Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Surfacing
    Surfacing
    Surfacing
    Ebook234 pages4 hours

    Surfacing

    By Margaret Atwood

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale—now an Emmy Award-winning Hulu original series—and Alias Grace, now a Netflix original series.

    Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateMar 27, 2012
    ISBN9781451686883
    Surfacing
    Author

    Margaret Atwood

    Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of over fifty books, including fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning television series, her works include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-Seed; The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for the Giller Prize; and the poetry collection Dearly. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in Great Britain for her services to literature. She lives in Toronto.

    Read more from Margaret Atwood

    Related to Surfacing

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Not Everything Turns to Gold

      Oct 2, 2018

      Theodore Roosevelt once said, “When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West.” The Rough Rider’s koan has been widely viewed as a celebration of the limitless California adventure, but it’s also a reminder of the dizzying, vert

      4 min read

    • Article

      Ben Okri

      Apr 25, 2022

      Ben Okri
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Susan Straight

      Dec 23, 2019

      I live in a place where all our stories are told in the park, in the truck, in the yard, on the porch, at the baseball diamond, or in the bar. The post A Year in Reading: Susan Straight appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 245

      Dec 15, 2019

      The Art of Fiction No. 245
      42 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Space for Bette Howland

      May 6, 2019

      A Space for Bette Howland
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • Article

      Allan Gurganus

      Mar 9, 2021

      Allan Gurganus
      30 min read

    • Article

      The Living Days

      Nov 4, 2019

      The Living Days
      9 min read

    • Article

      Allegiance

      Nov 6, 2023

      Allegiance
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Inherited Imagination

      Aug 18, 2020

      The Inherited Imagination
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Rare and Beautiful Creature: On the Life and Work of Frank Stanford

      Sep 22, 2017

      It seems fair to suggest that the anxiety of influence—a creative necessity for so many poets—may have failed to penetrate the mobile-homed hamlets where Stanford roamed, rambled, mused, and wrote with prolific intensity. The post A Rare and Beautifu

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘In the Country of Women’: Featured Nonfiction from Susan Straight

      Nov 19, 2019

      In our latest edition of featured nonfiction, we present an excerpt from National Book Award finalist Susan Straight’s new novel, In the Country of Women, out now from Catapult. The post ‘In the Country of Women’: Featured Nonfiction from Susan Strai

      8 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Paul Theroux: ‘Writing Is A Blood Sport. One Does Have Differences With People’

      Oct 2, 2022

      In an ideal world – by which I mean one that lives up to my most energetic fantasies – Paul Theroux and I would be meeting in some far flung and exotic place: on an empty platform in a distant railway station, or under a date palm in a dried-up deser

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Home Stretch

      Sep 24, 2021

      The Home Stretch
      6 min read

    • Article

      At The Bend Of The Road

      Jul 20, 2021

      At The Bend Of The Road
      18 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Surfacing

