing, and very much appreciated the influence of Atwood’s personal knowledge here.
“I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.”
When we really start to consider who we have become, are we satisfied or maybe even proud of ourselves? Ashamed or disappointed? Can we become someone we did not wish to be? What do you do with those early experiences – do we learn from them or do we take on some of those attributes in order to add a protective armor? Naturally, we won’t all be able to answer the question the same way, and likely we can’t truly answer it at all. Elaine wrestles with this as an adult, and more keenly so now that she has returned to the setting of these formative years. She hopes to run into Cordelia during her retrospective at the gallery. Would it be therapeutic to face your childhood demons, or is it best to let them go?
“I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when.”
This is an exceptional novel and one that I had a difficult time setting aside. The writing is razor-sharp. Based on what I’ve read so far, it seems Atwood doesn’t gravitate towards sentimentality. It works especially well here. There’s much more than what I’ve relayed in this review – you’ll find occasional dry humor, thoughts on marriage, feminism and aging, as well as a child’s exploration of religion. This one, along with Alias Grace, is definitely a clear favorite.
“There is never only one, of anyone.”
I have no doubt that much of what happens to us in childhood is directly related to the adults we eventually become. Like the protagonist Elaine Risley, memories of my own childhood bubble to the surface more often than I’d like. I reflect on these and attempt to make sense of how both the good and the bad moments have shaped me. Cat’s Eye, my fourth by Margaret Atwood, is one of my favorite sorts of books – a coming of age novel and a brilliant character study. The fact that it takes place in Toronto – a beloved weekend destination – adds the dollop of whipped cream to the already scrumptious sundae.
“I am left to the girls, real girls at last, in the flesh. But I’m not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.”
Elaine grew up with a brother and never attended school for any substantial length of time. Her father was an entomologist, and much of their education occurred during their travels while he conducted his field research. Her mother was not like other mothers, wearing slacks, taking dance lessons, and skating at the local rink. When they buy a house in Toronto, she will be truly thrown into the merciless world of girls for the very first time. I can attest to the fact that it can be a very vicious realm indeed. Fortunately, I was never much of a victim, having decided to avoid the clutches of those that could do the most harm. But I witnessed it, and I can vouch that the cruelty of girls to one another hasn’t changed much over the years. The main difference now is that they can more easily broadcast their malice through various forms of social media. It’s even easier to be a bully now than it was before. It takes less time and effort to click a button than to confront someone in person and wield your weapons.
In Elaine’s day, prior to all the technology we are now blessed or cursed with, it only took a small gang of girls to decide which one would be the target. How much easier it is to inflict harm when said target is one of your own, a friend even. A friend you can manipulate more easily, as you hold her in your thrall. Here, the ring leader is Cordelia, Elaine’s ‘best friend’. She is assisted by her accomplices, Grace and Carol.
“With enemies you can feel hatred, and anger. But Cordelia is my friend. She likes me, she wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends, my girlfriends, my best friends. I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.”
The narrative is told by Elaine during her middle-aged years as she looks back to her childhood and young adulthood. She is now a successful painter and has returned to Toronto for a retrospective of her art work. The story alternates between these time periods and it does so very effectively. Many of her paintings reflect her early years. I always find the artist’s background and creative process to be rather intriguing, and very much appreciated the influence of Atwood’s personal knowledge here.
“I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.”
When we really start to consider who we have become, are we satisfied or maybe even proud of ourselves? Ashamed or disappointed? Can we become someone we did not wish to be? What do you do with those early experiences – do we learn from them or do we take on some of those attributes in order to add a protective armor? Naturally, we won’t all be able to answer the question the same way, and likely we can’t truly answer it at all. Elaine wrestles with this as an adult, and more keenly so now that she has returned to the setting of these formative years. She hopes to run into Cordelia during her retrospective at the gallery. Would it be therapeutic to face your childhood demons, or is it best to let them go?
“I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when.”
This is an exceptional novel and one that I had a difficult time setting aside. The writing is razor-sharp. Based on what I’ve read so far, it seems Atwood doesn’t gravitate towards sentimentality. It works especially well here. There’s much more than what I’ve relayed in this review – you’ll find occasional dry humor, thoughts on marriage, feminism and aging, as well as a child’s exploration of religion. This one, along with Alias Grace, is definitely a clear favorite.
“There is never only one, of anyone.”
February 18, 2020
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”
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Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye is a novel about an artist, Elaine Risley, returning to Toronto for a retrospective of her work. Elaine's retrospective provides the impetus to revisit memories; she vividly recounts childhood traumas, marriage and motherhood. In so doing, we get a clearer picture of how all those incidents made her who she is in the present. Atwood's description of the tide going out is a beautiful description of this process, as well as what we're left with.
While the writing was fantastic--it is after all written by Margaret Atwood--it wasn't until a pivotal scene with Elaine's childhood bullies/friends about halfway through the book that I was really gripped by the unfolding memories. Elaine is super observant, but not always able to recognize meaning, but her tormentor, Cordelia, has been equally observant, zeroing in on Elaine's vulnerabilities. That is especially reflected in that pivotal scene at the bridge.
The relationship between the two girls changes after that incident, but Atwood stresses the continued connection of people, "What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.” By the time Elaine returns for her retrospective, she misses Cordelia in her life: This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.” I also liked how Atwood talked about finding memories: “You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
This was a powerful character study. I was blown away from the bridge scene forward, but, and this could well be my own fault, it didn't fully engage me for a long time.
4.25 stars
“Potential has a shelf life.”
<
>Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye is a novel about an artist, Elaine Risley, returning to Toronto for a retrospective of her work. Elaine's retrospective provides the impetus to revisit memories; she vividly recounts childhood traumas, marriage and motherhood. In so doing, we get a clearer picture of how all those incidents made her who she is in the present. Atwood's description of the tide going out is a beautiful description of this process, as well as what we're left with.
While the writing was fantastic--it is after all written by Margaret Atwood--it wasn't until a pivotal scene with Elaine's childhood bullies/friends about halfway through the book that I was really gripped by the unfolding memories. Elaine is super observant, but not always able to recognize meaning, but her tormentor, Cordelia, has been equally observant, zeroing in on Elaine's vulnerabilities. That is especially reflected in that pivotal scene at the bridge.
The relationship between the two girls changes after that incident, but Atwood stresses the continued connection of people, "What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.” By the time Elaine returns for her retrospective, she misses Cordelia in her life: This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.” I also liked how Atwood talked about finding memories: “You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
This was a powerful character study. I was blown away from the bridge scene forward, but, and this could well be my own fault, it didn't fully engage me for a long time.
4.25 stars
“Potential has a shelf life.”
March 27, 2021
"Katzenauge" is one of the many novels of the well-known Canadian author Margaret Atwood.
It is the story of two women and their friendship; a friendship that became hostility - a story about childhood, about growing up.
The style of writing is gripping, almost enthralling, so that the reader feels so close to reading so the impression arises that the narrative contains biographical features.
It is the story of two women and their friendship; a friendship that became hostility - a story about childhood, about growing up.
The style of writing is gripping, almost enthralling, so that the reader feels so close to reading so the impression arises that the narrative contains biographical features.
August 27, 2024
https://instagram.com/p/CmHKBITrT9i/
An electric reflection on cruelty, self expression, and toxic relationships. Beguiling and disturbing, in artistic and real life struggles, we see the lasting effects of trauma and confusion that toxic relationships leave on us. So often, our lives go forward, but our personalities, perceptions, memories, and our ability to form new connections are profoundly altered by the people of our past. We spend so much effort on our image through the eyes of others that we forget to look truly and deeply at ourselves, to sever our self perception from the self esteem damaged by others. Darkly humorous and relatable, with all the sharpness and style of an artist.
An electric reflection on cruelty, self expression, and toxic relationships. Beguiling and disturbing, in artistic and real life struggles, we see the lasting effects of trauma and confusion that toxic relationships leave on us. So often, our lives go forward, but our personalities, perceptions, memories, and our ability to form new connections are profoundly altered by the people of our past. We spend so much effort on our image through the eyes of others that we forget to look truly and deeply at ourselves, to sever our self perception from the self esteem damaged by others. Darkly humorous and relatable, with all the sharpness and style of an artist.
May 28, 2020
What it's about
"We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something."
The power of abusive friendships and relationships is the theme of this book, though not all the relationships are tainted, so it's not depressing and at times it's quite amusing (e.g. discerning the mysteries of puberty).
There is also a fair bit about art and artists, with a dash of early feminism.
Plot structure
Elaine is an artist in her late fifties/early sixties revisiting Toronto for the opening of a retrospective of her work. This brings back vivid memories of her childhood, teens and twenties. The sections set in the past are told chronologically, and interspersed by the contemporary story of a few days in Toronto. Gradually all the threads tie up, particularly near the end when contrasting a curator’s descriptions of Elaine’s works with her own explanations, many of which arise from incidents described earlier in the book. However, “I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.”
Her early years were peripatetic but not unhappy: the family travel with her entomologist father. When she is seven, he takes a university post and they settle in the Toronto suburbs, but her family is rather eccentric, and she doesn't quite fit in, exacerbated by her being a tomboy and the fact she’s never really had the opportunity to make friends before, so doesn’t know the unspoken rules.
Perhaps inevitably, Elaine becomes the victim of bullying, and the first overt instance is very cruel, although it involves no physical pain or nasty words. There is nothing to tell. “I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: C does nothing physical.”
The pull of bullies
I’ve never really been bullied, but the thoughts and self-analysis sound plausible.
Like so many victims, Elaine feels drawn to the bully: she “is my friend. She likes me. She wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends… I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier… I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.” She reasons, “I will have to do better. But better at what?... I think they [bully’s older sisters] would be my allies if only they knew. Knew what? Even to myself I am mute.” She even gives things to her tormentors because “in the moment just before giving, I am loved” even though she has no doubt about the love of her own family.
Coping strategies
Elaine develops various coping strategies. She self-harms in a minor way (“the pain gave me something definite to think about”), adopts a talisman (the eponymous cat’s eye marble and the luck of a royal visit to the city) and in some ways, victimhood builds strength and also empathy. “I can sniff out hidden misery in others now.” She also escapes through art, especially of foreign places and discovers that “Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of your own time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.”
