Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
Elaine Risley is a middle-aged painter (she doesn’t like to be called an artist) coming back to Toronto for a retrospective of her works. She spent part of her childhood and adult life in Toronto, and the narration shifts between her present feelings of estrangement and inadequacy, and her memories of the events that shaped her as a painter and as a woman.
Elaine’s childhood in the forties was impacted by her relationship with three girls from her neighborhood; Grace, Carol and mostly Cordelia, who haunts her until the present day. The girls build exclusive friendships and shifting alliances, of which Elaine is most often the excluded part. They have a special way of bullying her, without beating her, without even using harsh words. Elaine is a more or less willing participant in this abuse, in the sense that she doesn’t stand up to them. What makes her different, in her own view and in the opinion of her "friends", is that she spent her early childhood in the wilderness (her father is a researcher in entomology), and was educated with scientific principles rather than brought up in a more conventional religious environment, like her girlfriends. Having always played with her brother, she feels awkward in the company of girls, and never gets quite familiar with their ways…
Growing into adolescence, Elaine becomes skilled in verbally insulting her girlfriends, never letting her own defenses down. Cordelia has no more power over her, they renew a relationship where Elaine has the upper hand, without openly making use of her advantage. As an adult, Elaine’s self-destructive relationships with men are determined by what she suffered in childhood, even if she does not want to acknowledge it, and leave her with a feeling of worthlessness. As a mother of two girls, she fears for her daughters, fears that they suffer what she did or that they make some other girl suffer. As a painter, her work is influenced by the people and things that left, in one way or another, an imprint on her memories of childhood and early adulthood. What Elaine is really looking for when coming back to Toronto is closure from a damaging relationship with Jon, her first husband and mostly, she must come to terms with her mixed feelings about Cordelia…
The themes raised by Atwood are female friendships and their complexities, the weight and treacherousness of memory, as well as the difficulty of growing old. With a masterful writing, potent symbolism and an engrossing story, Cat’s Eye is a book I recommend to people who love literature. I particularly liked the description of Elaine’s paintings and how they relate to both her experience and her dreams. I didn’t like Cat’s Eye quite as much as The Blind Assassin, but I still enjoyed it a lot…
Rating: 4/5
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