    3.5/5

    1,015 ratings58 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Atwood wrote this book in 1971 probably (since it was first published in 1972) at which time I was slogging my way through first year university. And I have to confess that it was quite some time before I started reading her writing. The first book that made an impact on me was The Handmaid's Tale which was published in 1985. I've read almost everything she has written since then and read quite a few of the earlier novels. Somehow this one always escaped my attention. When I ran out of reading material on a camping trip and had to find something else to read from the fabulous USB Poor Michael's in Onanole MB, this seemed like the time to remedy that void. Turns out to be quite appropriate to read it while communing with nature right before Canada Day.A woman (who remains unnamed throughout the book) makes a trip from the city to the remote Quebec lake where she spent her youth. With her is her boyfriend Joe and a married couple, David and Anna. She is back to search for her father, a naturalist who has been living in a cabin on an island. Paul, a friend of his, found the cabin uninhabited and unlocked and wrote to the daughter. While she searches for her father she also undergoes a psychological journey. Her companions are not very helpful in either quest. David is more concerned with the American encroachment on Canada; Anna is desperately trying to retain a youthful appearance so David will continue to stay with her; Joe, well Joe is a man of few words so it is hard to say what he is thinking but he does ask our heroine to marry him so probably he is thinking about that. When the news comes that the father's body has been found in the lake by some American fisherman our heroine has a psychological meltdown. After a few days of wandering in the woods with only a blanket for covering and no food she vanquishes the demons (which she calls gods) and prepares to return to civilization. This latter period seems so much like a vision quest on which native peoples engage. There are other references to native spirituality and lifestyle. We hear about these things often now but, as far as I can remember, in the early 1970s these would have been extremely uncommon. That's just one example of how long Atwood has been exploring themes she has developed over the years. Concern for the environment and animal welfare are also referenced; again, these were not high in the public consciousness.This will never be my favourite Atwood but it is interesting in terms of seeing how early she was writing about themes which she has continued to explore throughout her long writing career.
    • 4/5
      Always down for a descent into madness. Sometimes it's the only way through.
    • 2/5
      "Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by results."'Surfacing' centres on a young divorcée who returns to her remote childhood island home in the Quebec wilderness to uncover the truth about the mysterious disappearance of her father, (her mother has already died), with her boyfriend and two friends. She initially believes that her father is alive and merely in hiding but she gradually becomes convinced that he has drowned in the lake attempting to uncover some ancient cave paintings. All the while childhood memories, grief and the landscape are exerting ever stronger influences as she gradually descends into madness - or perhaps mysticism. From a very young age Atwood accompanied her family and zoologist father on research trips into the Quebec wilderness so is very familiar with the novel's environ. Therefore her portrayal of it is very evocative, you can almost feel the island's wildness and isolation. In fact that it was the human characters that let this novel down. Her two friends seem such a particularly obnoxious couple that you wonder quite why anyone would want to spend any time at all with them in a city let alone an isolated location. Her boyfriend initially seems the strong, silent dependable type but when our heroine refuses his marriage proposal he goes off in a hissy fit and sleeps with the other woman. The title of this book seems to allude to the 'Surfacing' of long buried memories and traumas but quite frankly the final few chapters totally lost and baffled me. The unnamed heroine seems to have been intended as some sort of visionary feminist whose body was in tune with nature and to ".... above all, to refuse to be a victim," but perhaps this is too simplistic. Perhaps maybe she is meant to embody what it means to be human when we are stripped of our outer layers and are deprived of social contact. Whichever it may be I'm not totally convinced that it works. This was a book with so much potential but fails to live up to it. Then maybe it could just be me, so read it yourself and make your own mind up.
    • 3/5
      Linguistically, this novel was fantastic. Atwood's prose is wonderful; her strange metaphors and similes never ceased to amaze me. However, other than the language, I didn't come away from this novel with much. The story line was barely interesting, and the characters were irritating. I'm certain that in two years, I will have forgotten what this book was even about.
    • 3/5
