title: Surfacing by: Atwood, Margaret published: 1972 read: 2021-06 preview

An earlier Atwood novel, describing how a young woman travels back to her disappeared dad’s cottage, somewhere at a Canadian lake. It is summer, it’s a nordic setting: clear water, cottages, insects. Her goal is to come to terms with her disappeared father, and perhaps find out where he went.

She visits his cottage with three friends; her boyfriend Joe, and a married couple, their friends Anna and David. They are all in their late twenties. With a lot of sexual tension between the four, and not all of it healthy and pleasant. Yet the main character, who remains unnamed, remains on top of the whole situation.

She is fighting for her freedom: free from her father’s legacy; from her boyfriend; from society.  And wins, in a certain way.  Her strength is unparalleled, her determinedness unwavering.  And goes “over dead bodies”, so to speak.

Delving deeper into her memories, and using the nature around her to do so, she undergoes a profound transformation. She begins to reject modern society’s values and becomes increasingly detached from her friends. This climaxes in a symbolic and literal return to nature, where she strips away the layers of her former self and takes on a more primal identity.

If you’d want to analyse the book, “Surfacing” works with identity, memory, and the relationship between humans and nature. It focusses on the struggle to reconcile past traumas with the present and the possibility of finding a new sense of self through nature.

But I just admired the main character, and of course through that, the author.