The most important question is only occasionally made explicit: how should parents handle things? When Elaine’s mother realises something of what’s going on, she tells her daughter to toughen up, in part because she doesn’t know what else to suggest. The church-going mother of the main bully has a far more alarming attitude, based on the fact that Elaine is a heathen.
Eventually Elaine finds the inner strength to walk away, “I can hear the hatred but also the need. They need me for this and I no longer need them.” Nevertheless, although they sometimes go for years without contact, the connection continues, though balance of their relationship alters at different times.
Adult consequences
I don’t know if all victims have the potential to become bullies, but Elaine occasionally has flashes of it in adulthood, “It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.” She is always more relaxed around boys (she has an older brother), “boys are my secret allies”. Conversely, “I enjoy pestering the girls in this minor, trivial way: it shows I am not like them” and in a bar with boys from the university art class, “I expect nothing from them. In truth I expect a lot. I expect to be accepted.”
As an adult, Elaine is moderately happy and successful, yet her past taints all her relationships to some extent. She also fears passing on her anxieties to her own daughters, “I felt I had to protect them from certain things about myself… But they didn’t seem to need that protection.” As a teenager, she didn’t want to know too much family history, even about apparently trivial things, “All this is known, but unimaginable. I also wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
Lines I liked
* ”Clothes lines are strung with… a display of soiled intimacy, which they [mothers] have washed and rinsed, plunging their hands into the grey curdled water."
* About knowing about her brother’s secret girlfriend, “Knowing this secret… makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance. I can know because I don’t count.”
* “What they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease.”
* In a department store, “the air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war”.
* “All fathers except mine are invisible in day time; day time is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.”
* On the difference between faith and knowledge: Elaine thought she had a vision, but next morning was less certain, “I’m not sure now, that it really was the Virgin Mary. I believe it but I no longer know it.”
* “Art is what you can get away with said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shop-lifting… A hijacking of the visual.”
* “My name has solidified around me, with time. I think of it as tough but pliable now, like a well-worn glove.”
* “Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out.”
* On giving money to a beggar, “It’s obscene to have such power; also to feel so powerless.”
* “Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.”
* An antique shop has “one-time throwouts, recycled as money”.
* The angry sex of a disintegrating relationship: “We make love, if that is any longer the term for it. It’s not shaped like love, not coloured like it, but harsh, war-coloured, metallic. Things are being proved. Or repudiated.”
See also
A comment on my review of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal (HERE), highlighting "toxic female friendship" made me realise the connection between the two books.
"We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something."
The power of abusive friendships and relationships is the theme of this book, though not all the relationships are tainted, so it's not depressing and at times it's quite amusing (e.g. discerning the mysteries of puberty).
There is also a fair bit about art and artists, with a dash of early feminism.
Plot structure
Elaine is an artist in her late fifties/early sixties revisiting Toronto for the opening of a retrospective of her work. This brings back vivid memories of her childhood, teens and twenties. The sections set in the past are told chronologically, and interspersed by the contemporary story of a few days in Toronto. Gradually all the threads tie up, particularly near the end when contrasting a curator’s descriptions of Elaine’s works with her own explanations, many of which arise from incidents described earlier in the book. However, “I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.”
Her early years were peripatetic but not unhappy: the family travel with her entomologist father. When she is seven, he takes a university post and they settle in the Toronto suburbs, but her family is rather eccentric, and she doesn't quite fit in, exacerbated by her being a tomboy and the fact she’s never really had the opportunity to make friends before, so doesn’t know the unspoken rules.
Perhaps inevitably, Elaine becomes the victim of bullying, and the first overt instance is very cruel, although it involves no physical pain or nasty words. There is nothing to tell. “I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: C does nothing physical.”
The pull of bullies
I’ve never really been bullied, but the thoughts and self-analysis sound plausible.
Like so many victims, Elaine feels drawn to the bully: she “is my friend. She likes me. She wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends… I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier… I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.” She reasons, “I will have to do better. But better at what?... I think they [bully’s older sisters] would be my allies if only they knew. Knew what? Even to myself I am mute.” She even gives things to her tormentors because “in the moment just before giving, I am loved” even though she has no doubt about the love of her own family.
Coping strategies
Elaine develops various coping strategies. She self-harms in a minor way (“the pain gave me something definite to think about”), adopts a talisman (the eponymous cat’s eye marble and the luck of a royal visit to the city) and in some ways, victimhood builds strength and also empathy. “I can sniff out hidden misery in others now.” She also escapes through art, especially of foreign places and discovers that “Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of your own time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.”
The most important question is only occasionally made explicit: how should parents handle things? When Elaine’s mother realises something of what’s going on, she tells her daughter to toughen up, in part because she doesn’t know what else to suggest. The church-going mother of the main bully has a far more alarming attitude, based on the fact that Elaine is a heathen.
Eventually Elaine finds the inner strength to walk away, “I can hear the hatred but also the need. They need me for this and I no longer need them.” Nevertheless, although they sometimes go for years without contact, the connection continues, though balance of their relationship alters at different times.
Adult consequences
I don’t know if all victims have the potential to become bullies, but Elaine occasionally has flashes of it in adulthood, “It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.” She is always more relaxed around boys (she has an older brother), “boys are my secret allies”. Conversely, “I enjoy pestering the girls in this minor, trivial way: it shows I am not like them” and in a bar with boys from the university art class, “I expect nothing from them. In truth I expect a lot. I expect to be accepted.”
As an adult, Elaine is moderately happy and successful, yet her past taints all her relationships to some extent. She also fears passing on her anxieties to her own daughters, “I felt I had to protect them from certain things about myself… But they didn’t seem to need that protection.” As a teenager, she didn’t want to know too much family history, even about apparently trivial things, “All this is known, but unimaginable. I also wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
Lines I liked
* ”Clothes lines are strung with… a display of soiled intimacy, which they [mothers] have washed and rinsed, plunging their hands into the grey curdled water."
* About knowing about her brother’s secret girlfriend, “Knowing this secret… makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance. I can know because I don’t count.”
* “What they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease.”
* In a department store, “the air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war”.
* “All fathers except mine are invisible in day time; day time is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.”
* On the difference between faith and knowledge: Elaine thought she had a vision, but next morning was less certain, “I’m not sure now, that it really was the Virgin Mary. I believe it but I no longer know it.”
* “Art is what you can get away with said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shop-lifting… A hijacking of the visual.”
* “My name has solidified around me, with time. I think of it as tough but pliable now, like a well-worn glove.”
* “Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out.”
* On giving money to a beggar, “It’s obscene to have such power; also to feel so powerless.”
* “Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.”
* An antique shop has “one-time throwouts, recycled as money”.
* The angry sex of a disintegrating relationship: “We make love, if that is any longer the term for it. It’s not shaped like love, not coloured like it, but harsh, war-coloured, metallic. Things are being proved. Or repudiated.”
See also
A comment on my review of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal (HERE), highlighting "toxic female friendship" made me realise the connection between the two books.
May 3, 2020
Pity-wanting Pain
Reading Cat's Eye is like watching a film, only with smells, and taste, and touch in addition to cinematic sight and sound. Its heroine, Elaine, has all these 'outward wits' which Atwood captures magnificently. But, although Elaine is an artist, she has almost nothing of the 'inward wits' of communal sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation or memory.
The story is three dimensional: the North/South dimension of her life with her parents who migrate every year from Toronto to the Laurentians on biological field trips; the East/West dimension of her independent life which stretches from Toronto to Vancouver; and the temporal dimension of her own maturation.
Periodically the three dimensions collapse into moments of insight and clarity that progress from childhood with age: boys are noisy and messy but essentially uncomplicated; girls are generally hateful even, especially, when they are friends; young men are superficial and boring; older men are duplicitous and domineering; motherhood is a schlep; marriage is a continuous losing battle; feminist sisterhood isn't to be trusted; art is largely pretense and scam and dates rather quickly.
Elaine's life is a tale of haplessness, of lurching from one emotional trauma to the next. There are no plans, no goals, no passions. She falls into art as she falls into bed with unsuitable men. The step by step development of her life is told is Proustian detail but without the introspective analysis. Every action is compulsive with no apparent rationale.
She knows this and learns from her traumatic experiences, but only those lessons that are relevant to the past, not to new situations. Every insight is obsolete as soon as she arrives at it. Her past persists in her feelings and her art, both inadequate for the world she inhabits now. She realizes that her life is a ruin, with no obvious cause for its ruination.
So Elaine lives in pain. "Pain is important but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women but not the pain of men. Telling about pain is called sharing." Among her feminist friends at least. She prefers men, even her ex-husband, to this therapeutic band. "There's not much time left, for us to become what we intended," she says, as if she actually had an intention. Perhaps this is the source of her pain. "Potential," she says, "has a shelf life." But Atwood isn't saying what the source of her apathetic trajectory might be. She let's the reader make her own diagnosis.
Reading Cat's Eye is like watching a film, only with smells, and taste, and touch in addition to cinematic sight and sound. Its heroine, Elaine, has all these 'outward wits' which Atwood captures magnificently. But, although Elaine is an artist, she has almost nothing of the 'inward wits' of communal sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation or memory.
The story is three dimensional: the North/South dimension of her life with her parents who migrate every year from Toronto to the Laurentians on biological field trips; the East/West dimension of her independent life which stretches from Toronto to Vancouver; and the temporal dimension of her own maturation.
Periodically the three dimensions collapse into moments of insight and clarity that progress from childhood with age: boys are noisy and messy but essentially uncomplicated; girls are generally hateful even, especially, when they are friends; young men are superficial and boring; older men are duplicitous and domineering; motherhood is a schlep; marriage is a continuous losing battle; feminist sisterhood isn't to be trusted; art is largely pretense and scam and dates rather quickly.
Elaine's life is a tale of haplessness, of lurching from one emotional trauma to the next. There are no plans, no goals, no passions. She falls into art as she falls into bed with unsuitable men. The step by step development of her life is told is Proustian detail but without the introspective analysis. Every action is compulsive with no apparent rationale.
She knows this and learns from her traumatic experiences, but only those lessons that are relevant to the past, not to new situations. Every insight is obsolete as soon as she arrives at it. Her past persists in her feelings and her art, both inadequate for the world she inhabits now. She realizes that her life is a ruin, with no obvious cause for its ruination.
