While certainly not my favorite Atwood tale (that title goes to The Handmaid's Tale, this was a wonderfully beautiful, dark story of a woman trying to figure out who she is and why. How X is able to delve into her past, figuring out why she has become who she is, with little attachment to relationships is a story that most women have experienced, on at least some level. No, not every woman is faced with the pain that X has had to face, or the desire to simply leave everything behind, but I would bet that in each of our lives, we have had a need to become a detective to figure out our own life.

This is a novel that needs to be read on various levels. An understanding that it is an exploration of X's mind and memories - and how they affect her current situations, along with being an exploration of X's current life and her needs to become someone knew, defined by herself as opposed to all those around her, is necessary to getting anything out of the work. It is not a straight time-line story, nor is any of our lives. We all fluctuate between the present and the past, trying to figure out how the past has impacted our present.

Atwood does an admirable job of writing this process out, in my opinion. ( )

I don't know what to say about this book other than that I found it beautiful. Margaret Atwood knows people, and all their messed-up ways; the ones in here are often annoying, but always people you know-- probably because you could become them very easily. Or at least that's what you fear. How do we become complicit in terrible things? One of many questions Atwood tackles here, though on a much smaller scale than in The Handmaid's Tale. I could read her all day; every sentence is a gem.

I have been trying to get a hold of more of Atwood's books, as I really enjoyed The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid's Tale and The Edible Woman. This one did not grab me as much, it is very dark in comparison to some of her others. X returns to her childhood home in a remote area of Canada after receiving notice that her father has gone missing. She goes with her boyfriend and 2 other friends. She hasn't had much contact with her family since she's left, and also she has left behind a husband and a child. A tough book at times, but a voyage of discovery for her unnamed main character. ( )

It's been a very long time since I read this, but I loved it, as I love all her earlier works. It's first on my reread list! The problem is the 180 to-read books on my list. ( )

Abortion, divorce, environmentalism, Canadian-American relationships, sexism – oh my! This list of difficult issues is tackled in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, which is about a woman who searches for her lost father in northern Quebec, along with her boyfriend (Joe) and a married couple (David and Anna). These subjects may seem a bit overwhelming for one novel, but Surfacing handles these issues (and more) very well. The unnamed narrator is deeply affected by these problems of twentieth-century society, and the novel’s messages are not lost on a twenty-first century reader.
I don’t know how good of a strategy this is, but when I read novels, I like to be able to say to myself that ‘character X is a good/bad person’. I just find that the characters are typically more memorable when I can label them according to how their morals and intentions compare to my values. It was easy for me to do this with characters like David (who I found despicable, yet entertaining), and Anna (who I felt sorry for, while I also wanted to knock some sense into her). The reader feels like he or she knows where David and Anna are coming from, even though the novel is a first-person narrative.
On the other hand, Atwood skilfully kept Joe, and his relationship with the narrator, a little mysterious. Joe’s intentions were never clear, and the narrator kept waiting for him to physically hurt her, but he never did. Although such vagueness about an important character would normally annoy me, I enjoyed the vagueness of Joe. The first-person narration means that every insight about Joe depicts the narrator’s numbness to love. Atwood uses Joe as a vehicle for the reader to learn about the narrator, and Joe never really becomes more than ‘the narrator’s boyfriend’, but he does play a major role in the narrator’s transformation.
One aspect of the novel that I thought was very interesting was the Canadian view of Americans. Atwood seems to have grasped the love/hate relationship that Canadians feel towards our neighbours to the south. With the huge differences in population size, it is understandable that Canadians feel threatened by American society, and are therefore critical of it. In Surfacing, Americans are represented as polluting, careless killers who will do anything to get what they want: “Are the Americans worse than Hitler?” (129). David is especially vocal about his distaste for Americans, calling them things like “rotten capitalist bastards” (12). But, the irony in David’s character is how much he is actually like the Americans he hates so much. Besides the fact that he loves baseball (the American past-time), he seems to treat his wife Anna the same way the Americans abuse the Canadian environment; they take advantage of it for their own leisure without regard for the damage they are causing.
Many people would probably call Surfacing a feminist novel, but I think that Atwood gets even deeper than that. She seems to be commenting on what it means to be human, not just a female human. This comes from the narrator’s understanding of nature, which I would say is the main reason to read this novel. The narrator does not accept the roles for women in society, but she does not seem to accept society in general, either. Having grown up in northern Quebec, the narrator connects to the natural world better than any city or suburban person ever can. It is this connection that makes her critical of people’s place in the world, which is seen in her views on animals, surviving in the woods, and environmental exploitation. The narrator’s insight may make you want to pack just the essentials, and head off into the wilderness!
Overall, Surfacing is a psychological exploration of a woman’s search for her place in the world. While the serious issues in this novel are not too heavy, they will make the reader go into deep thought about the major problems presented. I have heard that Atwood’s newer works are much better than her earlier stuff. I don’t know if that means people typically do not enjoy Surfacing or they just really love her later works, but in my case, I know I will definitely be checking out more titles by Atwood since I really enjoyed Surfacing. How could her writing get better? ( )