“Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood - review

 “Cat’s Eye” by Margaret Atwood:

This is Atwood’s refreshingly honest while slightly accusing, slightly misogynistic version of a “Künstlerroman”, the Life of the Artist as a Young Woman who, right from the start, is constantly observed, questioned, criticized and judged.  

Elaine, a woman painter, returns to her hometown Toronto for a retrospective of her art and starts reminiscing in vivid detail and extraordinary observance, her life, her childhood and her friendship with “best friend” and cruel torturer Cordelia. 

Everything and everyone in this narrative is rendered in great detail of sight, sound, taste and smell: a symphony of sensual evocation. Emotion is made comprehensible through the physical world. And a lot of the physical world is associated with pain. Fear and horror are inextricably intertwined in everyday experience. The timeline is set mostly in the past and occasionally interspersed by the present. 

The girl Elaine has to endure betrayal and cruel childhood games of power, subservience and dominance. In a surreal, almost magical event she frees herself from her tormentors and starts to live an emancipated life, has an affair, gets married and divorced, becomes a painter, becomes a mother, struggles with her identity, struggles with the constant judgement women in society have to endure and emerges out of this process all the stronger. In the final pages she rises above the ties that bound her, not necessarily happier, but more in accord with and more accepting of herself, all the while Cordelia never ceases to pop up in her mind.

This is an emotional book, half of the story is told from the child Elaine’s perspective. All the relevant persons we meet through the eyes of Elaine: her parents, her brother who met a tragical death, her school-friends, her teachers. 

Cat’s Eye ends on a peaceful, forgiving note. While Elaine walks through her exhibition, she assembles structure and meaning out of the shards and shreds of her life and ties loose ends. Cat’s Eye is not only a reminiscent look on youth but also a meditation on ageing and the way relations with people, places and the past are changing.

Atwood unrelentingly tugs at (not quite lifts) the false, lying veil of feminist benevolence and womanly support which is really claw-and-tooth disguised as friendship. “Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women“ is one astounding lesson Elaine learns, another is that “men don’t have intentions, they are like the weather, they have no mind“.

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