So Elaine lives in pain. "Pain is important but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women but not the pain of men. Telling about pain is called sharing." Among her feminist friends at least. She prefers men, even her ex-husband, to this therapeutic band. "There's not much time left, for us to become what we intended," she says, as if she actually had an intention. Perhaps this is the source of her pain. "Potential," she says, "has a shelf life." But Atwood isn't saying what the source of her apathetic trajectory might be. She let's the reader make her own diagnosis.
May 24, 2019
When I finished Cat's Eye the other night I had goosebumps and they didn't go away immediately. I paced around my living room for a while, rubbing my arms. I didn't quite know what I was feeling and I still don't. I don't think I've ever read such a deep dive into a character before, where we get to see how a character's childhood and upbringing affects the trajectory of her entire life. In some ways this book is about how women relate to themselves and one another in a sexist society, but it also pretends it's not about that; Elaine, the main character, has some blind spots that make her all the more interesting to consider. I thought the writing was phenomenal, poetic wtithout being fussy, with so many layers, and yet even on the surface it was a fantastic, entertaining story.
As I've mentioned on Goodreads a few times, I first read this back when I was 18 or 19, and that fact makes me laugh now. I was in no way sophisticated enough to appreciate what a towering work this is. All this time I thought this was one of Margaret Atwood's lesser novels! But that's changed. Move over, Robber Bride and Oryx and Crake. Cat's Eye is my new favorite.
As I've mentioned on Goodreads a few times, I first read this back when I was 18 or 19, and that fact makes me laugh now. I was in no way sophisticated enough to appreciate what a towering work this is. All this time I thought this was one of Margaret Atwood's lesser novels! But that's changed. Move over, Robber Bride and Oryx and Crake. Cat's Eye is my new favorite.
February 16, 2024
As a relative latecomer to the works of Margaret Atwood (this was my fourth book in) – she continues to impress and engage immensely.
‘Cat’s Eye’ has, like ‘The Blind Assassin’ (which it predates by around a decade) memory and memories as its central narrative device. Both novels have a central protagonist nearer to the end of their days than to the start – looking back and confronting the memories from various periods in their earlier lives. Ostensibly, that is as far as any similarity goes – beyond that the books bear’s very little resemblance in either nature or narrative to each other.
The very first page, indeed the opening paragraph, sets the scene, the tone and the theme – this is a novel all about time, it’s all about dimension and circularity. This first page is so particularly well written, so compelling (even by Atwood’s high standards) it defiantly draws the reader in, reels them in like an unsuspecting, helpless yet consenting catch, submissive on the end of Atwood’s line.
Thereon in we learn more about the childhood, formative years and life of our main protagonist – Elaine Risley latterly an artist, seemingly addressing her life through her work, making preparations for a retrospective of her paintings, whilst at the same time remembering and revisiting her past.
The subsequent parts of the book concerning Risley's childhood are particularly strong, indeed outstanding – these form the heart and the most powerful part of the novel. Whilst this is clearly familiar territory for many writers, what Atwood gives us here is not the usual tired, clichéd, staid, mildly diverting but rose-tinted and empty nostalgia – as you would expect from some, Atwood gives us far more than that. Yes this is by definition of course a form of nostalgia (of the best kind) it has to be and it does provide us with some of the funniest work by Atwood that I have read thus far, nevertheless and nostalgia nothwithstanding…underlying all this there is always a brooding presence, a sense of foreboding, a feeling of impending doom. There’s an expectation of a fall, of a downward trajectory…always just on the horizon, always around the next corner, always just behind that door… It has been noted by others in the past that ‘Cat’s Eye’ is a ‘Lord of the Flies’ for girls….
For this novel is ultimately all about the scars, the fears, the hurts and the pains of childhood – that in many cases stay with us throughout our lives; indeed in some cases define the rest of our lives.
This is the world of the playground bully, playground rules, unwritten codes of conduct and a childhood world where making one wrong social move can have dire and unspeakable consequences. This is so very well written and portrayed by Atwood – conveying a deeply disturbing picture of the world of growing up, trying to fit in – in a world of covert bullying, perfidious and all pervading.
It could be argued that this element to the novel presents what is essentially a Freudian world view and analysis – all about the traumas, the mental scars of childhood remaining with us, affecting and determining our lives, defining our futures. ‘Tell me about your childhood’… as it were. But I think what Atwood provides is something more sophisticated and complex than that, more profound and less simplistic. There is much here about the compulsion to recognise, to acknowledge and to confront the demons of our childhood. It does feel very much throughout this novel that there is the need for this confrontation, for resolution and for closure – as to whether Atwood gives us this…I will leave you to decide…
Perhaps, as in life (or at least some lives) the parts of this novel concerning childhood do seem to determine and define the remainder of the novel. Whilst the passages concerning teenage years and adulthood in ‘Cat’s Eye’ are on the whole extremely well-written and engaging, as you’d expect from Atwood – for the most part they don’t have the same emotional impact and power as those concerning childhood.
It should be noted that there are apparently some elements contained herein from, or influenced by Atwood’s early life, however she has repeatedly stressed that the plot is an entirely fictitious one. This is not even close to being semi-autobiographical.
This is a novel about the circularity of life and of time – this much is clear from the opening page. It is about the ending(s) and the beginning(s) – the beginning(s) and the ending(s) – the child within us is always there, the past is always ever-present, always with us.
“Time is not a line but a dimension…nothing goes away…”
Whilst possibly not quite in the same league as ‘The Blind Assassin’ or indeed ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ – this is undoubtedly a very fine book, Atwood writes so very well and with such skill; ‘Cat’s Eye’ is clearly another important part of the hugely impressive Margaret Atwood literary canon and is not to be missed.
‘Cat’s Eye’ has, like ‘The Blind Assassin’ (which it predates by around a decade) memory and memories as its central narrative device. Both novels have a central protagonist nearer to the end of their days than to the start – looking back and confronting the memories from various periods in their earlier lives. Ostensibly, that is as far as any similarity goes – beyond that the books bear’s very little resemblance in either nature or narrative to each other.
The very first page, indeed the opening paragraph, sets the scene, the tone and the theme – this is a novel all about time, it’s all about dimension and circularity. This first page is so particularly well written, so compelling (even by Atwood’s high standards) it defiantly draws the reader in, reels them in like an unsuspecting, helpless yet consenting catch, submissive on the end of Atwood’s line.
Thereon in we learn more about the childhood, formative years and life of our main protagonist – Elaine Risley latterly an artist, seemingly addressing her life through her work, making preparations for a retrospective of her paintings, whilst at the same time remembering and revisiting her past.
The subsequent parts of the book concerning Risley's childhood are particularly strong, indeed outstanding – these form the heart and the most powerful part of the novel. Whilst this is clearly familiar territory for many writers, what Atwood gives us here is not the usual tired, clichéd, staid, mildly diverting but rose-tinted and empty nostalgia – as you would expect from some, Atwood gives us far more than that. Yes this is by definition of course a form of nostalgia (of the best kind) it has to be and it does provide us with some of the funniest work by Atwood that I have read thus far, nevertheless and nostalgia nothwithstanding…underlying all this there is always a brooding presence, a sense of foreboding, a feeling of impending doom. There’s an expectation of a fall, of a downward trajectory…always just on the horizon, always around the next corner, always just behind that door… It has been noted by others in the past that ‘Cat’s Eye’ is a ‘Lord of the Flies’ for girls….
For this novel is ultimately all about the scars, the fears, the hurts and the pains of childhood – that in many cases stay with us throughout our lives; indeed in some cases define the rest of our lives.
This is the world of the playground bully, playground rules, unwritten codes of conduct and a childhood world where making one wrong social move can have dire and unspeakable consequences. This is so very well written and portrayed by Atwood – conveying a deeply disturbing picture of the world of growing up, trying to fit in – in a world of covert bullying, perfidious and all pervading.
It could be argued that this element to the novel presents what is essentially a Freudian world view and analysis – all about the traumas, the mental scars of childhood remaining with us, affecting and determining our lives, defining our futures. ‘Tell me about your childhood’… as it were. But I think what Atwood provides is something more sophisticated and complex than that, more profound and less simplistic. There is much here about the compulsion to recognise, to acknowledge and to confront the demons of our childhood. It does feel very much throughout this novel that there is the need for this confrontation, for resolution and for closure – as to whether Atwood gives us this…I will leave you to decide…
Perhaps, as in life (or at least some lives) the parts of this novel concerning childhood do seem to determine and define the remainder of the novel. Whilst the passages concerning teenage years and adulthood in ‘Cat’s Eye’ are on the whole extremely well-written and engaging, as you’d expect from Atwood – for the most part they don’t have the same emotional impact and power as those concerning childhood.
It should be noted that there are apparently some elements contained herein from, or influenced by Atwood’s early life, however she has repeatedly stressed that the plot is an entirely fictitious one. This is not even close to being semi-autobiographical.
This is a novel about the circularity of life and of time – this much is clear from the opening page. It is about the ending(s) and the beginning(s) – the beginning(s) and the ending(s) – the child within us is always there, the past is always ever-present, always with us.
“Time is not a line but a dimension…nothing goes away…”
Whilst possibly not quite in the same league as ‘The Blind Assassin’ or indeed ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ – this is undoubtedly a very fine book, Atwood writes so very well and with such skill; ‘Cat’s Eye’ is clearly another important part of the hugely impressive Margaret Atwood literary canon and is not to be missed.
April 6, 2021
“Time is not a line but a dimension..You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.''
Margaret Atwood's novel Cat’s Eye dazzled me. It is brilliant and beautifully written. It takes on the topic of friendships of girls between the ages of 8-12 and how those years can affect their emotional development into adulthood. Atwood has an uncanny knowledge of these girls and their struggles which is rendered in psychologically penetrating detail. Atwood uses bullying to show a nasty part of life for some of these young girls, how critical "fitting in" is for them and the lengths they will go to feel liked by their peers.
On a personal note I have to say that I was not bullied in school. Several of my friends have shared with me their experiences of being bullied. Thank you. Though I wasn't bullied at school I was bullied at home by a family member so I am very much acquainted with bullying. I can vouch for Atwood's thesis that we are our memories.
Elaine Risley, our narrator, is a Canadian painter who, at age 50, has returned to her childhood city of Toronto for a retrospective of her work. The dull, provincial city of her youth has changed greatly since she left. It is now ''New York without the garbage and muggings.” But in the week she is there her interest in the city's new galleries, restaurants and shops and in the retrospective itself, is minimal. Her focus, and the novel's, is all on the past, on those images and memories that surface unexpectedly, of many people, but mostly of Cordelia, her childhood friend and tormentor.
