I admit that there were a few moments when I actually wanted to stop reading this book. Pages with no dialogue really bore me and the continuous narration makes me skip paragraphs while searching for clues that something interesting is actually going on. If one considers the fact that this novel counts no less than 500 pages, it could be easily understood why I had the impression of wasting my time on it. But I soon discovered that the lines had something that hypnotized me, almost like the “cat’s eye” in the title, the hero’s lucky charm.
An autobiography
It is firstly the heroine’s, Elaine Risley, autobiography, which is built like a bildungsroman with few missing points. Then, it is the author’s autobiography, who lends lots of her own memories to her heroine. Elaine is an artist. Not a writer but a painter. She is mother of two girls, wife and successful painter (a lively one!). So successful that she even has a retrospective exhibition at 50. Although it makes her feel old, this is not the reason why she would rather not attend the exhibition. That is because it takes place in Toronto, city of her childhood, her teenage years and young adult years, and the place she escaped from and would never come back to.
One can realize that this period was terrifying for her. That, once in Toronto, she felt more ostracized than those who were exiled from Europe. It is obvious that most of her childhood and her teenage years she was struggling fit in, to improve, to be “the same”. Maybe this is the reason why now, at an adult age, she can’t stand any kind of labeling.
With this kind of family …
Once arriving in Toronto, in her first husband’s studio, Elaine begins her journey into her own past. Its remembrance is done at present tense and it often mingles with thoughts and feelings from the moment of the retrospective exhibition. The first things we find out are tied to her family. Her father studies insects on the field, so the family is always on the road, sleeping in tents or in camping houses, eating food from cans, heated at camp-fire. Her mother is an atypical housewife, wears pants and takes walks by herself. The elder brother collects anything, he has a deep-rooted passion for aliens, space, time and later for physics and he is the only one playing with little Elaine. The latter has not yet been baptized, she is not afraid of her parents (she has no reason to), she searches for worms and grubs under the stones with her brother and her behavior better suits a boy than an 8-year old a girl.
The age when one can forgive anything?
I was reading the other day on a blog (I ended up there by chance but I can’t remember the address) something like this: “memories from that age when by nightfall you have already forgotten friends’ wickedness”. At about that age, Elaine goes to Toronto, where her father gets a job at the University. It is obvious that she needs to fit in and part of this means having friends of the same age. One of them is Carol, to whom Elaine is pretty much an exotic person and who wonders endlessly: “You’re sleeping in these beds?”, “Is this what you’re eating?” Another one is Grace, the eldest, which the other two are desperately trying to please. However, when Cordelia shows up in the picture, the other three become some kind of slaves. Cordelia dominates them, giving them orders, being more powerful, and the girls feel accepted when she shows few tokens of kindness.
Among them, Elaine is still the weakest and she soon becomes the perfect target for her friends’ mockeries and one surely cannot understand how little girls of 10 or 11 could say or do such things. Cordelia pretends that Elaine must improve and it is because they are her true friends they always must criticize and punish her with exile from the group. She accepts everything, her personality being crushed little by little. She becomes terrified of them, starts tearing her skin off her feet and even avoids them for a while. But she continues telling herself that they are her friends and finds herself in the same situations.
<!–[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]–>
<!–[endif]–>
“-Come on, says Cordelia. Do what you’re told to.
-She doesn’t obey, says Grace.”
How long can a memory haunt you?
Humiliations become more and more diverse and when Cordelia goes too far, putting Elaine’s life in jeopardy, the latter comes back to her senses. She still fears her friends, nothing being changed. However, she finds the strength to leave them. Now free, Elaine defends herself through forgetfulness. She doesn’t forgive but she forgets, reaching a kind of pathological oblivion. Only later, in her fifties, she recalls all these happenings. Although they switch roles at a given moment, Elaine realizes that “her best friend” didn’t do more than stir some emotions that she herself felt when she was at home. And it’s at this moment that she sets herself free from the fear of Cordelia. This is why now she wishes to see her, because she is no longer a threat.
Up to the end, even though I got bored at the beginning, I found myself avidly turning the pages, “hunting” for Cordelia’s, Grace’s or Carol’s tainted appearances. I was anxious “seeing” Cordelia entering the room the night of the exhibition. I ended up closing the book amazed how a novel so boring in the beginning, well written and emphasizing the most important details though, could have taken almost an entire day to read.
Written by Raluca