      Another holiday read for me, but I would not want to go on holiday with any of the protagonists in this book. This is in essence a back to nature fable - a young woman strives to strip away layers of civilisation in an attempt to communicate with her estranged father.Written in the first person by a young woman who travels to a remote part of Quebec in search of her father who has been reported missing. She is accompanied by her boyfriend Joe and a couple of married friends Anne and David. Joe and David have hired some movie equipment and want to make a cinema verite film of their experiences. The young woman (who is never named) teaches her friends basic skills for living in a remote part of the country: her fathers dwelling place is a wooden shack on an island in the middle of a lake with no electricity. The young woman’s search leads her away from her friends and we see them through her eyes as she quickly becomes remote from their city-like culture and life style.The missing father has been involved in his own search for evidence of a missing Indian culture around the lakes and the young woman seems to want to step into his shoes to track down what happened to him. Meetings with rich American vacationers/hunters on the lake upset everybody and the book has a particular Canadian anti-American feel to it. David spouts anti-capitalist dogma at every opportunity, when he isn’t being mean to his wife Anna. Joe proposes marriage to the young woman but by this time she really does not want to have anything much to do with the other three. She retreats into her own world and rapidly goes insane. The young woman’s descent into madness; happening so quickly is far from convincing and while the first part of the novel has a certain atmosphere of suspense in that the reader feels that something is about to happen as people are unravelling on the trip, it plunges into a denouement that is surprising and just not believable. This is an early novel by Margaret Atwood written in a style of short sharp sentences that do give the book a realist feel, but I felt that there was something missing in the core of this novel. I have yet to be convinced by Atwood and so three stars for this.
    • 4/5
      It was a very good book, it warmed up to a very strange but wonderfully written climax. I'll admit that I did get lost in places, but I think that was my own lack of concentration than anything. I liked the discussion of abortion, mainly because I wasn't expecting it & because it was so honest, although it was very brief as its not a main feature of the story. But I liked the powerful feminist voice in her writing, especially how very of the time of writing it sounded - its interesting to see how things have developed even over such a short amount of time, & also to see just how they haven't.
    • 5/5
      Every time I read Atwood, I am struck by how different she is. I love that I can come to a book and know that I'm in for something good - but not something rehashed. Margaret Atwood doesn't do formula - each book is it's own creation, different from what's come before and not simply a taste of what's to come. This is a slim little novel, speeds by until the last 20 pages or so - and at that point it becomes much more... muddy. For good reason, which I won't share here, since it's worth reading on your own. Overall, it's not a happy novel. Partly it's about facades, how people act one way but feel another. It's about cruelty, emotional and otherwise, lashing out when we feel pain. It's about discovering yourselves, crumbling under traumas. A good little book, 4.5 stars I'd say.
    • 3/5
      This is an interesting, though strange, tale. It tells of a foursome taking a trip to upper Canada to look for the father of one of them. The family home is a cabin on an island, with no power, no phone, etc., and the father has been missing for some time. It is set in the early 70s, so is a bit dated, but not too much. The descriptions of the setting are wonderful, and the interaction between the four is interesting. Late in the book, the narrator goes off her rocker, though, and it gets a bit strange. And then she straightens up and all is well. It's hard to describe. Atwood is an able story teller; although this is not her best work, it is certainly worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Linguistically, this novel was fantastic. Atwood's prose is wonderful; her strange metaphors and similes never ceased to amaze me. However, other than the language, I didn't come away from this novel with much. The story line was barely interesting, and the characters were irritating. I'm certain that in two years, I will have forgotten what this book was even about.
    • 4/5
      I found the earlier parts of this book realistic and haunting, something that many readers seem to share. The mystery of the disappearance of the protagonist's father and the dynamics of the personal relationships keep this book humming along. In the end I found it surrealist and very strangely compelling. Overall the book continues in a dreamlike, haunting manner, even after the strong change in the narrative. I continue to think about it months later. Not like much of the other Atwood I've read, but it still has that stamp of weird.
    • 2/5
      What is this? I have read several Atwood novels and short stories, and I found myself cringing throughout the first ten pages of this novel, ten pages in which I found five typos. Whoa.