With the beginning of each section of this story we are with Elaine in the present. Something in the present triggers a memory and the story travels seamlessly to the past, picking up where the story left off. Most of the novel takes place in the past. Both time frames are written in the first person so we get to know Elaine in the present tense, in both the present and the past, lending great immediacy to the story and most importantly, reflecting that emotions and memories remain in the present. I was with Elaine every step of the way and I felt what she felt: pride, unworthiness, sadness, joy, love, pain, worry, happiness, terror, etc..
One of the first scenes in the novel is of Elaine visitng the site where her exhibit will take place. Elaine notices that someone has drawn a mustache on Elaine's picture outside the gallery which is holding a retrospective of her art. I love her reaction to this which is so apt:
"Suddenly I feel wonder. I have achieved finally a face that a mustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts mustaches, a public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself.... after all.”
Elaine's first eight years are spent on the road with her family, as her father, an entomologist, tracks infestations across northern Canada. For Elaine and her brother it is an enchanted existence, ''irregular, and slightly festive,'' a life of motels and tents, but it little prepares her for the life that is to follow when her parents move to Toronto, to a new and only partially completed tract house in a growing suburb. There, amid the tightly prescribed rituals, Elaine quickly learns that there are .''things my parents have been keeping from me, things I need to know'': a whole vocabulary of household words, ''chintz,'' ''coat tree,'' … and the need for braids, dressing gowns and purses, the whole, complicated world of girls. At one point Elaine thinks she has finally figured out one of the secrets to fitting in:
"Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, or aim as well..… I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly.”
Elaine learns that it is shameful to want to be successful, to admit that you made an effort at something or to be proud of your ability. Instead, ."yours is so much better than mine,".. or ."I'm so bad at this,”.. are the correct things to say. The aim of these remarks is to receive a compliment and to be flattered by your friends. But they are also about forcing conformity and mediocrity. It is better to deliberately do something badly than to admit that you want to or can do something well.
At the center of Elaine’s new world is Cordelia. Cordelia lives in one of the larger houses, a house with… a powder room, napkin rings, egg cups. Her mother paints and has a cleaning woman. Elaine lives in an unfinished house with very little furniture (at first) and no frills. Certainly not a cleaning woman because Elaine’s mother likes to clean, to do all the work herself. Fashion is not on Elaine’s mother’s mind, while it is very important to. Cordelia and all the people in the neighborhood.
Cordelia sees the difference in Elaine and is scornful and manipulative. Elaine adores her and Cordelia finds in Elaine a target for her “improvements.” In the campaign of terror that follows, Cordelia and her two friends surround Elaine throughout her day, pointing out her failings, her weaknesses, mocking the way she walks, the way she eats, the way she laughs. They ostracize her and torment her with her own image:
“Cordelia brings a mirror to school … She takes it out of her pocket and holds the mirror up in front of me and says ‘Look at yourself! Just look!’ Her voice is disgusted.”
Though this cruelty feels very specific to Elaine, there’s also something universal about it. The adult Elaine remembering this bullying realizes that women are always judged and “there is no end to imperfection”..
Faced with this reign of terror Elaine submits and feels that she needs to learn from Cordelia in order to be liked by her and the other girls.
’'I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. . . . It will take hard work and a long time….She is my friend. She likes me. She wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends… I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier… I would have known what to do.”
This bullying goes on for a long time until a major event changes Elaine’s outlook as well as her relationship to Cordelia.
It is very fitting that Elaine becomes an artist and paints the faces of women. For one thing, she grew up with parents and a brother who made things with their hands instead of buying them when possible. More importantly, her art is her outlet for all the trauma and mixed feelings from her childhood and a way to try to come to terms with those feelings. Her paintings mostly showcase the different forms and faces of women. At her retrospective we notice that Elaine is comfortable with men but a bit wary of women. The reader understands exactly why.
.Cat's Eye is a stunning novel with a lot to say, more than I could write about in this review for fear of spoilers (and because this review is long enough). Through Elaine's raw, heartwarming and heart-wrenching story we witness Atwood's idea that "your memories are you.... They never go away" and all that that means for Elaine and possibly for the reader. This novel inevitably leads the reader to think about his/her own memories and how they exist in you in the present and how they may have impacted your life.
.Cat's Eye is one of the best books I've read this year and is an all-time favorite. Completely immersed in Elaine's world and mind while reading this book I got to know Elaine so well that she feels like a real person about whom I care deeply.
The memory of this book lives in me.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone left on this planet who has not read it yet.
Margaret Atwood's novel Cat’s Eye dazzled me. It is brilliant and beautifully written. It takes on the topic of friendships of girls between the ages of 8-12 and how those years can affect their emotional development into adulthood. Atwood has an uncanny knowledge of these girls and their struggles which is rendered in psychologically penetrating detail. Atwood uses bullying to show a nasty part of life for some of these young girls, how critical "fitting in" is for them and the lengths they will go to feel liked by their peers.
On a personal note I have to say that I was not bullied in school. Several of my friends have shared with me their experiences of being bullied. Thank you. Though I wasn't bullied at school I was bullied at home by a family member so I am very much acquainted with bullying. I can vouch for Atwood's thesis that we are our memories.
Elaine Risley, our narrator, is a Canadian painter who, at age 50, has returned to her childhood city of Toronto for a retrospective of her work. The dull, provincial city of her youth has changed greatly since she left. It is now ''New York without the garbage and muggings.” But in the week she is there her interest in the city's new galleries, restaurants and shops and in the retrospective itself, is minimal. Her focus, and the novel's, is all on the past, on those images and memories that surface unexpectedly, of many people, but mostly of Cordelia, her childhood friend and tormentor.
With the beginning of each section of this story we are with Elaine in the present. Something in the present triggers a memory and the story travels seamlessly to the past, picking up where the story left off. Most of the novel takes place in the past. Both time frames are written in the first person so we get to know Elaine in the present tense, in both the present and the past, lending great immediacy to the story and most importantly, reflecting that emotions and memories remain in the present. I was with Elaine every step of the way and I felt what she felt: pride, unworthiness, sadness, joy, love, pain, worry, happiness, terror, etc..
One of the first scenes in the novel is of Elaine visitng the site where her exhibit will take place. Elaine notices that someone has drawn a mustache on Elaine's picture outside the gallery which is holding a retrospective of her art. I love her reaction to this which is so apt:
"Suddenly I feel wonder. I have achieved finally a face that a mustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts mustaches, a public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself.... after all.”
Elaine's first eight years are spent on the road with her family, as her father, an entomologist, tracks infestations across northern Canada. For Elaine and her brother it is an enchanted existence, ''irregular, and slightly festive,'' a life of motels and tents, but it little prepares her for the life that is to follow when her parents move to Toronto, to a new and only partially completed tract house in a growing suburb. There, amid the tightly prescribed rituals, Elaine quickly learns that there are .''things my parents have been keeping from me, things I need to know'': a whole vocabulary of household words, ''chintz,'' ''coat tree,'' … and the need for braids, dressing gowns and purses, the whole, complicated world of girls. At one point Elaine thinks she has finally figured out one of the secrets to fitting in:
"Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there's a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of without making any effort at all. I don't have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, or aim as well..… I don't have to think about whether I do these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton's Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I've done it badly.”
Elaine learns that it is shameful to want to be successful, to admit that you made an effort at something or to be proud of your ability. Instead, ."yours is so much better than mine,".. or ."I'm so bad at this,”.. are the correct things to say. The aim of these remarks is to receive a compliment and to be flattered by your friends. But they are also about forcing conformity and mediocrity. It is better to deliberately do something badly than to admit that you want to or can do something well.
At the center of Elaine’s new world is Cordelia. Cordelia lives in one of the larger houses, a house with… a powder room, napkin rings, egg cups. Her mother paints and has a cleaning woman. Elaine lives in an unfinished house with very little furniture (at first) and no frills. Certainly not a cleaning woman because Elaine’s mother likes to clean, to do all the work herself. Fashion is not on Elaine’s mother’s mind, while it is very important to. Cordelia and all the people in the neighborhood.
Cordelia sees the difference in Elaine and is scornful and manipulative. Elaine adores her and Cordelia finds in Elaine a target for her “improvements.” In the campaign of terror that follows, Cordelia and her two friends surround Elaine throughout her day, pointing out her failings, her weaknesses, mocking the way she walks, the way she eats, the way she laughs. They ostracize her and torment her with her own image:
“Cordelia brings a mirror to school … She takes it out of her pocket and holds the mirror up in front of me and says ‘Look at yourself! Just look!’ Her voice is disgusted.”
Though this cruelty feels very specific to Elaine, there’s also something universal about it. The adult Elaine remembering this bullying realizes that women are always judged and “there is no end to imperfection”..
Faced with this reign of terror Elaine submits and feels that she needs to learn from Cordelia in order to be liked by her and the other girls.
’'I am not normal, I am not like other girls. Cordelia tells me so, but she will help me. . . . It will take hard work and a long time….She is my friend. She likes me. She wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends… I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier… I would have known what to do.”
This bullying goes on for a long time until a major event changes Elaine’s outlook as well as her relationship to Cordelia.
It is very fitting that Elaine becomes an artist and paints the faces of women. For one thing, she grew up with parents and a brother who made things with their hands instead of buying them when possible. More importantly, her art is her outlet for all the trauma and mixed feelings from her childhood and a way to try to come to terms with those feelings. Her paintings mostly showcase the different forms and faces of women. At her retrospective we notice that Elaine is comfortable with men but a bit wary of women. The reader understands exactly why.
.Cat's Eye is a stunning novel with a lot to say, more than I could write about in this review for fear of spoilers (and because this review is long enough). Through Elaine's raw, heartwarming and heart-wrenching story we witness Atwood's idea that "your memories are you.... They never go away" and all that that means for Elaine and possibly for the reader. This novel inevitably leads the reader to think about his/her own memories and how they exist in you in the present and how they may have impacted your life.
.Cat's Eye is one of the best books I've read this year and is an all-time favorite. Completely immersed in Elaine's world and mind while reading this book I got to know Elaine so well that she feels like a real person about whom I care deeply.
The memory of this book lives in me.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone left on this planet who has not read it yet.
