Surfacing: Margaret Atwood

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Surfacing: Margaret Atwood

Surfacing: Margaret Atwood

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Description

The quiet, shy, well-meaning boyfriend of the narrator. Joe is an unsuccessful artist who makes ugly pottery and teaches pottery classes. Joe remains too simple-minded to understand the narrator’s complexities. He insists on marrying the narrator, which she resists. Joe is a good man, but he is also potentially violent. 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. The prot’s father has disappeared and that is why they go to the remote cabin. They think he had gone feral . The situation could be like Man Thing, which is a manga I have read, but it is not, as the Prot’s father does not became a Man Thing. I was thinking that if the father did become a Man Thing he would be waiting in the woods and catch them and rip them up to make more Man Things, but this does not happen.

Here are some of my favourite bits - spoilers because they mark essential revelations (I would call them plot points, but let's face it, plot is a little too generous a concept). These mark the most Atwoodian use of language: poetic and suggestive, more than descriptive or concrete. They rely on the reader having read carefully to that point; and then they deliver with a gut-punch of comprehension that belies the abstract, disembodied words and images themselves. Read these at the risk of potentially dulling their impact if you're going to read or re-read this novel: The narrator's greatest conflict comes from feeling alienated from her patriarchal society, which emphasizes the role of men over that of women. She even feels isolated from her boyfriend, who she can't decide if she loves or trusts, and her friends, who she realizes she knows nothing about. The narrator almost feels like she's an outsider looking into a world she doesn't understand or want to be a part of. The more time she spends with her friends, the more she realizes marriage—and life inside the patriarchy in general—terrifies her. 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. Unnamed Protagonist is a woodsy gal, not necessarily by choice, but by a plan of her father's making. She and her brother were raised by their bizarre parents on a remote island surrounded by a remote village somewhere in a remote and very Catholic corner of Quebec.She appears to delve further into madness after being left alone on the island, having kept so many of her emotions bottled up over the years. Anna The woman feels anesthetized. She can describe her surroundings vividly, but they evoke little emotion in her. The remoteness and loneliness of the wilderness mirrors her inner reality. She talks about a husband and child, but they have never existed. The reality was that a man she loved abandoned her, after coercing her into an unwanted abortion. Commercial art, her profession, now seems a prostitution of talent. She calls herself an escape artist.

Joe is the narrator’s boyfriend. A veteran of the Vietnam War, he works as a pottery teacher to supplement his income while working on his personal pottery, which the narrator finds ugly. He is surly and gloomy and doesn’t verbalize his emotions, barely speaking much at all. Surfacing has always been my tied-for-least-favorite-with- Alias-Grace Atwood novel, and unfortunately, this reread didn't change my mind.

Analysis

So, if you happen to know the general plot of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, you can understand, with confidence, that I have very little in common with the Unnamed Protagonist. We both might have had unusual parents, but the commonalities stop there. Atwood's previous novel, The Edible Woman, dealt with a young woman who is so terrified of marriage that it causes her to lose her touch with reality and fall deeper and deeper into mental illness. It was a good novel but its biggest weakness was its plot. In Surfacing, Atwood treads much of the same ground but completely jettisons any semblance of a plot and thus presents us with a far more intriguing and mature work. Soon after, David approaches the narrator and tries to seduce her, stating that Anna and Joe are having an affair. The narrator does not give in to his advances. When Anna hears of the narrator’s rejection of David, it causes her to feel guilty and she is cruel to the narrator instead of her husband. The friends’ relationships remain frayed. Anna’s makeup, which David demands she wear at all times, represents the large-scale subjugation of women. The narrator compares Anna to a doll when she sees her putting on makeup, because Anna becomes David’s sexual plaything. At the same time, makeup represents female deception. Anna uses makeup as a veneer of beauty, and the behavior is representative of the way she acts virtuous (but sleeps with other men) and happy (but feels miserable). Makeup goes completely against the narrator’s ideal of a natural woman. The narrator calls herself a natural woman directly after her madness, when she looks in a mirror and sees herself naked and completely disheveled. The narrator comments that Anna uses makeup to emulate a corrupt womanly ideal. The Ring

The narrator is trying to resolve issues with her dead mother and missing father, her boyfriend, her ex-husband and their child she left behind, a former lover, the natural world, and whether she wants to be a wife, mother, artist or even an ordinary human. 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. When David tries to convince the narrator to have sex with him, he tells her Joe and Anna are having sex. What does that tell you about David's relationship with sex? What about to other characters? Anna 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? 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 ]In The Evil Dead these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods and they release evil spirits that want to kill them etc. In Cabin Fever these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods and catch a flesh eating disease and die and go mad, etc. In The Cabin in the Woods these kids go and stay in a remote cabin way out in the woods where a zombie army tries to kills them etc. Now these are movies but in Surfacing, which is a book, these kids go and stay in a remote cabin out in the woods but the big difference is there are no zombies and flesh eating bugs and evil spirits at all all though are they. It is a profound question. The central protagonist is a woman in her late twenties. She is unnamed and the narrator of the story. She is searching for her missing father, who had been residing on an island in a lake in northern Quebec. She travels there with a lover and another wed couple. It is on this island that she herself grew up. Returning there, leads her to reexamine her life.

David does not show much respect toward women. He is condescending to both his wife and the narrator and tends to only ever give consideration to his own wants and needs. He has openly been unfaithful to his wife, and continually makes sexual innuendos toward the narrator in front of his wife. He is extremely bullying and controlling toward his wife, often making negative comments about her weight and her intelligence. Although he sees himself as the obvious leader of the group, the narrator does not actually hold him in any high regard—though, ironically, she does see him as the closest in personality to herself. Joe 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. This man is not actually the narrator's husband; rather, he was her art professor and a married father she had an affair with. At his urging, she had an abortion when she became pregnant. The Narrator's Brother The narrator is glad the others are with her because if she were alone the vacancy and the loneliness would overtake her. David starts to talk about the dead animals this country was built on and Anna chastises him for lecturing and tells him they aren’t his students. She strokes his face lovingly and the narrator wonders what their secret is. They have been married nine years and the narrator remembers how when she got married her husband changed and started expecting things from her.

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): The novel could be classified as a psychological thriller, and as such it does not appeal to me. It is intended that the reader be confused. Repeatedly pronouns are used in an ambiguous fashion; often whom they refer to is not clear. The reader is to be kept guessing. We are to be tantalized by the mystery. We are meant to be left in the dark but egged on to search for understanding. I prefer writing that is clear. I don’t like guessing games.



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