      What happened here? I realize it was an early work and clearly her writing and tone improved rapidly, but there wasn't a lot of redemption in this work, for me. I wanted to find some trace of Atwood's genius as I continued, but I just felt more and more as if I were in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Sure, the descriptions are still lovely, and there are the quirks and feminism tropes found in all her stories, but it just didn't bring the novel together for me. Just because she is one of the greatest novels of the past fifty years, does not make one lower-grade book any more noteworthy. Not recommended.
    • 3/5
      STRANGE....easiest way to describe it.The nameless character goes back to her childhood home on a remote island looking for her father....she brings all kinds of emotions and "hangups" with her.She spends little over a week with her boyfriend and another couple...they all start getting on each other's nerves. When it is time to leave, the nameless heroine hides and doesn't go with them....even stranger things happen when she is there alone.While there with her friends, she is constantly worrying that her widowed father will return and be enraged that there are people in his home. She finds things from her childhood while in the house and things that make her think about feelings and obligations.She seems to be looking for answers about her life then and now. It has excellent character descriptions and descriptions of feelings.....it takes a few pages to get you interested, and it is a deep, thoughtful book with a lot more "underneath" that comes out - must be why it is called surfacing?
    • 5/5
      Pure Atwood. A treat to the brain and inner eye. Savor the word choices and pictures. Read it again. Enjoy. Think. Use it if you can.
    • 3/5
      The story is compelling. Good job writer! If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed reading your book. I read enthusiastically and understood the story. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top
    • 3/5
      This is an early novel by Atwood. The unnamed protagonist is grabbling with identity and Canada is grappling with national identify. The book was published in 1972. There is many references to the war and it felt like the references were to WWII and not Vietnam but it isn't clear. There is also a theme of aloneness. The protagonist never fit in, being raised in the wilderness without the amenities of civilization. She never connected with people. This is a trip back home with friends (married couple) and her lover. She is going to find her father who has been missing. The protagonist ends up submerging herself in madness. The book has also a strong feminism theme.
    • 5/5
      I was prepared to dash through this short novel but quickly realized I ought to slow down, then slower still, one chapter per day. It is tightly woven like a short story, without the extraneous bits, full of great descriptions ('cow-sprinkled hills ... cuttings dynamited in pink and grey granite'). I'm more familiar with Ontario than Quebec, but I know this backcountry with its lakes and mist, its quiet woods and islands. Atwood fully convinces me that she knows it too.There are two mysteries in play, the surface action and also a deeper psychological story. A woman's father who lives alone in his island cottage goes mysteriously missing. After being notified, she rounds up her boyfriend and some friends to transport her, so she can look for clues. At the same time, the reader is left to wonder why she's bothering. She displays no particular attachment to her father in her first-person narrative - nor to her boyfriend, or to her shallow friends, nor is she triggered by nostalgia during this trip back to her childhood stomping grounds (it was never her home, she keeps telling us.) She isn't attached to anything, or anyone. References to drowning creep in, to being underwater. I'm of two minds about stories that delve into different realms of logic where I can't follow, but there's something satisfying in how it's managed here. Before you can surface you must first submerge, to the only place where you can find the answers you seek.
    • 3/5
      A harrowing ride into the eye of the main character's psychotic mind. Not an easy read for me just because Atwood's character seems to slide in and out of reality a bit too easily for me. I suppose that's the point though, eh? Like the character, we find ourselves asking "what is real."
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book by Atwood a lot more than The Handmaid's Tale. The characters seemed very realistic to me and the plot had a lot of depth and leaves a lot for reflection. It also covered issues of environmental, political and national. I found it very entertaining but also very complex at the same time. I would classify it as a must read.
    • 4/5
      I can see why people find this book challenging but I loved it. It felt authentic and was so compelling even as the narrator devolves into an animal state. I felt a visceral disgust for the men she is around in the book which made me ready for the ending that others found unexpected. A challenging, unusual read, but well worth the time. Another great Atwood.
    • 3/5
      An odd but fascinating book which blends mystery with character study. Atwood's early work focuses a lot on gender politics between straight women and men, and this book delves into the uneasy lines which blue between the two couples here.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book, but I can see how not everyone will enjoy it. Describing it as "part detective novel, part psychological thriller" feels like a stretch and doesn't capture the essence of the story. This book is a journey. It's the main character figuring out life. It isn't necessarily the events that take place; it's more about the character's mindset as she tries to put her life together.Having said that, I really enjoyed this book. The writing is amazing as always with Atwood and the descriptions really get you thinking. The first person narrative has you questioning what is real and the bias of one's own experience. Beautiful, beautiful work. A thought-provoking puzzle that holds you to the end.
    • 4/5
      The first person narrator, who never tells us her name, leaves "the city" to return to the isolated French Canadian countryside where she grew up to see if she can find her father, who has disappeared into the bush. With her are friends David and Anna, who she hasn't known very long, but who have a car and agreed to take her where she needs to go; and Joe, her current lover (apparently one of a fairly long string--she refers to him as "this one"), a hirsute man of very few words. As you might expect, this is a journey of discovery for the narrator as she revisits old haunts, seeks out places her father might have gone searching for ancient native paintings, learns unpleasant things about the couple she had viewed as happily married, and wrestles with her own past. Early on it's clear she had been hiding things from her parents; soon we wonder what she's hiding from us, and even from herself. As time passes, she pushes civilization further and further from herself, along with rational thought, until we glimpse an almost feral creature desperate to dissolve into the natural world. There are some brutal images and abundant symbolism in this powerful work. Atwood's characters are brilliantly drawn; David, a self-absorbed jackass who punctuates his conversation with cartoon character laughs, simply made my skin crawl; Anna, a woman terrified of losing her husband, obnoxious as he is, who contrives never to let him see her without make-up, made me want to introduce her to some real people, male and female; Joe, a cipher, really, who is not up to understanding his lover, but tries his best, might be the most sympathetic of the lot. My one quibble with this novel is that I found the ending a bit unsatisfactory. I thought we were going to end up in one place, and apparently we did not, although I feel we should have. (Yes, I know that's clear as mud...sorry, but I can't do better without being terribly spoilerish.)Review written in April 2016
    • 3/5
      "Surfacing" is definitely not my favorite by Margaret Atwood. The story overall felt choppy to me -- there were bits that I really liked, but there were also stretches that I just found tedious.The story centers on a woman who returns to her backwoods home in Quebec after learning her long-ago abandoned father has disappeared. What's real and what is not isn't really well-defined here. By the time I got to the end, I was asking myself "Wait, what just happened?" I didn't feel like there was enough of a lead-up to the ending for it to feel realistic.
    • 4/5
      There is something to be said about reading a book in which the narrator loses their grip with reality. In Surfacing, the entire book is told from one perspective, and then suddenly the character goes from mildly eccentric/odd...to all out batty. When it happened I had to stop and reread, "Wait," I told myself, "she just did what?"