April 3, 2019
Her greatest story, about childhood bullying amid seemingly innocent play and the dire consequences, also has wonderful things to say about siblings, a brother and a sister's relationship, and marriage.
July 7, 2022
الذاكرة عبء ثقيل خاصًة إذا كانت مسكونة بشخصيات وأحداث يرغب الانسان في نسيانها
عين القطة رواية قائمة على تيمة الذكريات والرغبة في الكشف والفهم والمُصالحة
الراوية ايلين رسامة في منتصف العمر تعود لمدينتها تورنتو لحضور معرضها الفني
وهناك تنتقل بين الحاضر والماضي وتستعيد الذكريات على مدى سنوات طويلة
التفاصيل الدقيقة لفترة الطفولة والمراهقة وتجارب وصداقات الماضي
الصداقات المبكرة التي تتحول أحيانا لعلاقات مُزعجة تترك أثر واضح في النفس
وتغيرات الشخصية بمرور العمر وصولا للقدرة على المواجهة وأحيانا التغاضي
بدأت مرجريت آتوود الرواية عام 1964 ثم توقفت عن الكتابة لسنوات
وعادت لإكمالها في الثمانينيات ونُشرت 1988... فكرة جيدة وسرد مُطول
عين القطة رواية قائمة على تيمة الذكريات والرغبة في الكشف والفهم والمُصالحة
الراوية ايلين رسامة في منتصف العمر تعود لمدينتها تورنتو لحضور معرضها الفني
وهناك تنتقل بين الحاضر والماضي وتستعيد الذكريات على مدى سنوات طويلة
التفاصيل الدقيقة لفترة الطفولة والمراهقة وتجارب وصداقات الماضي
الصداقات المبكرة التي تتحول أحيانا لعلاقات مُزعجة تترك أثر واضح في النفس
وتغيرات الشخصية بمرور العمر وصولا للقدرة على المواجهة وأحيانا التغاضي
بدأت مرجريت آتوود الرواية عام 1964 ثم توقفت عن الكتابة لسنوات
وعادت لإكمالها في الثمانينيات ونُشرت 1988... فكرة جيدة وسرد مُطول
December 11, 2017
The annual Santa Claus Parade trotted and pranced through downtown Toronto a couple of Sundays ago, and while it was going on I thought of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.
Although I read the book – considered a highlight of Atwood’s middle period – more than two months ago, the image of protagonist Elaine and her frenemies watching the parade from her entomologist-father’s office at the University of Toronto stuck with me. While passing the big boulevard of University Avenue, I even looked up at a couple of windows in dull, brick buildings (I’m sure the original has been torn down, replaced by something more modern), imagining the girls on one of the upper floors caustically commenting on the tacky floats.
Images like that pervade this nostalgia-tinged book about Elaine Risley, a painter in mid-career, who visits the city where she grew up while a retrospective of hers is going up in a chic Queen Street West gallery.
Cat’s Eye is a novel full of ghosts, especially that of Elaine’s childhood nemesis, Cordelia, who taunts her, torments her and in one particularly disturbing scene leaves her to die one winter night in one of Toronto’s ravines. Spoiler alert: Elaine survives, and the way she’s rescued is suffused with a mystical element that later works its way into her art.
Elaine is now based in Vancouver, but as she walks past landmarks she keeps thinking she sees Cordelia. She’s also haunted by her brilliant physicist brother, and the intense games she and he were forced to play to be accepted socially once they moved from rural Ontario, where their father studied bugs, to the city.
This is one of Atwood’s most personal books. Her father was indeed an entomologist, and she and her family did live for many years in the woods, isolated from the social rules and hierarchies of city life. It's filled with lots of sensual details – sights, sounds, tastes – that evoke childhood, youth and young adulthood.
The book also provides a clear-eyed look at the complex relationships among women – friends? rivals? competitors? – especially in the decades before the feminist movement.
And for anyone familiar with Toronto, Atwood provides a very amusing look at how the city has changed: not just geographically but culturally, with every hip pretension and snobby boutique savagely skewered. The details about Elaine’s early works – and the media reaction to a feminist group show – are also fascinating. And the way women are treated in the art world – first at school and then professionally – have a documentary-like realism to them. Atwood knows this scene.
I wanted a bit more about Elaine’s current relationships. And there’s a schematic quality to the book’s time scheme that Atwood has used in other books, like The Blind Assassin.
But this is a powerful, essential novel in Atwood’s oeuvre, and one of the best novels about this city ever written.
Although I read the book – considered a highlight of Atwood’s middle period – more than two months ago, the image of protagonist Elaine and her frenemies watching the parade from her entomologist-father’s office at the University of Toronto stuck with me. While passing the big boulevard of University Avenue, I even looked up at a couple of windows in dull, brick buildings (I’m sure the original has been torn down, replaced by something more modern), imagining the girls on one of the upper floors caustically commenting on the tacky floats.
Images like that pervade this nostalgia-tinged book about Elaine Risley, a painter in mid-career, who visits the city where she grew up while a retrospective of hers is going up in a chic Queen Street West gallery.
Cat’s Eye is a novel full of ghosts, especially that of Elaine’s childhood nemesis, Cordelia, who taunts her, torments her and in one particularly disturbing scene leaves her to die one winter night in one of Toronto’s ravines. Spoiler alert: Elaine survives, and the way she’s rescued is suffused with a mystical element that later works its way into her art.
Elaine is now based in Vancouver, but as she walks past landmarks she keeps thinking she sees Cordelia. She’s also haunted by her brilliant physicist brother, and the intense games she and he were forced to play to be accepted socially once they moved from rural Ontario, where their father studied bugs, to the city.
This is one of Atwood’s most personal books. Her father was indeed an entomologist, and she and her family did live for many years in the woods, isolated from the social rules and hierarchies of city life. It's filled with lots of sensual details – sights, sounds, tastes – that evoke childhood, youth and young adulthood.
The book also provides a clear-eyed look at the complex relationships among women – friends? rivals? competitors? – especially in the decades before the feminist movement.
And for anyone familiar with Toronto, Atwood provides a very amusing look at how the city has changed: not just geographically but culturally, with every hip pretension and snobby boutique savagely skewered. The details about Elaine’s early works – and the media reaction to a feminist group show – are also fascinating. And the way women are treated in the art world – first at school and then professionally – have a documentary-like realism to them. Atwood knows this scene.
I wanted a bit more about Elaine’s current relationships. And there’s a schematic quality to the book’s time scheme that Atwood has used in other books, like The Blind Assassin.
But this is a powerful, essential novel in Atwood’s oeuvre, and one of the best novels about this city ever written.
May 20, 2021
DNF. I just can't anymore. I tried so hard to get into this book, but it was so dreadfully BORING. It's been on my to-read list for ages, and the ratings are good, but it is just not a book for me. I left 2 stars because it wasn't BAD, just blah, and it could possibly be that I wasn't in the mood for a novel like this, but I won't be trying again.
January 1, 2023
This is a beautifully written book in which Margaret Atwood explores the friendships of girls in their adolescence. At the time when a young person is impressionable and desirous of having friends, the twist Atwood brings to the tale is of a protagonist who has grown up without any socialization among girls. Her father is an entomologist who has raised his children in an unorthodox manner as he collects specimens from all over the Canadian countryside causing Elaine to miss out on the usual interactions with other girls in childhood. She understands how to interact with boys having a brother to play with. When they decide to settle into a home in Toronto, Elaine is forced to figure out the nuances of friendships on her own. She is soon caught up in a group who subtly and psychologically degrade her and devalue her.
But I am not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
Elaine narrates her story in a series of memories going back to her past reliving each moment in vivid detail. She is able to describe such minute and intricate particulars with such ease.
“I’ve started to chew my fingers again. There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.
However, as a grown woman she has returned to Toronto where the memories she has tried to let go of, surface and flood her thoughts. She has become a successful painter and is now coming back for a retrospective of her work but all of her thoughts are encapsulated by seeing the one girl who instigated her childhood traumas, Cordelia.
There is no one I would ever tell this to, except Cordelia. But which Cordelia? The one I have conjured up, the one with the roll top boots and the turned up collar, or the one before, or the one after? There is never only one, of anyone.
Elaine has not been able to shed that 9 year old child who was ever observed and ridiculed, never good enough. What Atwood seems to portray so flawlessly and so poignantly is the woman that little girl grew up to become. We see the effects, long-lasting and ever-present, of the childhood hurts. We witness the flawed relationships she has as an adult and the mother she becomes with the worries she has for her daughters remembering the secret shame she held from her parents.
I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face of stupid act, somebody frowning.
Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
Atwood does a spectacular and very convincing job of capturing the essence of childhood bullies who easily inflict abuse on one another as well as that enigmatic age of adolescence. She takes the reader through a lifetime of one tormented girl and provides a vivid depiction of how the past can linger into adulthood and shows how difficult it can be to shed the shame.
I don’t want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank.
But I am not used to girls, or familiar with their customs. I feel awkward around them, I don’t know what to say. I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.
Elaine narrates her story in a series of memories going back to her past reliving each moment in vivid detail. She is able to describe such minute and intricate particulars with such ease.
“I’ve started to chew my fingers again. There’s blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.
However, as a grown woman she has returned to Toronto where the memories she has tried to let go of, surface and flood her thoughts. She has become a successful painter and is now coming back for a retrospective of her work but all of her thoughts are encapsulated by seeing the one girl who instigated her childhood traumas, Cordelia.
There is no one I would ever tell this to, except Cordelia. But which Cordelia? The one I have conjured up, the one with the roll top boots and the turned up collar, or the one before, or the one after? There is never only one, of anyone.
Elaine has not been able to shed that 9 year old child who was ever observed and ridiculed, never good enough. What Atwood seems to portray so flawlessly and so poignantly is the woman that little girl grew up to become. We see the effects, long-lasting and ever-present, of the childhood hurts. We witness the flawed relationships she has as an adult and the mother she becomes with the worries she has for her daughters remembering the secret shame she held from her parents.
I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face of stupid act, somebody frowning.
Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
Atwood does a spectacular and very convincing job of capturing the essence of childhood bullies who easily inflict abuse on one another as well as that enigmatic age of adolescence. She takes the reader through a lifetime of one tormented girl and provides a vivid depiction of how the past can linger into adulthood and shows how difficult it can be to shed the shame.
