meATWOOD Cat'(s) Eye Margaret KINDLE MOBI CPUL H.A.

In Cat's Eye--Margaret Atwood (1998)-- the main character, a middle aged Elaine, a successful artist, returns to her home town -- city -- of Toronto. She finds the landscape much changed, much hipper, more modern, a "New York without the muggings." But in returning she is forced to come to terms with the bullying she experienced as a child, as the girl who put up with constant criticism as she tries her best to fit in, only to be continually terrorized and judged as lacking by her circle of supposed friends--friends that she cannot disengage from for fear that there are no others who would accept her.
All this is vintage Atwood: the precise and devastating detail, the sense of the ordinary transformed into nightmare, the quiet desperation of characters trapped, silenced, utterly alone. Inevitably, the emotional intensity of these early scenes makes the more familiar material of Elaine's later life seem somewhat anticlimactic.
The central figure of her childhood is Cordelia, whose memory she cannot escape and who later haunts her art, and whose cruelty she has partly adopted in order to protect herself. Cordelia and the memory of her is almost an obsession for Elaine, a "doppelganger". Elaine tracks Cordelia down to a "discreet loony bin", and finds her drugged and trapped, still in many ways a child, a child who was unable to let loose the reins of power she had welded over her inner circle of friends, who's highest point of life was in being the central Queen of her bullying circle.
Reading the novel as Ms. Atwood's own midlife assessment of her life and her work adds a certain significance to its conclusion and may lead us to speculate further on some elements of the story that the character does not confront - the undercurrent of misogyny, the joylessness in a life that is in every other respect carefully recounted - it in no way adds to the pleasure the book provides. For finally ''Cat's Eye'' is not only about memory, nor is it the chronicle of a particular life. It is a novel of images, nightmarish, evocative, heartbreaking and mundane, that taken together offer us not a retrospective but an addition: a new work entirely and perhaps Margaret Atwood's most emotionally engaging fiction.