      In effect, Margaret, you got me again.

      This was a quick read but a highly interesting one. A woman heads back to her childhood home when she finds out her dad has gone missing. She is joined by her boyfriend and a married couple. We see her thoughts on marriage, children, civilization, Americans, nature and war by the way she reacts to others.

      A very good read!
    • 3/5
      I have to admit, some of Atwood's work is disturbing on several levels, some is a little out there, but thought provoking, & some stories are just kind of sad & thought provoking at the same time. This is one of them.When our unnamed artist gets notified that her father in Canada has disappeared from his cabin, she & her significant other, along with another couple, travel to the wilds to try to find him or what's happened to him. As she spends this time in the wilds she grew up in, we learn more of her upbringing, & the past that she has to face in order to surface from her self imposed disconnect with her feelings.
    • 5/5
      Another victory by Margaret Atwood. This is a fantastic novel, everything from the language to the imagery to the depth and breadth of the book is amazing. I really felt like I was inside the character's head. The feminist undertones are present throughout but it isn't until the climax of the novel that you feel their full implications. There do seem to be some anti-American sentiments in the book, but by the end I think the Americans are more symbolic of waste and a disrespect for nature than anything else. Great great great book.
    • 4/5
      I first read Surfacing in university, now, 35 years later, it is included on the syllabus of my daughter’s Can Lit course. Though written in 1972, and set in a remote area of Quebec in the 1960s, it felt very contemporary to me. Being back in your hometown and coming to terms with the truth about your childhood after the loss of your parents is a timeless right of passage. A journey that can send you off the deep end, as it does in Surfacing.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. I really identified with the main character here, her reactions to the brutality of humanity towards the wild, her empathy with the skinned crane, her disdain for her friends and their frivolity. I loved the dark tone.
    • 4/5
      Surfacing by Margaret Atwood; 4 starsFor me this book was an unsolved mystery & a thriller. My second Atwood, the first being The Penelopiad, & I again found myself enamored by her words, her phrasing and by her imagination. Both Atwood tales I've read were deep & dark to me. I have to remain focused & must constantly think when I read her. (I wonder if all of her books are all like this.) She has a way of working her way into the deepest reaches of one's mind & she finds the humanity that exists and brings it to the front.Surfacing is about a woman who returns to her home village in Canada. She is searching for her father in a cabin in the woods where she was raised. She is on this journey with her lover and another couple. As the days go by she finds herself returning to nature in every sense of that word. She becomes primal, driven to the point of madness, as she returns to this original state. It's not happy book. It's heartbreaking and beautiful. There's a purity to her madness, to this return to nature as she slowly loses her friends, her family, her memories, her sense of self.This small novel really sucked me in and I read in a single sitting. I intently followed the unnamed female lead character through her attempts to find & understand the disappearance of her father. Surfacing is a very sad & intense novel. And there is so much in it that I read & reread and yet I am sure that I still missed some of Atwood's understanding. I know that one day I will be in the mood to read this book again and it is definitely worth a reread.