I don’t want to remember. The past has become discontinuous, like stones skipped across water, like postcards: I catch an image of myself, a dark blank, an image, a blank.
December 4, 2013
"Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."
Simply put, I worship this book.
Cat’s Eye follows the controversial painter Elaine as she reflects upon her childhood and younger years when she returns to Toronto (the city of her youth) for a retrospective of her works. Her reflections stir up memories of friendship, longing, betrayal, love, hate, and pain. Especially haunting are her memories of Cordelia, a childhood friend with whom she had a complex relationship. It is a truly brilliant story, so completely well-written and beautiful that I just wanted to read certain sentences over and over again. Her story also rouses intense emotions in the reader, as we can all unearth memories of childhood friendships gone awry, awkward teenage years, and failed love.
Elaine finds she needs to mourn her past in order to get through the present. Her past is so achingly realistic and personal, that you can’t help but empathize and contemplate your own personal grief. That’s not to say the book is fully depressing; instead, I would say that it is haunting. There are certain things to which I can relate at this exact moment in my life, which may have caused the book to have a bigger impact on me than it might for others. Regardless, I think this is another brilliant masterpiece by Atwood and would recommend it to both Atwood fans, and those new to her writing.
Simply put, I worship this book.
Cat’s Eye follows the controversial painter Elaine as she reflects upon her childhood and younger years when she returns to Toronto (the city of her youth) for a retrospective of her works. Her reflections stir up memories of friendship, longing, betrayal, love, hate, and pain. Especially haunting are her memories of Cordelia, a childhood friend with whom she had a complex relationship. It is a truly brilliant story, so completely well-written and beautiful that I just wanted to read certain sentences over and over again. Her story also rouses intense emotions in the reader, as we can all unearth memories of childhood friendships gone awry, awkward teenage years, and failed love.
Elaine finds she needs to mourn her past in order to get through the present. Her past is so achingly realistic and personal, that you can’t help but empathize and contemplate your own personal grief. That’s not to say the book is fully depressing; instead, I would say that it is haunting. There are certain things to which I can relate at this exact moment in my life, which may have caused the book to have a bigger impact on me than it might for others. Regardless, I think this is another brilliant masterpiece by Atwood and would recommend it to both Atwood fans, and those new to her writing.
December 11, 2022
There is no one I would ever tell this to, except Cordelia. But which Cordelia? The one I have conjured up, the one in the roll-top boots and the turned up collar, or the one before, or the one after? There is never only one of anyone.
This is a story about the many faces and people we become as we progress through life and how we allow our former selves to dictate our present ones. It is about the weight of memory; the fragility of identity; the search for who we are.
It is easy to see this as a book about bullying, but it is so much more. It is a book about coming of age, about power and weakness, about the voices we carry inside ourselves that shape us and haunt us, about creativity and where it springs from, and about loss, what is taken and what is given away.
There is a myth that we grow up and leave the child behind. But do we? Doesn’t the child fashion the adult? Aren’t we always harkening back to those earlier days, even if we prefer not to?
Time is not a line but a dimension. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
This is the third time I have read this book, and it has left me this time with the same empty, aching, stripped clean feeling that I had the first time I read it. I feel as if I have traveled backward through my own past, although I was never bullied in this way, I never had the power in my own hands over another, and I never reached any pinnacle of success to know whether it would satisfy the childhood fears of inadequacy or not. Perhaps that is the point. We all have different lives, different experiences, and yet at the core we experience so many of the same feelings, hidden inadequacies, and secret selves.
As I age, I often find myself wondering if we ever truly know any other person. Even those with which we are most intimate never see us completely, there are always experiences and thoughts that remain hidden. With every person we know we share different pieces of ourselves, and if it is true for us, is it not also true for them that everything is never shared? This is a book that begs us to ask such questions–to reach for understanding of both ourselves and others, to not only look, but to see.
This is a story about the many faces and people we become as we progress through life and how we allow our former selves to dictate our present ones. It is about the weight of memory; the fragility of identity; the search for who we are.
It is easy to see this as a book about bullying, but it is so much more. It is a book about coming of age, about power and weakness, about the voices we carry inside ourselves that shape us and haunt us, about creativity and where it springs from, and about loss, what is taken and what is given away.
There is a myth that we grow up and leave the child behind. But do we? Doesn’t the child fashion the adult? Aren’t we always harkening back to those earlier days, even if we prefer not to?
Time is not a line but a dimension. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
This is the third time I have read this book, and it has left me this time with the same empty, aching, stripped clean feeling that I had the first time I read it. I feel as if I have traveled backward through my own past, although I was never bullied in this way, I never had the power in my own hands over another, and I never reached any pinnacle of success to know whether it would satisfy the childhood fears of inadequacy or not. Perhaps that is the point. We all have different lives, different experiences, and yet at the core we experience so many of the same feelings, hidden inadequacies, and secret selves.
As I age, I often find myself wondering if we ever truly know any other person. Even those with which we are most intimate never see us completely, there are always experiences and thoughts that remain hidden. With every person we know we share different pieces of ourselves, and if it is true for us, is it not also true for them that everything is never shared? This is a book that begs us to ask such questions–to reach for understanding of both ourselves and others, to not only look, but to see.
August 28, 2014
Nearly impossible to write a review for such a masterful work as this. All I can do is write some of my thoughts while reading this. It's like a psychological character study. It's the feelings that are evoked. Everything is full of descriptions, the meaning belongs to the reader. Atwood brings me to the brink, then pulls back leaving me with a sense of uneasiness. Our lives can only be interpreted by us. Which of my own memories have been blocked, or purposely left unremembered only to surface in other areas without an understanding. How well do we know anyone, as we carry our own secret thoughts, what do others carry.
See? I will be pondering this book long after it's reading. Highly recommended.
See? I will be pondering this book long after it's reading. Highly recommended.
February 8, 2021
When I was considering whether to read this or not, what flashed through my head was, “Do you really want to read a book about bullying?” I knew this was the book’s central theme. I thought, “What can I learn from this?” I knew, even before picking up the book, how despicable such behavior is. I knew where I stood, so I wondered what more could be learned.
By reading this book one experiences on an emotional level the cruelty and the fear and anguish bullying inflicts on another. The experience becomes excruciating personal. It is not something you are soon to forget. A deeper understanding is achieved of the pain and grief involved and of its long-term effects. I am very glad I read the book. I have never been bullied. I now look on such behavior with a fuller understanding.
This book is about a trio of girls who bullied a fourth. They are eight, nine years old when the bullying starts. Why this happens, the consequences of bullying and how adults react are all explored. In depth. The book follows Elaine Risley, the girl who is bullied, from her earliest years to when she is middle aged. She has become a prestigious artist and is having a retrospective of her work in Toronto, but this is also where she grew up and where the bullying occurred. Elaine thinks back, remembers and draws conclusions about what she wishes could have been different.
The story is told in “parts”, each part split into chapters. Each part begins in the present, i.e. at the time of Elaine’s retrospective, which is probably in the 1980s. She is telling her story; we are hearing her point of view. Her thoughts in the present drift back to events in her past. Past events are told in chronological order, so each new flashback starts where the last one ended, making the story easy to follow.
The reader sees life in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. We look at how life has changed during this time-period. Elaine’s relationship with those in her family changes of course too. This is a coming-of-age story. It is about her relationship with her brother. It is about being a woman, being employed and being independent. The book is not just about bullying! It is about art and art criticism. The book keeps you thinking, on not just one topic but many.
The book has wonderful lines. Look at these:
“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
“There is never only one of anyone.”
“She’s never learned the intricacies of male silences.”
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fish bodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.”
“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
“We make love for the comfort of it.”
“He is like an apple after a prolonged gluttonous binge.”
“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
“You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
“Art is a hijacking of the visual.”
“Art is something you can do at home, in your spare time.”
“You can draw art very well, but you cannot draw life.”
“Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.”
“He looks like someone who will later turn up on a stamp.”
The book is described as being disturbing, hilarious and compassionate. It is all three. The lines upset, make you laugh and cry and leave you thinking.
The audiobook is very, very well narrated by Laurel Lefkow. She makes Elaine sound real, both when she is young and as she becomes older. Her thoughts and her emotions feel genuine. It felt like Elaine was talking to me .
This is definitely my favorite book by the author. It has excellent writing, which I also saw in her other novels of a more dystopian bent, but the realism of this novel made it much easier for me to relate to the characters.
By reading this book one experiences on an emotional level the cruelty and the fear and anguish bullying inflicts on another. The experience becomes excruciating personal. It is not something you are soon to forget. A deeper understanding is achieved of the pain and grief involved and of its long-term effects. I am very glad I read the book. I have never been bullied. I now look on such behavior with a fuller understanding.
This book is about a trio of girls who bullied a fourth. They are eight, nine years old when the bullying starts. Why this happens, the consequences of bullying and how adults react are all explored. In depth. The book follows Elaine Risley, the girl who is bullied, from her earliest years to when she is middle aged. She has become a prestigious artist and is having a retrospective of her work in Toronto, but this is also where she grew up and where the bullying occurred. Elaine thinks back, remembers and draws conclusions about what she wishes could have been different.
The story is told in “parts”, each part split into chapters. Each part begins in the present, i.e. at the time of Elaine’s retrospective, which is probably in the 1980s. She is telling her story; we are hearing her point of view. Her thoughts in the present drift back to events in her past. Past events are told in chronological order, so each new flashback starts where the last one ended, making the story easy to follow.
The reader sees life in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. We look at how life has changed during this time-period. Elaine’s relationship with those in her family changes of course too. This is a coming-of-age story. It is about her relationship with her brother. It is about being a woman, being employed and being independent. The book is not just about bullying! It is about art and art criticism. The book keeps you thinking, on not just one topic but many.
The book has wonderful lines. Look at these:
“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
“Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
“There is never only one of anyone.”
“She’s never learned the intricacies of male silences.”
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fish bodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.”
“What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.”
“We make love for the comfort of it.”
“He is like an apple after a prolonged gluttonous binge.”
“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.”
“You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.”
“Art is a hijacking of the visual.”
“Art is something you can do at home, in your spare time.”
“You can draw art very well, but you cannot draw life.”
“Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.”
“He looks like someone who will later turn up on a stamp.”
The book is described as being disturbing, hilarious and compassionate. It is all three. The lines upset, make you laugh and cry and leave you thinking.
