Cat's Eye - Hardcover

Atwood, Margaret Eleanor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385260075 ISBN 13: 9780385260077

Publisher: Doubleday, 1989

Synopsis

Years after painter Elaine Risley flees Toronto for Vancouver, she returns to search for long-missing parts of her life and pursue the elusive Cordelia, her best friend and sometimes enemy

About this title

Review:

Margaret Atwood charts the psychological process of memory as compulsion and memory as a healing act through the character of Elaine Risley, an artist who returns to her home town of Toronto for a retrospective of her work. Elaine's visit triggers thoughts of her childhood with all the urgency of a bad rash. Dominating her reflections are her childhood "friends", three girls who wreak havoc on Elaine's self-esteem. Having spent her early childhood on the road with an entomologist father, a less than traditional mother and a brother more concerned with snot and snakes than the intricate behaviour codes of girls, the young Elaine is vulnerable to the indirect aggression of Cordelia, the ringleader of the group who seeks to improve her. Through Elaine's experiences, Margaret Atwood turns a keen and ironic eye on the training of females in North American culture: "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." The self-effacement of these girl-children barely masks a need for power that erupts all too often in cruel forms of play. This is a story in which the lines between victims and oppressors blur, in which forgiveness becomes an act of gaining power. Through humour, pain and insight, she makes us see, with surprise and recognition, details from childhood we may well have forgotten. --Chris Kellett, From 500 Great Books by Women

Review:

'Atwood conceives Elaine with a poet’s transforming fire; and delivers her to us that way, a flame inside an icicle.' (Los Angeles Times)

'Irresistible ... This book is about life for all of us.' (The Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0385260075
• ISBN 13: 9780385260077
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1