    Book preview

    Surfacing - Margaret Atwood

    I

    CHAPTER ONE

    I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have seaplanes for hire. But this is still near the city limits; we didn’t go through, it’s swelled enough to have a bypass, that’s success.

    I never thought of it as a city but as the last or first outpost depending on which way we were going, an accumulation of sheds and boxes and one main street with a movie theater, the itz, the oyal, red R burned out, and two restaurants which served identical gray hamburger steaks plastered with mud gravy and canned peas, watery and pallid as fisheyes, and french fries bleary with lard. Order a poached egg, my mother said, you can tell if it’s fresh by the edges.

    In one of those restaurants before I was born my brother got under the table and slid his hands up and down the waitress’s legs while she was bringing the food; it was during the war and she had on shiny orange rayon stockings, he’d never seen them before, my mother didn’t wear them. A different year there we ran through the snow across the sidewalk in our bare feet because we had no shoes, they’d worn out during the summer. In the car that time we sat with our feet wrapped in blankets, pretending we were wounded. My brother said the Germans shot our feet off.

    Now though I’m in another car, David’s and Anna’s; it’s sharp-finned and striped with chrome, a lumbering monster left over from ten years ago, he has to reach under the instrument panel to turn on the lights. David says they can’t afford a newer one, which probably isn’t true. He’s a good driver, I realize that, I keep my outside hand on the door in spite of it. To brace myself and so I can get out quickly if I have to. I’ve driven in the same car with them before but on this road it doesn’t seem right, either the three of them are in the wrong place or I am.

    I’m in the back seat with the packsacks; this one, Joe, is sitting beside me chewing gum and holding my hand, they both pass the time. I examine the hand: the palm is broad, the short fingers tighten and relax, fiddling with my gold ring, turning it, it’s a reflex of his. He has peasant hands, I have peasant feet, Anna told us that. Everyone now can do a little magic, she reads hands at parties, she says it’s a substitute for conversation. When she did mine she said Do you have a twin? I said No. Are you positive, she said, because some of your lines are double. Her index finger traced me: You had a good childhood but then there’s this funny break. She puckered her forehead and I said I just wanted to know how long I was going to live, she could skip the rest. After that she told us Joe’s hands were dependable but not sensitive and I laughed, which was a mistake.

    From the side he’s like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction. That’s how he thinks of himself, too: deposed, unjustly. Secretly he would like them to set up a kind of park for him, like a bird sanctuary. Beautiful Joe.

    He feels me watching him and lets go of my hand. Then he takes his gum out, bundling it in the silver wrapper, and sticks it in the ashtray and crosses his arms. That means I’m not supposed to observe him; I face front.

    In the first few hours of driving we moved through flattened cow-sprinkled hills and leaf trees and dead elm skeletons, then into the needle trees and the cuttings dynamited in pink and gray granite and the flimsy tourist cabins, and the signs saying GATEWAY TO THE NORTH, at least four towns claim to be that. The future is in the North, that was a political slogan once; when my father heard it he said there was nothing in the North but the past and not much of that either. Wherever he is now, dead or alive and nobody knows which, he’s no longer making epigrams. They have no right to get old. I envy people whose parents died when they were young, that’s easier to remember, they stay unchanged. I was sure mine would anyway, I could leave and return much later and everything would be the same. I thought of them as living in some other time, going about their own concerns closed safe behind a wall as translucent as Jell-O, mammoths frozen in a glacier. All I would have to do was come back when I was ready but I kept putting it off, there would be too many explanations.

    Now we’re passing the turnoff to the pit the Americans hollowed out. From here it looks like an innocent hill, spruce-covered, but the thick power lines running into the forest give it away. I heard they’d left, maybe that was a ruse, they could easily still be living in there, the generals in concrete bunkers and the ordinary soldiers in underground apartment buildings where the lights burn all the time. There’s no way of checking because we aren’t allowed in. The city invited them to stay, they were good for business, they drank a lot.

    That’s where the rockets are, I say. Were. I don’t correct it.

    David says Bloody fascist pig Yanks, as though he’s commenting on the weather.

