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Cat's Eye

By Margaret Atwood

(71)

| Mass Market Paperback | 9780553282474

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Book Description

Controversial painter Elaine Risley returns from Vancouver for a retrospective of her work. Here, in Toronto, the city of her youth, she confronts the submerged layers of her past – her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self-righteous Mrs. Smeath, and the two men Continue

Controversial painter Elaine Risley returns from Vancouver for a retrospective of her work. Here, in Toronto, the city of her youth, she confronts the submerged layers of her past – her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self-righteous Mrs. Smeath, and the two men Elaine later came to love in diverse and sometimes disastrous ways. But it is the enigmatic Cordelia, once her tormentor, then her best friend, whose elusive yet powerful presence in her life Elaine finally comes to understand. The realm of childhood and growing up, with its secrecies, cruelties, betrayals, and terrors, has never been so brilliantly evoked. By turns disquieting, humorous, compassionate, haunting and mordant, Cat’s Eye is vintage Atwood.

4 Reviews

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  • 2 people find this helpful

    Cat's Eye is Margaret Atwood's first novel since her international award-winning best-seller The Handmaid's Tale, in which she created a futuristic totalitarian society. In Cat's Eye, Atwood moves away from this overtly political territory to an landscape which is more personal but no less disturbin ... (continue)

    Cat's Eye is Margaret Atwood's first novel since her international award-winning best-seller The Handmaid's Tale, in which she created a futuristic totalitarian society. In Cat's Eye, Atwood moves away from this overtly political territory to an landscape which is more personal but no less disturbing.
    Painter Elaine Risley, pushing fifty, returns from Vancouver to Toronto for a retrospective of her work, which has been much celebrated by the women's movement and much attacked from other quarters.
    Toronto is the city she fled many years earlier, hoping to leave behind the tyrannical and obsessive memories of her early life there - from her post-World War II school days and fifties adolescence, through the avant-garde art scene of the sixties, to the advent of feminism in the early seventies.
    Now, as she wanders the streets of the city, which are no longer puritanical and dowdy but resplendent with eighties glitz, Elaine confronts the submerged layers of her past - her unconventional family, her eccentric and brilliant brother, the self-righteous and dangerous Mrs. Smeath, and the two men Elaine later came to love and diverse and sometimes disastrous ways. But it is the enigmatic Cordelia, once her tormentor, then her best friend, whose elusive yet powerful presence in her life Elaine finally comes to understand.
    The realm of childhood and growing up, with it secrecies, cruelties, betrayals, and terrors, has never been so luminously evoked. Through the quirky, idiosyncratic voice of Elaine Risley, Atwood has given fascinating dimensions to the ambiguous roots of women's relationships, both with one another and with the world.

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    meganzing said on Apr 7, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • "I do of course have a real life. I sometimes have trouble believing in it, because it doesn't seem like the kind of life I could ever get away with, or derserve. This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."
    --Margaret Atwood

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    Paolo said on Mar 31, 2012 about the Others edition | Add your feedback

  • Most naturalistic of Margaret Atwood's novels that I've read i.e. no science fiction elements.

    This includes probably the best representation I've read of the depths young girls can reach in calculated cruelty and manipulativeness if they perceive some licence from the social milieu around them.

    N ... (continue)

    Most naturalistic of Margaret Atwood's novels that I've read i.e. no science fiction elements.

    This includes probably the best representation I've read of the depths young girls can reach in calculated cruelty and manipulativeness if they perceive some licence from the social milieu around them.

    No quite so stark, compelling or brilliant in it's descriptions of the later years of the main characters life, it neverless gives a very convincing memorial of the generational shifts of 50's ands 60's Canada.

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    huntch said on Feb 15, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

  • I'm reading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye and Bend Sinister: The Gay Times Book of Disturbing Stories - I'm mostly bored with the former but quite entertained by the latter.

    I guess I must've bought Cat's Eye because it's on some women's writings reading list. I like the subject it deals with. ... (continue)

    I'm reading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye and Bend Sinister: The Gay Times Book of Disturbing Stories - I'm mostly bored with the former but quite entertained by the latter.

    I guess I must've bought Cat's Eye because it's on some women's writings reading list. I like the subject it deals with. In fact, I wish more people would write about growing up as girls. But it's far too slow for my current state of mind. I just don't have the patience to sit through 70 pages before Cordelia actually appears

    http://opengoal.livejournal.com/48076.html

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    Vicky Pang said on Jun 8, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

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