Cat's Eye (Bloomsbury Modern Library) (New Portway Large Print Books)

by Margaret Atwood

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace

Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood - unbearable betrayals and cruelties - surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and tormentor, who has haunted her for forty years.

'Not since Graham Greene has a novelist captured so forcefully the relationship between school bully and victim...Atwood's games are played, exquisitely, by little girls' LISTENER
An exceptional novel from the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize

• ISBN10: 034901308X
• ISBN13: 9780349013084
• Publish Date: 22 August 2019 (first published 31 December 1988)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 5 March 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Imprint: Virago Press Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 512
• Language: English

Reviews

[clementine]

This is still one of my favourites, five years later - so brutal and unflinching. Margaret Atwood has done a bit of everything, but I think her realistic fiction is perhaps her strongest work.

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Review 01/31/2012:

I don't know what I was expecting with this book, but it certainly wasn't what I ended up reading. I thought I would enjoy it, but I didn't think I would be so immersed in it, so saturated with the vivid descriptions. Reading Cat's Eye is like drowning. That sounds negative, but it's the only way I can think to describe it: it's so immersive, and I felt like I was choking for air the entire time. It is so dark and disturbing.

I don't know how this book would read to somebody else, but for me it was such an odd experience because I know what she's writing about. I know what Elaine went through in her childhood. I felt those emotions so strongly, because I have felt them before in my life. That period was 1/3 of my life ago, and as soon as I started reading Cat's Eye it felt as if those experiences were still new. Even after all these years, it's so raw.

I don't know. I can't get all my emotions in order. I was discussing this book in class the other day, and I almost started crying. I surprised myself with that. I didn't realize how much it was affecting me.

This isn't a book that I would normally give five stars to. It's just not my usual type of book, really. But I can't find one flaw in it, and I know it's going to stick with me, as much as I might like to forget about it. It's going to disturb me for a long time.