    Anna says nothing. Her head rests on the back of the seat, the ends of her light hair whipping in the draft from the side window that won’t close properly. Earlier she was singing, House of the Rising Sun and Lili Marlene, both of them several times, trying to make her voice go throaty and deep; but it came out like a hoarse child’s. David turned on the radio, he couldn’t get anything, we were between stations. When she was in the middle of St. Louis Blues he began to whistle and she stopped. She’s my best friend, my best woman friend; I’ve known her two months.

    I lean forward and say to David, The bottle house is around this next curve and to the left, and he nods and slows the car. I told them about it earlier, I guessed it was the kind of object that would interest them. They’re making a movie, Joe is doing the camera work, he’s never done it before but David says they’re the new Renaissance Men, you teach yourself what you need to learn. It was mostly David’s idea, he calls himself the director: they already have the credits worked out. He wants to get shots of things they come across, random samples he calls them, and that will be the name of the movie too: Random Samples. When they’ve used up their supply of film (which was all they could afford; and the camera is rented) they’re going to look at what they’ve collected and rearrange it.

    How can you tell what to put in if you don’t already know what it’s about? I asked David when he was describing it. He gave me one of his initiate-to-novice stares. If you close your mind in advance like that you wreck it. What you need is flow. Anna, over by the stove measuring out the coffee, said everyone she knew was making a movie, and David said that was no fucking reason why he shouldn’t. She said You’re right, sorry; but she laughs about it behind his back, she calls it Random Pimples.

    The bottle house is built of pop bottles cemented together with the bottoms facing out, green ones and brown ones in zigzag patterns like the ones they taught us in school to draw on tepees; there’s a wall around it made of bottles, too, arranged in letters so the brown ones spell BOTTLE VILLA.

    Neat, David says, and they get out of the car with the camera. Anna and I climb out after them; we stretch our arms, and Anna has a cigarette. She’s wearing a purple tunic and white bellbottoms, they have a smear on them already, grease from the car. I told her she should wear jeans or something but she said she looks fat in them.

    Who made it, Christ, think of the work, she says, but I don’t know anything about it except that it’s been there forever, the tangled black spruce swamp around it making it even more unlikely, a preposterous monument to some quirkish person exiled or perhaps a voluntary recluse like my father, choosing this swamp because it was the only place where he could fulfill his lifelong dream of living in a house of bottles. Inside the wall is an attempted lawn and a border with orange mattress-tuft marigolds.

    Great, says David, really neat, and he puts his arm around Anna and hugs her briefly to show he’s pleased, as though she is somehow responsible for the Bottle Villa herself. We get back in the car.

    I watch the side window as though it’s a TV screen. There’s nothing I can remember till we reach the border, marked by the sign that says BIENVENUE on one side and WELCOME on the other. The sign has bullet holes in it, rusting red around the edges. It always did, in the fall the hunters use it for target practice; no matter how many times they replace it or paint it the bullet holes reappear, as though they aren’t put there but grow by a kind of inner logic or infection, like mold or boils. Joe wants to film the sign but David says, Naaa, what for?

    Now we’re on my home ground, foreign territory. My throat constricts, as it learned to do when I discovered people could say words that would go into my ears meaning nothing. To be deaf and dumb would be easier. The cards they poke at you when they want a quarter, with the hand alphabet on them. Even so, you would need to learn spelling.

    The first smell is the mill, sawdust, there are mounds of it in the yard with the stacked timber slabs. The pulpwood goes elsewhere to the paper mill, but the bigger logs are corralled in a boom on the river, a ring of logs chained together with the free ones nudging each other inside it; they travel to the saws in a clanking overhead chute, that hasn’t been changed. The car goes under it and we’re curving up into the tiny company town, neatly planned with public flowerbeds and an eighteenth-century fountain in the middle, stone dolphins and a cherub with part of the face missing. It looks like an imitation but it may be real.

    Anna says Oh wow, what a great fountain.

    The company built the whole thing, I say, and David says Rotten capitalist bastards and begins to whistle again.

    I tell him to turn right and he does. The road ought to be here, but instead there’s a battered checkerboard, the way is blocked.

    Now what, says David.

    We didn’t bring a map, because I knew we wouldn’t need one. I’ll have to ask, I say, so he backs the car out and we drive along the main street till we come to a corner store, magazines and candy.

