Surfacing (original 1972; edition 1998)

I can never decide how I feel about Margaret Atwood's writing. I know a lot of people adore it, but to me both her style and her chosen themes are just completely repetitive. The premise of Surfacing is interesting, and I actually liked reading critical analysis of it, but I don't connect with the four main characters, and the style reminds me of so many other books I've read. For one, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. The writing is nice, dreamy, kind of poetic, but... I guess I just find Margaret Atwood emotionally distant. ( )

As a huge Atwood fan, I've really been meaning to get to her older fare, having read most of her newer novels and short fiction; I'm a bit lacking in the poetry and non-fiction departments of her work as well. Surfacing is definitely an older novel of hers, so I was very eager to get into it.

While reading Surfacing, I kept a close eye out for mentions of things that surface in a variety of ways, and I was not disappointed by this avenue of looking into the work. The word "surface" comes up several times, and as most of the action takes place near a lake, many things "surface" - the protagonist's brother and father, for one, plus fish and the like. Several things also surface metaphorically - secrets about the other couple staying at the cabin with them, latent feelings, personal secrets about the protagonist herself, jealousy, and so on. In fact, the protagonist talks about the head being separate from the body - separated by the neck - and having a life of its own. At one point in the novel, she plunges her head underwater, and I thought about the head surfacing first, then the rest of her. There's a lot of underwater, plunging, and diving going on throughout the novel too. I found my paying attention to the title to be very satisfying as I read.

However, the ending was weird. I think the protagonist was hallucinating or trying to get back to the primal or something, but it was just plain weird and inexplicable. I've run into the weird and inexplicable endings with Atwood before, and I hate feeling like I'm missing something importantly metaphorical or symbolic, which I'm certain I did here. Ah, well. Perhaps I will find a kind soul who will explain what in the Dickens was going on in the last few chapters, and then I'll feel better.

The prose was lovely throughout the book. I noticed longer sentences, almost run-ons, which were not present in Lady Oracle, my most recent Atwood read. I wondered at this as I read. The protagonist is an artist, and I posited that perhaps the style was meant to flow more around the protagonist's own artistic stylings.

In all, I appreciated the read, though I was disappointed with the ending, I have to say. It wouldn't stop me from recommending the book, however. ( )

ebook version

I didn't finish this book. It put me in a very bad state of mind, and I didn't really care about the characters. So, it didn't seem worth my time. Rather depressing and numb-feeling. I was kind of disappointed, since I love most of her other work.

It did have an interesting perspective on certain types of being numb in life. ( )

I have read a number of Margaret Atwood's books including, most recently, "Cat's Eye," which probably set me up for disappointment with this novel, one of Atwood's earliest works. In "Surfacing", the unnamed protagonist, her boyfriend, and another couple travel to a rural island in Quebec, in search of the protagonist's father, who has gone missing. The couples do not appear to know eachother well, but over the course of a week spent in the missing father's cabin, they begin to learn more about one another, though the primary character remains distant from the others, her secrets hidden and only gradually and obscurely exposed to the reader. Much of the novel is spent in flashbacks of earlier times and towards the end, the primary character appears to slip into a psychotic break, which is unexpected and confusing. Though Atwood's melodic and poetic language is apparent even in this early novel (her second, published in 1972), it only glimpses of the power of her talent, which fully emerges in her later novels such as "The Handmaid's Tale", "Cat's Eye", "Blind Assassin" and "The Robber Bride". In all, I found this novel rather bland, distant, emotionless, and confusing. I would not recommend it to anyone unless they were already Atwood fans who already knew of her ability to spin complex and entertaining narratives. ( )