The audiobook is very, very well narrated by Laurel Lefkow. She makes Elaine sound real, both when she is young and as she becomes older. Her thoughts and her emotions feel genuine. It felt like Elaine was talking to me .
This is definitely my favorite book by the author. It has excellent writing, which I also saw in her other novels of a more dystopian bent, but the realism of this novel made it much easier for me to relate to the characters.
October 1, 2019
Margaret Atwood puts to rest the belief that little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” What they are capable of is nothing short of brutal.
We meet Elaine- she has come back to Toronto for an exhibition of her art. She is anxious about being back, as she has always felt that if she had stayed in Toronto, she would be dead. We go through two time periods- the present and to Elaine’s childhood and young adult years in Toronto. Her being in Toronto makes her memories resurface- the scars of her childhood are so deeply embedded within her.
“ There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps. The next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself.
What do you have to say for yourself? Cordelia used to ask. Nothing, I would say. It was a word I came to connect with myself, as if I was nothing, as if there was nothing there at all.”
Margaret Atwood carefully flushed out Elaine- a woman who is haunted by her childhood. Trauma doesn’t go away after the trauma- it lives on in the person and shapes their lives.
“ The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.”
I finished this book a few days ago. I have been thinking about it and what I wanted to say about it. This book tore at my heart for that little girl who was victimized. It made me think about other victims, including myself. Many of us live through a trauma and move forward, but it’s true that it never totally leaves you..
This is the fourth book I have read by Margaret Atwood. She is one of the more eclectic author’s ever. Each book is so different, other than they are all exceptionally written.
Very impactful, thought provoking book!!
We meet Elaine- she has come back to Toronto for an exhibition of her art. She is anxious about being back, as she has always felt that if she had stayed in Toronto, she would be dead. We go through two time periods- the present and to Elaine’s childhood and young adult years in Toronto. Her being in Toronto makes her memories resurface- the scars of her childhood are so deeply embedded within her.
“ There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps. The next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. I focus on taking the cap off the toothpaste, getting the brush up to my mouth. I have difficulty lifting my arm to do even that. I feel I am without worth, that nothing I can do is of any value, least of all to myself.
What do you have to say for yourself? Cordelia used to ask. Nothing, I would say. It was a word I came to connect with myself, as if I was nothing, as if there was nothing there at all.”
Margaret Atwood carefully flushed out Elaine- a woman who is haunted by her childhood. Trauma doesn’t go away after the trauma- it lives on in the person and shapes their lives.
“ The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.”
I finished this book a few days ago. I have been thinking about it and what I wanted to say about it. This book tore at my heart for that little girl who was victimized. It made me think about other victims, including myself. Many of us live through a trauma and move forward, but it’s true that it never totally leaves you..
This is the fourth book I have read by Margaret Atwood. She is one of the more eclectic author’s ever. Each book is so different, other than they are all exceptionally written.
Very impactful, thought provoking book!!
May 20, 2018
We have just started reading another historic Booker shortlist in The Mookse and the Gripes group. This time the year is 1989, and although The Remains of the Day is one of my favourite Booker winners, this one must have come pretty close.
The narrator is Elaine, an artist who has returned from a new life in Vancouver to Toronto, the city where she spent most of her formative years, to attend and supervise a career retrospective exhibition.
Each of the book's sections begins with a short introductory chapter set in the present and proceeds to tell another part of her life story, these start in childhood and gradually catch up.
The dominant relationship is the one with her childhood friend Cordelia. At the start of the book Cordelia is presented as a scheming and manipulative bully. This part of the story is powerful and very believable, and culminates in an incident where Elaine almost drowns after falling through ice while trying to recover a hat Cordelia has thrown off a bridge.
Later in childhood the balance of power in their relationship changes. Elaine becomes more successful and Cordelia more needy, and it becomes clear that Cordelia and the need to resolve their relationship still haunts Elaine as an adult.
The best parts of this book are very strong, but perhaps it is a little too long. The sections on Elaine's development as an artist and her marriages were less interesting, but did allow Atwood to find humour in the gallery curator's attempts to find meaning in the personal pieces.
The narrator is Elaine, an artist who has returned from a new life in Vancouver to Toronto, the city where she spent most of her formative years, to attend and supervise a career retrospective exhibition.
Each of the book's sections begins with a short introductory chapter set in the present and proceeds to tell another part of her life story, these start in childhood and gradually catch up.
The dominant relationship is the one with her childhood friend Cordelia. At the start of the book Cordelia is presented as a scheming and manipulative bully. This part of the story is powerful and very believable, and culminates in an incident where Elaine almost drowns after falling through ice while trying to recover a hat Cordelia has thrown off a bridge.
Later in childhood the balance of power in their relationship changes. Elaine becomes more successful and Cordelia more needy, and it becomes clear that Cordelia and the need to resolve their relationship still haunts Elaine as an adult.
The best parts of this book are very strong, but perhaps it is a little too long. The sections on Elaine's development as an artist and her marriages were less interesting, but did allow Atwood to find humour in the gallery curator's attempts to find meaning in the personal pieces.
January 17, 2024
4.0 Stars
Video Review: https://youtu.be/3hvDORi-RaE
This is a complex winding narrative which is hard to describe. Yet, I completely love this one. I have come to love Atwood's stories. Her writing is just beautiful and I cherished so many sentences. I have a particularly love for stories about female friendship so this one was particularly up my alley. Highly recommend to other fans of Canadian lit. Atwood is the master.
Video Review: https://youtu.be/3hvDORi-RaE
This is a complex winding narrative which is hard to describe. Yet, I completely love this one. I have come to love Atwood's stories. Her writing is just beautiful and I cherished so many sentences. I have a particularly love for stories about female friendship so this one was particularly up my alley. Highly recommend to other fans of Canadian lit. Atwood is the master.
May 22, 2019
I read this not too long after reading Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays because this was one of his favorite novels whose form he discussed. I wanted to see how Margaret Atwood deconstructs time and memory. I wasn't disappointed. Time is deliberate and audacious in this novel. It is not alluded to by chapter headings or by a change in tense. Everything happens in the present, even though the present is sometimes past. Stylistically, it is fluid with descriptions so sensory that people and places seem close. Sentences are intentionally written with comma splice errors. The book itself moves with style and grace as it captures the life and thoughts of its main character, Elaine.
I begin to spend time outside my body without falling over. At these times I feel blurred, as if there are two of me, one superimposed on the other, but imperfectly. There's an edge of transparency, and beside it a rim of solid flesh that's without feeling, like a scar. I can see what's happening, I can hear what's being said to me, but I don't have to pay any attention. My eyes are open but I'm not there. I'm off to the side.
Elaine, a painter, has returned to her home of Toronto for a showing. Although she is celebrated, she feels alone and different. She constantly compares herself to other women artists and feels ill at ease around women. Yet through her art, fans consider her a feminist. Her paintings mostly showcase the different form and faces of women. She is not a feminist, she insists, even as she tries to dissect the thought. Elaine is removed and so her cool stoicism may not make her the most liked character. But there is also young Elaine who is reticent yet resilient, whose teenage story of bullying and abuse from friends is tragic. And this is where time plays a role. How has time carved and painted Elaine? Now a successful painter and mother, will she ever be able to form meaningful friendships or relationships? Or has her art become her means of relating to the world?
That must be what was meant by fallen women. Fallen women were women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves. There was some suggestion of downward motion, against one's will and not with the will of anyone else. Fallen women were not pulled-down women or pushed women, merely fallen.
I purchased a used copy of this novel and it's marked with coffee stains and scented with cigarette smoke. I tried to picture the last reader, which continent would he or she have read from, and did he or she read in the morning, outside, to a cool breeze, or while stuck in a windowless room with a hot pot and an astray? The edges of my cover are worn and there is a piece the shape of a triangular, torn off one end. This made it perfect. I enjoyed interacting with form and dialogue through highlighters and pens because after reading Atwood's rendition of time, I appreciate what time has done to my little paperback.
I begin to spend time outside my body without falling over. At these times I feel blurred, as if there are two of me, one superimposed on the other, but imperfectly. There's an edge of transparency, and beside it a rim of solid flesh that's without feeling, like a scar. I can see what's happening, I can hear what's being said to me, but I don't have to pay any attention. My eyes are open but I'm not there. I'm off to the side.
Elaine, a painter, has returned to her home of Toronto for a showing. Although she is celebrated, she feels alone and different. She constantly compares herself to other women artists and feels ill at ease around women. Yet through her art, fans consider her a feminist. Her paintings mostly showcase the different form and faces of women. She is not a feminist, she insists, even as she tries to dissect the thought. Elaine is removed and so her cool stoicism may not make her the most liked character. But there is also young Elaine who is reticent yet resilient, whose teenage story of bullying and abuse from friends is tragic. And this is where time plays a role. How has time carved and painted Elaine? Now a successful painter and mother, will she ever be able to form meaningful friendships or relationships? Or has her art become her means of relating to the world?
That must be what was meant by fallen women. Fallen women were women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves. There was some suggestion of downward motion, against one's will and not with the will of anyone else. Fallen women were not pulled-down women or pushed women, merely fallen.
I purchased a used copy of this novel and it's marked with coffee stains and scented with cigarette smoke. I tried to picture the last reader, which continent would he or she have read from, and did he or she read in the morning, outside, to a cool breeze, or while stuck in a windowless room with a hot pot and an astray? The edges of my cover are worn and there is a piece the shape of a triangular, torn off one end. This made it perfect. I enjoyed interacting with form and dialogue through highlighters and pens because after reading Atwood's rendition of time, I appreciate what time has done to my little paperback.
December 31, 2019
I could not put this book down! What a great writer Margaret Atwood is!
"Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love."
"I suppose I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her like everything else are drenched in time."
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fish bodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future."
"Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love."
"I suppose I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her like everything else are drenched in time."
"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fish bodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future."
July 29, 2015
I always enjoy Margaret Atwood' s books and this is not an exception. In fact this one is quite amazingly interesting. It revolves around the memories of the main character, Elaine who recalls her friendships as a young girl. It becomes apparent that she was bullied quite severely by her young friends and one of them in particular. As the story progresses we find that in the end Elaine escapes from the bullying and eventually even turns the tables. The bullied becomes the bully. It is a sad story but written in Atwood's amazingly beautiful style, it becomes a superb reading experience.
