“From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.”
The premise of Surfacing is simple: a young woman returns to her childhood home — a cabin in the woods of Canada — to find her father, who has gone missing. For moral support, she brings along her boyfriend and two friends, a husband and wife. Her boyfriend and the male friend are concurrently filming scenes for series of random images they plan to create. The girl’s friends have never been out in the backwoods like this, so they spend a lot of time hiking, fishing, as well as fighting and complaining.
Like most Atwood novels, however, there’s a lot more going on here. The narrator, whose name we never learn, has a lot of dissatisfaction brewing in her life. She’s recently recovering from a divorce and a child. Returning to her old home brings up a lot of old feelings, specifically about how she was treated by the other kids in school.
What I love about Atwood’s writing style is there’s generally very little plot to move the story forward. There’s no drive in this novel to solve the mystery of the narrator’s father’s disappearance. Instead, we’re treated to a couple hundred pages of a young woman thinking about her life and herself, and how that fits into the lives of those around her. It’s more like a character study than a story.
Atwood is a very feminist writer, and she was one of the first of that kind. This is an older novel — 1972 — and it is full of feminist themes as well as tension between Canadians and Americans. I cannot relate much to the Canadian nationalism that one character fervently displays, but Atwood’s feminist musings will never go out of style for me — they are all easy to relate to and learn from.
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