Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
Fiction
1989 Doubleday (first published September 1988)
Finished on May 30, 2020
Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

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 a 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 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 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. 

By turns disquieting, hilarious, compassionate, haunting, and mordant, Cat's Eye is vintage Atwood, and her most deeply felt work of fiction to date.

Nope. No more. Margaret Atwood is one of those widely praised authors whose novels simply aren't for me. I've read three of her books (Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin) and each time I ask myself, Why?  A year or two ago, I tried to read The Edible Woman, but after a few chapters, I called it quits. So why did I spend the last two weeks reading Cat's Eye? One of my good friends recommended it, telling me that it's her all-time favorite book, so I thought I'd see how I like it and if it could change my opinion about Atwood's works. 

I have to admit that I really did enjoy the first half of the novel, in spite of the cruel bullying inflicted on Elaine. Atwood is a good storyteller and does a fine job with the every day life details of her young characters. There is plenty of tension in these early chapters (and I will probably never forget Cordelia), but my interest began to wane as the story progressed and Elaine entered college.

Overall, Cat's Eye was worth reading, in spite of becoming a bit of a slog, but it's not one that I loved.