Michael
Cat’s Eye is the heartbreaking story of Elaine Risley. The novel starts with Elaine as a nine-year-old, follows her through school and college, and ends up with her as a well-respected artist who in middle-age has her first retrospective in her home-town of Toronto.
As a child, Elaine is a little odd. In fact, her entire family is slightly out of place in the Toronto of the 1940s and 1950s. Her father is an entomologist and so she, her father, mother, and brother spend the summers out in the forests of Canada researching insects. They really don’t have a home until at some point they return to Toronto where her father begins work at the university.
Elaine finally makes some friends. Elaine, Grace, Carol, and especially Cordelia are her best friends. But they are not. This is a novel about the cruelty of a group of girls*, and the trauma that bullying can cause throughout a person’s life. It is about how the past never really leaves us, but lives on, buried in our psyches and ready to reappear.
It seems to me that the novel’s focus is on a few years of this bullying, years that the adult Elaine has suppressed, and how this suppression has impacted her art, her relationships, and really her whole life.
The novel is written with Margaret Atwood’s wonderful prose. I was hooked from the beginning and felt for Elaine, and indeed for most of the characters (although Josef I could do without). I love Margaret Atwood’s writing, and this is among her best (maybe it’s not quite at the same level as The Handmaid’s Tale, but few books are).
It’s full of quotable lines, but one of my favorites is the last line, which in a way reaches back to her childhood with her brother. Speaking of stars: “It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by.” Not hope precisely, but acceptance.
*of course, the stereotypical bully is that of a boy beating up other boys, but boys can also bully in the same way that Elaine’s friends bully her.
Cat’s Eye is the heartbreaking story of Elaine Risley. The novel starts with Elaine as a nine-year-old, follows her through school and college, and ends up with her as a well-respected artist who in middle-age has her first retrospective in her home-town of Toronto.
As a child, Elaine is a little odd. In fact, her entire family is slightly out of place in the Toronto of the 1940s and 1950s. Her father is an entomologist and so she, her father, mother, and brother spend the summers out in the forests of Canada researching insects. They really don’t have a home until at some point they return to Toronto where her father begins work at the university.
Elaine finally makes some friends. Elaine, Grace, Carol, and especially Cordelia are her best friends. But they are not. This is a novel about the cruelty of a group of girls*, and the trauma that bullying can cause throughout a person’s life. It is about how the past never really leaves us, but lives on, buried in our psyches and ready to reappear.
It seems to me that the novel’s focus is on a few years of this bullying, years that the adult Elaine has suppressed, and how this suppression has impacted her art, her relationships, and really her whole life.
The novel is written with Margaret Atwood’s wonderful prose. I was hooked from the beginning and felt for Elaine, and indeed for most of the characters (although Josef I could do without). I love Margaret Atwood’s writing, and this is among her best (maybe it’s not quite at the same level as The Handmaid’s Tale, but few books are).
It’s full of quotable lines, but one of my favorites is the last line, which in a way reaches back to her childhood with her brother. Speaking of stars: “It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by.” Not hope precisely, but acceptance.
*of course, the stereotypical bully is that of a boy beating up other boys, but boys can also bully in the same way that Elaine’s friends bully her.