Surfacing - Margaret Atwood > Reviews

Advantages: britlliant use of language and literary techniques
Disadvantages: non-linear narrative may appear challenging

...is an uterly compelling read. Surfacing traces the physical and psychological journey of it's unnamed protagonist as she begins to dissct the fabricated lies of her past on a quest to achieve self-integration. Atwood's characterisation and manipulation of language throughout the novel provides the reader with a complex, intriguing and in some places frustrating narrative, which in turn envolpes the audience, immersing them in the narrators own ... Read review

Advantages: NONE
Disadvantages: NONE

ABOUT THE BOOK: The story is about a young woman returning to her hometown for the first time in a number of years. Her friends Anna and David along with her new boyfriend Joe take her back home. David finds this an appropriate time to do some of his filming. Everything has changed, new roads and new houses. She goes to find her old friends but they haven't seen her father for years. Her mother is dead. They think she is still married but ... Read review

Advantages: Clever, Intriguing and Atmospheric
Disadvantages: Can be a little confusing.....you need to really think about it!

This is totally deserving of any and all praise. It is a literary book, full of narrative devices that demonstrate the way that the mind can become pre-occupied and obsessed and ultimately warped. Atwood's tight narrative style enhances the claustraphobic and threatening atmosphere of the story and illustrate the ways that the unnamed narrator feels trapped within her own history and her relationships both past and present. I was hooked on the story ... Read review

Advantages: Poetic, beguilining simple prose
Disadvantages: Sometimes hard to fathom but stick with it

Surfacing Atwood has a way with prose. A simple journey undertaken by a nameless girl and three friends to a wood cabin in northern Quebec to investigate her father's disappearance becomes a tight verbal search for the self, for something lost, for something known, for something un-recapturable. Surfacing is, it has to be said, a non-linear text, but don't let that put you off, annointed as its supposedly simple story is with ironies and layers: ... Read review