{"id":6267,"date":"2007-04-21T07:36:14","date_gmt":"2007-04-21T11:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6267"},"modified":"2015-05-08T07:37:51","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T11:37:51","slug":"the-books-cats-eye-margaret-atwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6267","title":{"rendered":"The Books: \u201cCat\u2019s Eye\u201d (Margaret Atwood)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:<\/p>\n

\"n30451.jpg\"Here is an excerpt from Cat’s Eye<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Margaret Atwood. I’ve actually been dreading this moment, because I love this book so much. I don’t know how to talk about it. I’m also going to post multiple excerpts because there is no way I can pick just one. This book is a tour de force. I have a feeling that when Atwood passes on, she will be known mainly as “the author of The Handmaid’s Tale<\/i> and other books …” Maybe I’m wrong about that, I don’t know – but to my taste, this is her greatest book. Handmaid’s Tale<\/i> was a scary book, an important book, a “zeitgeist moment” book – it tapped into fears that still exist today and will continue to exist tomorrow, as long as there are fundamentalists who want to curb the lives of women. But I wouldn’t call it a “great” book. Cat’s Eye<\/i> is. God, is it great. But how do I talk about it?? I had (and still have) an intensely personal<\/i> response to this book – because although Atwood is writing about a time that pretty much pre-dates me – she is writing about stuff that is universal. Before Mean Girls<\/i>, there was Margaret Atwood. But that’s minimizing this book. To say what it’s about – is to do it a disservice. It’s about so many things. And on another level: the writing!! Atwood warms up a bit here – and also parts of this book are truly<\/i> funny. She has such a good eye for detail, for social mores – ridiculous and not … her comments on the Toronto “art” scene (sorry – those quotations are necessary – and I’m just picking up on Atwood’s gentle mockery) – the feeling of Toronto not being important or cosmopolitan enough … and “trying too hard” – Atwood describes that exquisitely.<\/p>\n

Like many of her books – this is not a strictly linear narrative. We go back and forth in time Elaine Risley is a middle-aged painter, who has come back to Toronto to attend a retrospective of her work at a prominent gallery. It’s a big deal for her, a big moment in her career – the acknowledgement of her country for her art. So there’s THAT part of the story – the present-day. Elaine preparing for her event. And then we go back in time. And the entire book is a sweeping saga of Elaine’s life – and this is Atwood’s most autobiographical novel. Her father was an entomologist – and Atwood spent the majority of her childhood traveling through the wildest reaches of Canada with her parents, living in log cabins in the middle of the woods – as her father did his work. It was not a “civilized” world … she grew up wild, a nature girl … so her confrontation with civilization was that much more vivid. She didn’t “fit”. She wasn’t “domesticated”, like other little girls. She loved bugs, and moss, and creepy crawly things under rocks, she loved mud, and freezing cold baths in remote lakes … Her confrontation with the world of girls, which came later, was jarring. Cat’s Eye<\/i> is about that. Elaine’s family moves to Toronto when she’s about 8 or 9 … and she says in the book “Until then I was happy.” She befriends a couple of other little girls … and they pal around … and the main one, the main girl, is Cordelia.<\/p>\n

In the present-day sections of the book – we hear about Cordelia. There is unfinished business with this old childhood friend. We get the sense that Elaine and Cordelia have lost touch. But why?<\/p>\n

Back and forth, back and forth … the Cordelia story comes out in patches, spots … By the end of the book, we are drained. Devastated. Hopeful? Maybe. Atwood leaves it up to us.<\/p>\n

Sorry to be vague – this book is so important to me. I’ll think more about it, and try to be clearer about it.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt in the beginning of the book. Elaine is in Toronto, it’s one of the present-day sections … everywhere she goes, she is haunted by ghosts. Herself as a youngster, her friends, and also: the old Toronto, the prim vicious small town she once knew … Now it’s gleaming and cosmopolitan … but underneath that surface, Elaine knows nothing has changed. At this point in the book – we do not know who Cordelia is. We have not “met” her in the past sections of the narrative … she is a mystery. We are not set up for her. But she is here, nonetheless.<\/p>\n


