Cat's Eye

When artist Elaine Risley returns to Toronto for a retrospective exhibit, she faces more than the ramifications of her professional career; the city is haunted by the ghosts of her past. When not working on the show, Elaine reflects on her difficult childhood, recalling it from both an adult perspective and that of the girl she was. Narrator Kimberly Farr gives the mature woman a slightly jaded, sometimes nostalgic tone, perfect for the artist who is coping with the unexpected results of fame. When the story shifts in time, Farr adjusts her inflections to reflect the innocent 8-year-old Elaine, who becomes hardened after a friend's betrayal and, later, after a failed first marriage. Listeners appreciate these aural cues as Elaine combs her memories for the keys to self-understanding. C.B.L. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

January 1, 1989
Herself the daughter of a Canadian forest entomologist, Atwood writes in an autobiographical vein about Elaine Risley, a middle-aged Canadian painter (and daughter of a forest entomologist) who is thrust into an extended reconsideration of her past while attending a retrospective show of her work in Toronto, a city she had fled years earlier in order to leave behind painful memories. Most pointedly, Risley reflects on the strangeness of her long relations with Cordelia, a childhood friend whose cruelties, dealt lavishly to Risley, helped hone her awareness of our inveterate appetite for destruction even while we love, and are understood as characteristically femininea betrayal of other women that masks a ferocious betrayal of oneself. Atwood's portrayal of the friendship gives the novel its fraught and mysterious center, but her critical assessment of Cordelia and the ``whole world of girls and their doings'' also takes the measure of a coercive, conformist society (not quite as extreme as in the futuristic The Handmaid's Tale ). Emerging ``the stronger'' for her latecoming understanding of herself, Risley in the final pages rises above the ties that bound her, transcendently alive to the possibilities of ``light, shining out in the midst of nothing.'' BOMC main selection.