Surfacing

This is an amazing novel, which I've now read three or four times. I see more in it every time I read it. It's a double or triple mystery: the mystery of the narrator's life (she revisits her isolated childhood home on the shores of a distant Canadian lake), the mystery of her parents' lives (her father is missing, possibly dead, but what was he doing?), the mystery of the broken yet essential relationship between the narrator and her parents ... and these are only some of the mysteries that make this such a vital book. And I love the writing style, which carefully replicates how the narrator's mind thinks; like all human thinking, there is plenty of free association and non-logical [at least at first reading] jumps. Is this a challenge for a reader? No, I don't really think it is a major challenge, i.e., too difficult to follow the narrator's train of thought. But the novel rewards careful reading.

SURFACING by Margaret Atwood 2/22/04 SURFACING by Margaret Atwood is a short novel that starts out as a story of a young woman who is in search of her missing father. Taking place in a wilderness area on an island in Quebec, the main character brings with her 3 friends (a boyfriend and another couple) and the four of them live on her family's old property, now rundown and in need of a lot of love and care. While the four spend their time "roughing it", she goes about plotting on how to figure out where her father is, or whether he is still alive. This was a very difficult book for me to read. I'm going to say this straight out, that SURFACING by Margaret Atwood was a disappointment for me. Although I'm not going to give it a rating lower than 3 stars, coming from an author that I consider my favorite, it was difficult to read such a book that I found was not her best work. Some may disagree with me, but I found this book somewhat lacking, and that because this was one of her earlier novels, I felt that Atwood was still figuring out her style of writing. The attention to detail to the Canadian wilderness was wonderful, however, and I could imagine myself there with these four adults, scrounging for food and fishing for dinner. I'm having a hard time describing how I feel about this book, as I had so much hoped for something better from Atwood. I don't think any fan should dismiss this book. It is a must read, if one would like an overview of Atwood's entire literary collection. However, I would recommend that any new reader not read this book first, as it might disappoint and prevent one in picking up another Atwood book. I still find that THE BLIND ASSASSIN is by far her best novel so far, followed closely by THE HANDMAID'S TALE.

Excellent writing as usual. Atwood is a wizard when it comes to describing even the simplest things with rich visual details and gorgeous metaphors, so it's never a waste of time reading her. But the story itself was not very exciting. Not all her work needs to be as thrilling as "The Handmaid's Tale", but I expected more from the character's personal journey. The pace of the action is satisfactory and yet, the pace of the character's inner voice isn't. I did not feel engaged.

Okay, thanks to grad school, I read this. Now Atwood has been the author of the last year thanks to Handmaids Tale, and perhaps that's her better book... because this one sure ain't. I've never come away from a book just thinking "wow. that was really weird." And I get it. It was super well-written. I was convinced with the narrator's storyline (up until, ya know, that point)... but the book just felt misconstrued. It first was reading like a murder mystery, then a thriller, then it got deep. And I just didn't like it.

I bought this book early this morning. I was in the mood for Atwood. This has come to mean a very specific thing for me. I want to say dark but that's unfair to Atwood. Her works are not necessarily dark, though they do tend to tap into those types of feelings, characters. "Deep" that's a better word. Atwood for me is something deep. She has a way of burrowing into the furthest reaches of your mind, your heart, she finds the humanity that exists and brings it to the front. Surfacing is about an unnamed woman who returns to her hometown in Canada. She is searching for her father in a cabin in the woods where she was raised. She is on this journey with her lover and another married couple. As the days progress, this woman finds herself returning to nature, in every sense of that word. She becomes primal, driven mad, as she returns to this original state. It's not happy book. It's heartbreaking and beautiful. There's a purity to her madness, to this return to nature as she slowly loses her friends, her family, her memories, her sense of self. It's not a long novel at 208 pages. I finished it in a single day. Something about this novel pulled me in and I felt compelled to finish it in a day. It felt wrong to read this in anything larger than single sitting. As if I were betraying the novel, it's unnamed female protagonist. I needed to follow her on this journey, to see it to the end, to be done with it. I don't think I could ever read this work again. It's too intense, too heart-breaking. This book is definitely worth reading, but it's not for everyone. I think you have to be in the mood for something like this, you have to want to read Atwood. And unless you've read a book by her, it's difficult to explain what this means. What it means to read an Atwood story or novel. Five stars.

I would have liked to read this book over a day or two without interruption so that I could immerse myself in it. Reading it in fits and starts while I was on hold at work (I have the Kindle app downloaded to my desktop) and before bed it at night really didn't allow me to feel the growing feeling of unease and dissociation that Margaret Atwood's book conveys. Though I wouldn't call it my favorite work by Ms. Atwood (Cat's Eye wins that hands down), it's a thought provoking short novel. Surfacing follows a nameless protagonist as she returns to her childhood home on an isolated island in Quebec after the mysterious disappearance of her father. Though very little as far as action happens in the novel, the woman's experience of suddenly being immersed in a a past that she fled from slowly drives her into delusion and madness. Many of the themes, such as not fitting in with your childhood world or your current one and the societal expectations put on women, I found very relatable. I must confess that running theme of Canadian independence was beyond me. Surfacing is one woman's story of leaving home because she did not fit in, only to find the new life that she's constructed is equally foreign to her. She confesses that she does not love Joe, the man she lives with, and that her career is something she fell into. Though most of us aren't driven mad by alienation, most of us can relate to it.

I love Margaret Atwood but I haven't read a lot of her older books - this is one of her first published novels. For being such a short book, it was a pretty powerful story. Like a lot of Atwood's work, the story is simple - a woman goes to the island in Canada where she once lived with her family, to find her father, who has inexplicably disappeared - but there's so much psychological complexity that when the book is over, you feel like it was three times as long as it is. Usually what I love about Atwood is her spare, cut-to-the-bone narrative and wickedly funny observational humor, and there's not really much of that in this book, but it is a great exploration of what really causes a person to descend from the kind of avoidance self-delusion a lot of people practice on a daily basis, into a complete mental breakdown where reality and fantasy blur together.

I was forced to read this for a feminist theories class and almost fell asleep during several portions of the book, as well as our class discussion. While part of the assignment is the teacher's fault (insisting on standard English for assingments while touting this book) I really do not think anybody should have to be subjected to such a horrid arrangement. Having previously heard about Ms. Atwood's writing from numerous feminist friends who were active in the second wave, I really wanted to give her work a chance, and thus was disappointed by the style. Since we already know the protagonist is trying to sort her life out and come to grips with a past abortion, the language structure only produces a giant headache--especially for those on tight academic assignment deadlines. This book would be okay for leisiure reading, but under no circumstances should be expected reading for a two week (or less period).