Cat's Eye

Beautifully written story about a young girl who was bullied and tormented by her supposed 'friends' and how she grows up and out of these painful memories through her involvement in the arts as an adult. A book I will keep close and read again.

The writing in this piece is so beautiful- the imagery is stunning. I’ve read it thrice through the years and am always finding something new to love. Not just a coming of age book, but also one about womanhood, self acceptance, and finding your light. Atwood is an incredible author, and this is absolutely one of her best works, if not her very best.

I think about Cat’s Eye often. Atwood is a master at her craft and Cat’s Eye is not only my favorite work of hers but my favorite book, period.

CAT'S EYE by Margaret AtwoodIn CAT'S EYE, Margaret Atwood tells the story of Elaine Risley, an avant-garde painter who finds herself reflecting on her tumultuous childhood when she returns to her home town of Toronto for a retrospective art exhibit. It has been many years since she set foot in Canada, where she grew up moving from place to place, due to her father's career as an entomologist. The story is told in flashbacks, as the story of her current life as a painter, on her second marriage, is told in-between the story of her childhood. Two plot lines run parallel to each other, until the very end when both the past and her present collide.Elaine's first years were spent travelling with her family, never having a best friend. It is all she yearns for, to have a real girl friend. All she had during those early years was her brother, who as he grew older drifted away from her, leaving her alone to fend for herself. When her father finally settles down and buys a house, she begins to make her first set of real friends. However, how does one define a friend? Elaine becomes part of a group of girls that seem to be living under the steel hand of Cordelia, the ringleader. Cordelia treats them all as if she was a dictator and they were her subjects, but her treatment of Elaine is totally unforgivable. Elaine is tormented to a point where her own mental health is jeopardized, and at one point one wonders how she ever survived. But survive she did. As Elaine tells her story, we see how she developed from a very insecure and needy young girl to a woman who understands why she made the choices she did as a child, and became a very successful painter, secure in who she was and where she had come from. The key to her understanding is her friendship with Cordelia, the young girl who treated Elaine like dirt, yet towards whom Elaine felt a type of longing for, years after she had last seen Cordelia. It is a psychologically themed book, as usual, layered upon different levels of plots and subplots and characters. Margaret Atwood is the queen of this form of novel, and it is no wonder she is one of the best storytellers today. This was my fourth Atwood novel, and I will not hesitate to read my next. Although not as complex as THE BLIND ASSASSIN, nor as prophetic as THE HANDMAID'S TALE, CAT'S EYE stands alone as a great book that is a must-read for any fan. I give this book 5 stars.

This multi-layered book about how childhood experiences impact on the rest of life's journey, tackles a subject rarely explored. This subject is how truly horrifying children's emotional cruelty to one another can be. Sure there have been lots of stories about English boys beating each other up, and inflicting nasty physical tortures on one another, but this book is a rarity because it tells of how little girls, as young as nine, inflict emotional torture on each other. There is much more to this book however. Cat's eye explores the whole life journey of a woman after these miserable childhood experiences, and her preoccupation throughout life with the "friend" who was the ringleader of these children's "reindeer games". None of what I have written so far describes how magnificent the prose and poetry of this book is. It explores many other topics such as art, marriage and old age. It is very much a novel that is primarily of interest to women which may be why it didn't win the Booker Prize. It's my favorite book in the world, except perhaps for the Robber Bride also by Atwood.

Generally, I like to be analytical and logical when writing about literature. This is what we are taught at university, after all. This novel, however, left me so astounded that I couldn't even talk about it to friends. I finished it more than six months ago and, in a way, have been grappling with it ever since. Scenes from it seem to randomly invade my mind. Surely if a mere work of fiction can hold this power for such a length of time, it must be worth more than the sum of its parts.The only point I really wish to make about it, is that there should be no gender discrimination in recommending this novel. Why anybody should feel that it is meant for a female audience is beyond me. Within the extremely rich layers of its narrative, the novel reveals essential truths about the way in which the process of growing up affects everybody. The fact that the main characters are women is simply not relevant beyond the fact that the narrator herself is a woman. Margaret Atwood is far too great a writer to have confined to such banalities."Haunting" is possibly the best way to describe this work and I am sure that every perceptive reader will be haunted by the way in which Elaine's experiences are eventually reflected in her art. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest novels I have ever read. But then again, every Atwood novel I read (and I have read them all) just confirms my opinion that she is one of the greatest writers of all time.