\nExcerpt from Cat’s Eye<\/a>\"\"<\/i> – by Margaret Atwood.<\/b><\/p>\n

I get up off the duvet, feeling as if I haven’t slept. I riffle through the herbal tea bags in the kitchenette, Lemon Mist, Morning Thunder, and bypass them in favor of some thick, jolting, poisonous coffee. I find myself standing in the middle of the main room, not knowing exactly how I got in here from the kitchenette. A little time jump, a little static on the screen, probably jet lag: up too late at night, drugged in the morning. Early Alzheimer’s.<\/p>\n

I sit at the window, drinking my coffee, biting my fingers, looking down the five stories. From this angle the pedestrians appear squashed from above, like deformed children. All around are flat-roofed, boxy warehouse buildings, and beyond them the flat railroad lands where the trains used to shunt back and forth, once the only entertainment available here on Sundays. Beyond that is flat Lake Ontario, a zero at the beginning and a zero at the end, slate-gray and brimming with venoms. Even the rain from it is carcinogenic.<\/p>\n

I wash in Jon’s tiny, greasy bathroom, resisting the medicine cabinet. The bathroom is smeared with fingerprints and painted dingy white, not the most flattering light. Jon wouldn’t feel like an artist without a certain amount of dinge around. I squint into the mirror, preparing my face: with my contact lenses in I’m too close to the mirror, without them I’m too far away. I’ve taken to doing these mirror things with one lens in my mouth, glassy and thin like the tag end of a lemon drop. I could choke on it by mistake, an undignified way to die. I should get bifocals. But then I’d look like an old biddy.<\/p>\n

I pull on my powder-blue sweatsuit, my disguise as a non-artist, and go down the four flights of stairs, tryiing to look brisk and purposeful. I could be a businesswoman out jogging. I could be a bank manager, on her day off. I head north, then east along Queen Street, which is another place we never used to go. It was rumored to be the haunt of grubby drunks, rubby-dubs we called them; they were said to drink rubbing alcohol and sleep in telephone booths and vomit on your shoes in the streetcar. But now it’s art galleries and bookshops, boutiques filled with black clothing and weird footgear, the saw-toothed edge of trend.<\/p>\n

I decide I’ll go and have a look at the gallery, which I have never seen because all of this has been arranged by phone and mail. I don’t intend to go in, make myself known, not yet. I just want to look at it from the outside. I’ll walk past, glance casually, pretending to be a housewife, a tourist, someone window-shopping. Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgment. I have to work up to them.<\/p>\n

But before I reach the gallery I come to a wall of plywood, concealing a demolition. On it is spray-painted, in defiance of squeaky-clean Toronto: It’s Bacon or Me, Babe<\/i>. And underneath: What Is This Bacon and Where Can I Get Some?<\/i> Beside this there’s a poster. Or not a poster, more like a flier: a violent shade of purple, with green accents and black lettering: RISLEY IN RETROSPECT, it says; just the last name, like a boy. The name is mine and so is the face, more or less. It’s the photo I sent the gallery. Except that now I have a mustache.<\/p>\n

Whoever drew this mustache knew what he was doing. Or she: nothing precludes that. It’s a curled, flowing mustache, like a cavalier’s, with a graceful goatee to match. It goes with my hair.<\/p>\n

I suppose I should be worried about this mustache. Is it just doodling, or is it political commentary, an act of aggression? Is it more like Kilroy Was Here<\/i> or more like Fuck Off<\/i>? I can remember drawing such mustaches myself, and the spite that went into them, the desire to ridicule, to deflate, and the feeling of power. It was defacing, it was taking away somebody’s face. If I were younger I’d resent it.<\/p>\n

As it is, I study the mustache and think: That looks sort of good<\/i>. The mustache is like a costume. I examine it from several angles, as if I’m considering buying one for myself. It casts a different light. I think about men and their facial hair, and the opportunities for disguise and concealment they have always at their disposal. I think about mustache-covered men, and about how naked they must feel with the thing shaved off. How diminished. A lot of people would look better in a mustache.<\/p>\n

Then, suddenly, I feel wonder. I have achieved, finally, a face that a mustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts mustaches. A public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself, something or other, after all.<\/p>\n

I wonder if Cordelia will see this poster. I wonder if she’ll recognize me, despite the mustache. Maybe she’ll come to the opening. She’ll walk through the door and I will turn, wearing black as a painter should, looking successful, holding a glass of only moderately bad wine. I won’t spill a drop.<\/p>\n