Surfacing: Margaret Atwood

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The novel, grappling with notions of national and gendered identity, anticipated rising concerns about conservation and preservation and the emergence of Canadian nationalism. [2] It was adapted into a movie in 1981.

Our unnamed female narrator brings her lover and their two (married) friends to her childhood lakeside cabin in the woods for a brief getaway from life and for the two men to capture some footage for the amateur film they are producing. She hides her true intentions of returning to this familiar lake however. She is trying to find her father. Long missing, our narrator does not presume him dead but instead believes that he is still alive and living by the lake. The whole novel is essentially our narrator's internal monologue throughout this strange week by the lake.The narrator believes her parents would not have approved of her life after she left home. Frequently, she recalls scenes from her marriage and divorce, and she slowly begins to admit to herself that much of what she wants to imagine about her recent years is false. There was no wedding; the scene she has in her memory is actually of the time her already married lover sent her to have an abortion. What her current lover, Joe, admires as her calmness she considers her numbness, an inability to feel. This book is way too I-hate-God and Single-Cell-Organisms-Rule for me. I love Nature, but I can't even begin to tell you how much I DON'T want to return to my primitive state of a pile of mud. Feminism, a theme in many of Atwood's novels, is explored through the perspective of the female narrative, exposing the ways women are marginalized in their professional and private lives. [6] Allusions to other works [ edit ] Joe asks if there is any news of her father and she says no in a calm, level tone. Maybe that is what he likes about her—her cool demeanor. She cannot remember much about their first meeting except it was in a corner store and then they went and had coffee. He told her later he liked how she took off and put on her clothes like she had no emotion, but she secretly thought to herself that she really didn’t have any.

Paul’s wife is referred to as “Madame” in the story. She was somewhat friendly with the narrator’s mother since their husbands were friends. However, since the narrator’s mother was an English speaker and Madame was a French speaker, the language barrier seems to have prevented a close friendship. The Narrator's Father Through the protagonist, Atwood examines the destructive nature of human beings, against each other and the other living creatures they have to share spaces with. In such vivid prose she transports the reader to a Canadian lake surrounded by woods. What was different this time around was I had a better idea of the time in which it was set, what it might have been like for a woman then. As well, having spent 8 years living in Quebec, I know first hand the prejudices and tensions between English and French. I've also read a hell of a lot more contemporary literary fiction, and, yep, this one still stands up. Magnificently.Claude tells them they can hire Evans to take them out to the cabin. Paul would take them for free, she knows, but she does not want him to misinterpret the men’s longish hair and beards and think they are trouble.

Anna often feels victimized by David, who is condescending and bullying towards her, and they have both had extramarital affairs. She must adhere to David’s rules, such as always wearing makeup and having him treat her like an idiot or a child. Yet despite all this, Anna still takes David’s side throughout the story and cannot fathom actually leaving him. She in turn is condescending toward the narrator during their trip, tarnishing their friendship. David and then (with the always satisfying visceral, gritty Atwood detail; also, read it aloud and hear the SOUND of the words--another element of the poetry): Stumble along the hall, from flower to flower, her criminal hand on my elbow, other arm against the wall. Ring on my finger. It was all real enough, it was enough reality for ever, I couldn't accept it, that mutilation, ruin I'd made, I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best way I could, flattening it, scrapbook, collage, pasting over the wrong parts. A faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I'd lived in it until now. Margaret Atwood's writing is so vivid, and so clear-eyed in looking at people and their intentions and limitations. This book is somewhat an artifact of its time - I immediately guessed it had been written in the early 1970's - but it is also timeless in many ways. It is also a compelling read, something I needed after struggling with a couple of the books I am "actively" reading; Atwood's prose never disappoints, and her cutting insights about human nature are witty and unsparing.And in case this sounds idyllic to any of you compost-your-own-waste types, it's not. It's agony. As far as this reader can tell, Mom was a distant/aloof type and Dad was occasionally cool but waaay out there in his thinking. Neither parent supported the natural social growth or adolescent curiosity of their offspring, and when the kids went to school in the city during the winters, they suffered as the subjects of a cruel scrutiny and social disdain. The others are surprised by the remoteness of this place but it is not weird to the narrator. She looks around for something like a note or a will but there is nothing; it does not seem like a house that has been lived in. She lights a fire and grabs a knife to go to the garden. They stay in her father's very rustic cabin while she searches for him. And tensions mount. There is a constricting malevolence present; there are eyes that seem to be watching, a predatory atmosphere. What should be an idyllic week of camping in the woods, is ... not. Though this book definitely has environmental themes, it isn't described in Wordsworthian swoon-inducing curlicues. In fact, what with the leeches, the rotting bird carcass, the entrails, et al, nature isn't something to mess with. It isn't just individual men that alienate and oppress women like the narrator. It's society itself. In this patriarchal society, exploitation becomes a natural fact of life. Take David's camera: he spends the entire trip capturing film that demeans and objectifies women and Nature alike. He takes videos of a dead heron hanging from a tree and intends to use them to further his own agenda instead of honoring the bird's life. Likewise, he pressures Anna to strip for the sake of the film, verbally abusing her until she does. Anna immediately regrets giving in to her husband's demands, as he plans to objectify and exploit her body in his film.

I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place That story appealed to me for so many reasons: I was on very familiar territory with her setting and her nameless main character's deep need to escape it. I was amused by the way her city friends find the small, run down village to be cute and authentic when the people living in it would have rather been anywhere than there. But city people and country-side people always treat the other like zoo animals... I underlined many interesting reflections on social awkwardness, and the struggle of the introverts and how little the behavioral expectations of women and children have changed in the last forty years. Ms. Atwood doesn't miss much, does she?A character who never appears in person. The narrator’s brother fled from his parents years before the novel takes place. The narrator finds it difficult to imagine him as an adult. He nearly drowned as a child, and the narrator constantly reflects on the image of his drowning. He was loving toward his sister, but he had a rather dark childhood. He kept a laboratory on the island, running experiments on animals in jars. The “Fake Husband” In her search for her father our narrator comes face to face with her own demons and it's not a pretty picture.