Cat's Eye

Rating:
Summary: Interesting to women artists of all types...
Review: This novel interested me because I am both a writer
and a visual artist and of course the book was written by the
former and about the latter...the elements of childhood that have shaped her. I enjoyed it but...I gave it four stars because its "shadow"-protagonist - a childhood chum of the main protagonist, the artist, remains just that throughout the book - a shadow. Now, this could be effective under certain circumstances, but Cordelia is so important...she keeps popping up in the artist's consciousness as a particularly important fixture in her early life....but I don't really get a true "sense" of her. Even when the author meets her later in life under strange and tragic circumstances...and her constant searching for Cordelia in ever stranger and on every corner...the character of this...character....doesn't gel. So a major conceit of the book was lacking for me, and I grew weary of it. I wanted to know SOMETHING more substantial about Cordelia, but never felt I really did. Other characters - childhood friends, the artist's parents and brother...were wonderfully drawn. Also the mother of a friend...a hateful, religious bigot who becomes the vengeful centerpiece of the artist's work, are deliciously drawn. But as I said, I feel the writer failed to make the one character who was pivotal come alive.

Rating:
Summary: the horrors of childhood, revisited
Review: _Cat's Eye_ is a novel that speaks to everyone. It speaks to those who moved often in childhood, and those who left their hometowns to escape negative memories. It speaks to artists. It speaks to women, and to anyone who had difficult relationships in childhood. It speaks to those who have obtained a measure of success, and to those that haven't. It speaks to Canadians, Americans, and even to men. It speaks to anyone who is haunted by their past.

Elaine Risley is an artist who is returning to her home city of Toronto for a retrospective of her work. Following her everywhere as she moves through the streets is the shadow of Cordelia, her childhood friend, confidant, and finally, her torturer. We learn about Elaine's childhood through highly effective and captivating flashbacks: her father was an entymologist, they moved around often, and when Elaine was finally able to settle and make friends she chooses the wrong girls. We suffer with her through her torment, and sympathize with her as an adult trying to heal through her art.

For me, the descriptions of Elaine's paintings are some of the finest points of the book. Each painting is a capsule of Elaine's childhood: the images overlap and symbolize events which she is trying to take out and place onto the canvas in order to purge herself. The reader can envision them clearly, and understand where they came from in the artist's psyche. The paintings are essential to the hypnotic flow of the book (one of them is displayed on the cover).

Ultimately, with the help of her successful retrospective and revisiting of Toronto, Elaine does finally emerge from her personal blizzard and into the sunlight. It is a journey well worth taking with her. One of my three favorite books of all time.

Rating:
Summary: Great story, great reader
Review: Kate Nelligan does a superb job reading the story, and the story works very well on audio.

Rating:
Summary: Packs a powerful punch.
Review: Wow. This story touched such a nerve as I read, invoking anger, rage, and sorrow for Elaine. And myself! For who among us has not had her own Cordelia? I've had TWO in my life! Argh. It speaks of how girls relate, and how very cruel they can be when they themselves feel weak and are compelled to squash the light in the eyes of others. I was riveted.

Rating:
Summary: Nuanced writing and well-crafted story should get 4.5 stars!
Review: I would give this book a 4 ½ star rating if it were possible. What keeps it from being a 5-star is the lack of better editing that could have made some parts less repetitive. However, the book is completely engrossing and well-crafted. Some of Atwood's observations are so poignant and finely shaded, it left me wishing I had written them.

I didn't find the flashback scenes confusing. After the first few sections, the pattern of what is the present and what was the past became obvious: the first chapter of every section, except the last, dealt with the present while the remaining chapters of each section were flashbacks/memories.

I think most women who grew up with brothers and/or have more guy friends than girl friends will relate well to this book. Being one of those women, I found Atwood's rendering of the intricacies of girls' play versus boys' quite interesting and on the mark. It seems that women who grew up with sisters know how to play these games well while women who grew up without sisters sometimes get tripped up.

But while the childhood torment shapes Elaine and influences her life in profound ways, it is by no means the only story. Elaine and her friends grow up. Elaine and Cordelia become friends in high school where the power balance shifts. Reasons why Cordelia, the main "antagonist," becomes a sort of emotional bully and why her character, her vitality slowly fades become sadly clearer.

At the same time, because her friendship with Cordelia so powerfully shapes Elaine, she feels Cordelia's influence throughout her life even when she no longer sees her friend. At times, she seems even to hear Cordelia's voice and follow in her painful footsteps. The Toronto retrospective of Elaine's artwork allows her to come back and face the memories and figure out why Cordelia needed to emotionally abuse Elaine and why Elaine can understand and forgive Cordelia after all these years. In a way, they needed each other because they were looking for the same thing: friendship and acceptance.

The imaginative descriptions of Elaine's art workwere almost too much! While reading the book, I envied how creative Atwood's mind really was. While writing this magnificent book, she also conjured up in her writing some powerful visual images.

Finally, Atwood's ability to tell a very real and human story against the back drop of the feminist movement was exciting and nuanced. She illustrated the impact the women's movement had on relationships between the character and other women artists and Elaine and her husband. At the same time, she conveyed a sense of how difficult it was to find a comfortable position in a powerful movement; for example, how does a woman embrace feminism without feeling as if she has to give up all symbols of "female oppression" such as wanting to look pretty, shaving one's legs, have a child WITH a HUSBAND? While some may say these issues are dated in today's world, they seem relevant still when women have to justify why they do/don't identify themselves as "feminists." Or why they have to qualify the label.

