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Cat's Eye

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Cat's Eye

By: Margaret Atwood
Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
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About this listen

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 40 years.

An exceptional novel from the winner of the 2000 Booker Prize.

©1988 O. W. Toad Ltd (P)2014 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd. Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction

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Critic reviews

”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)
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there were many occasions where the editing missed out sentence fragments being duplicated, could be improved. other than that happy with the story and narration.

Great book, audio needs some more editing

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The audiobook contained several dozens of retakes by the reader, which had not been edited out. Please fix this.

Too many retakes

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This story will be resonant with so many people, so well written it held me enthralled from beginning to end.

A Story of Great Depth

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Story wonderful. Beautifully read. Editing needs attention. But i thoroughly enjoyed it never the less

Wonderful story. Beautifully read - badly edited!

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As painter I related to the mundanity of the practicalities of life juxtaposed with the imaginative life of the artist and within her, the child. Beautifully written and read.
Sadly, I become annoyed with the editing which allowed repeated text to interrupt the flow.

A Painter's Life

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I enjoyed this book. Here is Atwood exploring themes of time, change and recollection across a Canada of the 40s through the present. There's a sense of danger or malice as she describes it running through the book. It may seem sedate but there's real venom just below the surface. From childhood bullying to a reported murder to war and to hijack. Some real and some imagined.

The narration is good but as other reviews state the editing is poor and gets worse as the novel progresses. This sort of thing shouldn't impact the final published work and, if it does, should be picked up following its mention by so many reviewers.

Great book Flawed Production

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The book itself is great. But the audiobook editing is poor. At many points, the same phrases are read out more than once without the redundant take(s) being cut out.

Problematic audiobook editing

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Terrible editing, many times sentences were repeated , you can forgive once or twice but it really started to get on my nerves!

Beautifully written and narrated but!

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It may be that this book is better read than listened to. Certainly it has the acuteness of perception and comment you expect from Margaret Atwood and a density of interesting observation and explorations that pass too quickly when only heard. It is an exploration of memory and how we create our past, of bullies and victims, of time. The fifty year old, successful Elaine looks back to a childhood idyllic until her parents settle in 1940s Toronto and she is confronted by social norms and constraints she has not had to deal with before. The book is almost entirely about her childhood and an extended period of bullying lead by her 'best friend', followed by teenage years when, if roles are not exactly reversed, Elaine at least has the upper hand. We learn little about Elaine's life as an adult, as a painter; that all seems further away than her vivid rehabiting of childhood.
As has been mentioned, the editing is appalling, the worst of any audio book I've listened to, with the breaks between chapters either long, or more usually, non-existent and many sentences repeated as if a mistake has been made and not edited out.
I found the style of the reading uneven. Sometimes it was brilliant, energetic and with great inflection. Mostly, however, the voice of the reader and the tone she adopts for the book injects a kind of Plaintive melancholy to the story that I don't think is an essential part of the book and becomes tedious.
As you'd expect from Margaret Atwood, this is a very interesting book and I would recommend it highly as a read. I'm not sure that I'd recommend this reader, though, she didn't suit me.

Disappointing Reading

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I really enjoyed the story and being able to listen to it while reading it at the same time, made easier to follow the book and understand it. Though several times the voice was repeating the same sentence twice.

Good but

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