February 1, 2020
Eileen Risely speaks of her childhood, growing up during the time of the big war. From the present, she tells the story of her life. I've always appreciated this form of story-telling - the looking back across the years. It is a form of time-travel. Atwood used this same type of narration in her later book,
The Blind Assassin
, which I read out of publication order (note: it does not matter, the two stories are unrelated). In this book, Eileen's retrospective begins when she is just eight years old, that age when our self is forming. What age she is now as she travels to Toronto, and back into her past life, I could not tell. She calls herself an old woman, but age is especially subjective thing looking inward. Even with her current success as an artist, I knew her tentativeness, her own uncertainty, and that it had stemmed from the past.
Before eight, she and her family roamed the countryside. A car their home, a tent, the forests. Homeless, I thought. But no, her father is an entomologist (much like Atwood's real-life father). They settle into an unfinished home in Toronto where Eileen's father will teach as a professor. Before this, her brother was her only friend. In her own words, other girls are a mystery to her. Yet quite and shy, she will make two friends. It is the third friend, one year later, that will change the course of her grade school years, and although Eileen could not actually say, it would be much longer than that.
I'm always a little amazed when reading an Atwood novel. The characters deeply carved, their own words come out of the page, fully formed with thought. I didn't love every step through Eileen's life (there are many years beyond the young child who first meets Cordelia). But at the end, I am entranced with her story and the many things, good-and-bad, that make up a life. Even when Eileen doesn't find what she'd hoped for there is resolution.
Before eight, she and her family roamed the countryside. A car their home, a tent, the forests. Homeless, I thought. But no, her father is an entomologist (much like Atwood's real-life father). They settle into an unfinished home in Toronto where Eileen's father will teach as a professor. Before this, her brother was her only friend. In her own words, other girls are a mystery to her. Yet quite and shy, she will make two friends. It is the third friend, one year later, that will change the course of her grade school years, and although Eileen could not actually say, it would be much longer than that.
I'm always a little amazed when reading an Atwood novel. The characters deeply carved, their own words come out of the page, fully formed with thought. I didn't love every step through Eileen's life (there are many years beyond the young child who first meets Cordelia). But at the end, I am entranced with her story and the many things, good-and-bad, that make up a life. Even when Eileen doesn't find what she'd hoped for there is resolution.
April 19, 2020
I’ve come to be a huge fan of Atwood’s writing but this book was just not for me. I still love her and bow down to her but I found this one to be unbearably boring. I quite disliked the main character and that proved to be disastrous because there’s no action in the book, it’s just about her childhood and her life and I couldn’t have cared less about any of it! I kept pushing through until the end, hoping some spark of magic or something would save it for me but sadly that was not to be.
September 8, 2024
“I turn the rope, Carol turns the other end, Grace and Cordelia skip. We look like girls playing.”
Margaret Atwood. What a pistol. That term is probably not used anymore, and may be considered sexist, I don’t know. In my day it was said with admiration, and I always thought of it as meaning sassy with the smarts to back it up. You have to be on your toes around these people. You have to work a little to keep up with them. That’s how I see Atwood.
I read this book shortly after it came out in the late 1980’s, and again sometime in the 90’s after which I proceeded to lend it to anyone if I thought there was a chance they might read it. This re-read brought it all back, why I thought it was so good. It’s an epic, relatable on so many levels, intimately personal yet universal, and touching on all the big themes like home and family and friends and youth and age and love and art and future and past. It’s the life of Elaine Risley, middle-aged painter, told in circles--present-day impressions mixed with recollections of the past.
Elaine is visiting her old hometown of Toronto from her new home across the country in Vancouver, for a retrospective of her art. She’s well-known in some circles, but doesn’t see herself as famous. There in the backdrop of her childhood, all the memories come back: what formed her and how she feels about what she has become.
There’s a paragraph early on in the book that has stayed with me all these years. Elaine has grown up somewhat isolated, as her father is an entomologist and the family spent lots of time in the woods. She played with her older brother mostly, whatever he played, like fishing and war-type games. When the family moves to town, she plays with girls for the first time. Instead of the outwardly-competitive stuff she’s used to, the girls cut out pictures and paste them into books, making comments on each other’s choices, the competitiveness disguised. Thankfully now these stark lines between gender roles are blurring, but when I was a child they were hard and fast, and having grown up with brothers, I remember this feeling.
“Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there’s a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it without making any effort at all. I don’t have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don’t have to think about whether I’ve done these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton’s Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I’ve done it badly. Partly this is a relief.”
The relief doesn’t last long for Elaine. She is soon bullied by the other girls, in that special, cruel way that some young girls have. It’s Carol and Grace and Elaine. Then it’s Carol and Grace and Cordelia, and Elaine is all of a sudden the one who isn’t good enough, the one who must be punished.
This mysterious power the girls have over Elaine, and also the power of the times she lived in and the authorities in her life, these are the threads that haunt this story. Can she, can we for that matter, wrestle that power back to live the lives we want, or are we destined to be dupes, pushed through the world according to someone else’s rules?
So many quotes resonated with me. So much of my life came back to me while I read, even though I grew up quite a bit after Elaine.
“'There are people who remember the war and people who don’t. There’s a cut-off point, there’s a difference.’ … ‘What is the difference?’ ‘We have long attention spans,’ I say. ‘We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do.’” Maybe because the war had a big impact on my parents, and they were certainly more old-fashioned than the parents of my friends, but for whatever reason, this is me to a tee.
“My brother is deadly. He takes five common marbles to school with him in a blue Crown Royal Whisky bag and comes back with the bag and his pockets bulging.” Those bags! I don’t know what this says about my family that we had so many of these lying around, but my brothers and I put all kinds of treasures in those blue/purple Crown Royal bags.
“You used to buy for quality, things that would last. You kept your clothes until they were part of you, you checked the hemlines, the way the buttons were sewed on, you rubbed the cloth between your finger and thumb.” I conjure my mother here. It’s her finger and thumb I can see so clearly rubbing that cloth.
“Most shoes were brown. They went with the pot roast done in the pressure cooker along with the limp carrots and the flaccid potatoes and the onions with their slippery layers. The pressure cooker had a whistle-shaped thing on the top. If you forgot to pay attention to it the lid would blow off like a bomb, and the carrots and potatoes would be hurled to the ceiling, where they’d stick like mush.” Well this cracks me up. My family’s favorite dinner was made exactly like this, and I’m pretty sure some of it ended up on the ceiling once.
A brilliant novel. I know now I’ll always be thinking about it.
“The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.”
Margaret Atwood. What a pistol. That term is probably not used anymore, and may be considered sexist, I don’t know. In my day it was said with admiration, and I always thought of it as meaning sassy with the smarts to back it up. You have to be on your toes around these people. You have to work a little to keep up with them. That’s how I see Atwood.
I read this book shortly after it came out in the late 1980’s, and again sometime in the 90’s after which I proceeded to lend it to anyone if I thought there was a chance they might read it. This re-read brought it all back, why I thought it was so good. It’s an epic, relatable on so many levels, intimately personal yet universal, and touching on all the big themes like home and family and friends and youth and age and love and art and future and past. It’s the life of Elaine Risley, middle-aged painter, told in circles--present-day impressions mixed with recollections of the past.
Elaine is visiting her old hometown of Toronto from her new home across the country in Vancouver, for a retrospective of her art. She’s well-known in some circles, but doesn’t see herself as famous. There in the backdrop of her childhood, all the memories come back: what formed her and how she feels about what she has become.
There’s a paragraph early on in the book that has stayed with me all these years. Elaine has grown up somewhat isolated, as her father is an entomologist and the family spent lots of time in the woods. She played with her older brother mostly, whatever he played, like fishing and war-type games. When the family moves to town, she plays with girls for the first time. Instead of the outwardly-competitive stuff she’s used to, the girls cut out pictures and paste them into books, making comments on each other’s choices, the competitiveness disguised. Thankfully now these stark lines between gender roles are blurring, but when I was a child they were hard and fast, and having grown up with brothers, I remember this feeling.
“Something is unfolding, being revealed to me. I see that there’s a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it without making any effort at all. I don’t have to keep up with anyone, run as fast, aim as well, make loud explosive noises, decode messages, die on cue. I don’t have to think about whether I’ve done these things well, as well as a boy. All I have to do is sit on the floor and cut frying pans out of the Eaton’s Catalogue with embroidery scissors, and say I’ve done it badly. Partly this is a relief.”
The relief doesn’t last long for Elaine. She is soon bullied by the other girls, in that special, cruel way that some young girls have. It’s Carol and Grace and Elaine. Then it’s Carol and Grace and Cordelia, and Elaine is all of a sudden the one who isn’t good enough, the one who must be punished.
This mysterious power the girls have over Elaine, and also the power of the times she lived in and the authorities in her life, these are the threads that haunt this story. Can she, can we for that matter, wrestle that power back to live the lives we want, or are we destined to be dupes, pushed through the world according to someone else’s rules?
So many quotes resonated with me. So much of my life came back to me while I read, even though I grew up quite a bit after Elaine.
“'There are people who remember the war and people who don’t. There’s a cut-off point, there’s a difference.’ … ‘What is the difference?’ ‘We have long attention spans,’ I say. ‘We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do.’” Maybe because the war had a big impact on my parents, and they were certainly more old-fashioned than the parents of my friends, but for whatever reason, this is me to a tee.
“My brother is deadly. He takes five common marbles to school with him in a blue Crown Royal Whisky bag and comes back with the bag and his pockets bulging.” Those bags! I don’t know what this says about my family that we had so many of these lying around, but my brothers and I put all kinds of treasures in those blue/purple Crown Royal bags.
“You used to buy for quality, things that would last. You kept your clothes until they were part of you, you checked the hemlines, the way the buttons were sewed on, you rubbed the cloth between your finger and thumb.” I conjure my mother here. It’s her finger and thumb I can see so clearly rubbing that cloth.
“Most shoes were brown. They went with the pot roast done in the pressure cooker along with the limp carrots and the flaccid potatoes and the onions with their slippery layers. The pressure cooker had a whistle-shaped thing on the top. If you forgot to pay attention to it the lid would blow off like a bomb, and the carrots and potatoes would be hurled to the ceiling, where they’d stick like mush.” Well this cracks me up. My family’s favorite dinner was made exactly like this, and I’m pretty sure some of it ended up on the ceiling once.
A brilliant novel. I know now I’ll always be thinking about it.
“The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into.”
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