This book is superbly written and realized.

Rating:
Summary: lengthy but enjoyable
Review: "Cat's Eye" is a tale about Elaine Risley, her childhood memories, her relationships, her accomplishments.

The book frankly explores topics like North American society's cultural expectancies, cruelty that exists among children, distorted perceptions of love, and the permanence of experience. As Elaine reflects on her life, the reader discovers that human beings have a persistent nature to strive for social acceptance.

The prose is a little choppy at times, but that is only Atwood's trademark. When I finished reading "Cat's Eye", I had a huge question mark hovering above my head. "Huh? That's it?" I had wondered. But upon further reflection, I realized that something must have motivated me to finish the book -- it was the blunt reality, the uncensored honesty, and the cold truths that made this book so captivating.

Rating:
Summary: Too long, but ultimately rewarding
Review: Cat's Eye gives a clear, if maybe exaggerated, picture of childhood cruelties and the marks they leave. The most interesting part Atwood conveys is the residue in the adult artist Elaine Risely. The scars we cover up that then have the power to affect us, years later. It will resonate with anyone who has tried to go home again. I read this book the same week I saw a childhood friend from years ago and didn't see the friend who had been the third of our trio. It was the best imaginable timing. It's a very complex study of emotional life, and in some ways very brilliant, although the scenes from childhood are excessive and long-winded. Skim a bit, but read it.

Rating:
Summary: One to keep
Review: This was a book that was loaned to me and I read it to kill some time. It has become one of my favorite books. I actually read that original copy to pieces. I would suggest this book to anyone that wanted a good rainy day afternoon book.

Rating:
Summary: Magical Marbles Don't Help Elaine
Review: "Cat's Eye" was a good example of the cruelties that little girls face during their childhood. Elaine, the main character, goes through the first eight years of her life acting like a boy, because she has a brother, and that is the only way she knows how to act. When her parents move to Toronto, she is faced with having to make friends that are girls. Elaine finds some cruel friends that criticize her every move. She is punished in obscene ways like being put down in a hole in the ground and covered with dirt for hours. Her "friends" make Elaine feel that they are "helping" her, and that it is a little girl's game that adults don't know about. When Elaine finds out that the adults were ok with it, she learns to hate. While playing a game of marble's, Elaine wins a cat's eye marble and she honestly believes that it will keep her safe from the girls. As you read the book, you will see how the girls in her childhood affected how she lived the rest of her life. The book was a little confusing, and hard to follow, since Atwood goes back and forth between the past and the present. Overall I would say that "Cat's Eye" isn't a GREAT book, but it isn't bad either.

Rating:
Summary: Cat In the Cat's Eye
Review: Reading Margaret Atwood -her work, the "cats eye" was emotive in a vituperative out pouring of all that wants to be seemingly human and ratiocinatively inhuman in torrents that assemble through the whip of the persona in fragment.
Novel plods warily, through characters in the guise of the selves. Ambi-orthodoxy of the characters insitu, is grudgingly carried on through discontinuities, leaving the stream of narratives palpitating in discontent. Time seethes through abstractions of vertigo, hanging individual particles to a levy a trend that stays on in a momentum of individuations.
There is a pressurized attack to transport the present in abject shocks of being humans, levitating back to a slow development of the past, leaving the beginning so startling and then again leaving the place mellow in a beginning.
The consonants of being filially attached to a brilliant paternity and a subdued maternity impinge the elan of growing up to a matrix, which traces the leftovers of what's absorbed in a normative.
The vacuum of a needy person wanting to fill a myth to relate the entirety of the self is subverted to an attachment, which tags on to the friend's anglicanised form of worship. The aversion to it forms the terra-incognito of the conscious below thresholds.
The repression of the native psyche allegorises the Risleyian development to the 'still of life'. Is life ever still?? No it isn't! Every still is moving. The movement is vicarious in dialogues of celebration. The angst of growing up as a body, to be in a body, to be a body is thwarted in sublimity to subliminal intrusions that stay subdued and the torrent in ferment is forever going on as stills.
The body never grows up-only the art does and warps into the canvas as tangled intimations of childhood, maturing the pubic to shades of a black Diaspora.
Its disheartening to probe the stellar pores of the male psyche as they tend to stereotype a tendency that atrophies in intellections, objective and diffident to the within and to objectives that divine the anthropomorphic into impastos of arresting Oedipus's.
Cosmological nuances and body hermeneutics mingle in aberrations, which keep jutting, thrusting and opening the body into art psychic. It's ironic in jestor-ship to obliterate the ballocks to gyenopathic angst's in simulation.
From a sudden juxtaposition of the present, there's a shallow mellowing into the past with patches of present in between. The narratives in earlier development lead the reader guessing, at some point of time later on there would be a momentous union of Cordeila and Risley. But it does not turn out that way and leaves their meeting point as a plot left over in indigestion.
The denouement of signification is rather natural in course as though nothing has happened. The only twist of a difference is Stephen's tragic death so unnatural as it stands out quite raving and different from the whole novel.
Stephen's descent into eternity to be particles of after life is a mausoleum of digression and existing forever as a story quite different in rite. Whether they add on or diminish the periphery is mooted to introspection.
Risley's development into an avant-gardist is buildgrunsroman in effort and kunstlerroman in effect. 'Still Life' is an era wanting to refract in a subjective mortality of being frozen but chaotic and moving to the intimate that wants the immortal