    You must mean the old road, the woman says with only a trace of an accent. It’s been closed for years, what you need is the new one. I buy four vanilla cones because you aren’t supposed to ask without buying anything. She gouges down into the cardboard barrel with a metal scoop. Before, the ice cream came rolled in pieces of paper which they would peel off like bark, pressing the short logs of ice cream into the cones with their thumbs. Those must be obsolete.

    I go back to the car and tell David the directions. Joe says he likes chocolate better.

    Nothing is the same, I don’t know the way any more. I slide my tongue around the ice cream, trying to concentrate on it, they put seaweed in it now, but I’m starting to shake, why is the road different, he shouldn’t have allowed them to do it, I want to turn around and go back to the city and never find out what happened to him. I’ll start crying, that would be horrible, none of them would know what to do and neither would I. I bite down into the cone and I can’t feel anything for a minute but the knife-hard pain up the side of my face. Anesthesia, that’s one technique: if it hurts invent a different pain. I’m all right.

    David finishes his cone, tossing the carton-flavored tip out the window, and starts the car. We go through a part that’s spread out from the town since I was here, freshly built square bungalows like city ones except for the pink and baby-blue trim, and a few oblong shacks farther along, tar paper and bare boards. A clutch of children playing in the wet mud that substitutes for lawns; most of them are dressed in clothes too big for them, which makes them seem stunted.

    They must fuck a lot here, Anna says, I guess it’s the Church. Then she says Aren’t I awful.

    David says The true north strong and free.

    Beyond the houses, two older children, dark faced, hold out tin cans toward the car. Raspberries perhaps.

    We come to the gas station where the woman said to turn left and David groans with joy, Oh god look at that, and they pile out as though it will escape if they aren’t quick enough. What they’re after is the three stuffed moose on a platform near the pumps: they’re dressed in human clothes and wired standing up on their hind legs, a father moose with a trench coat and a pipe in his mouth, a mother moose in a print dress and flowered hat and a little boy moose in short pants, a striped jersey and a baseball cap, waving an American flag.

    Anna and I follow. I go up behind David and say Don’t you need some gas, he shouldn’t use the moose without paying, like the washrooms they’re here to attract customers.

    Oh look, Anna says, hand going to her mouth, there’s another one on the roof, and there is, a little girl moose in a frilly skirt and a pigtailed blond wig, holding a red parasol in one hoof. They get her too. The owner of the gas station is standing behind his plate glass show window in his undershirt, scowling at us through the film of dust.

    When we’re back in the car I say as though defending myself, Those weren’t here before. Anna’s head swivels around, my voice must sound odd.

    Before what? she says.

    The new road is paved and straight, two lanes with a line down the middle. Already it’s beginning to gather landmarks, a few advertisement signs, a roadside crucifix with a wooden Christ, ribs sticking out, the alien god, mysterious to me as ever. Underneath it are a couple of jam jars with flowers, daisies and red devil’s paintbrush and the white ones you can dry, Indian Posies, Everlasting, there must have been a car accident.

    At intervals the old road crosses us; it was dirt, full of bumps and potholes, it followed the way the land went, up and down the hills and around the cliffs and boulders. They used to go over it as fast as possible, their father knew every inch of it and could take it (he said) blindfolded, which was what they often seemed to be doing, grinding up past the signs that said PETITE VITESSE and plunging down over the elevator edges and scraping around the rock-faces, GARDEZ LE DROIT, horn hooting; the rest of them clamped onto the inside of the car, getting sicker and sicker despite the Lifesavers their mother would hand out, and finally throwing up groggily by the side of the road, blue asters and pink fireweed, if he could stop in time or out the car window if he couldn’t or into paper bags, he anticipated emergencies, if he was in a hurry and didn’t want to stop at all.

    That won’t work, I can’t call them they as if they were somebody else’s family: I have to keep myself from telling that story. Still though, seeing the old road billowing along at a distance through the trees (ruts and traces already blurring with grass and saplings, soon it will be gone) makes me reach into my bag for the Lifesavers I brought. But they aren’t needed anymore, even though the new road turns from pavement into gravel (Must’ve elected the wrong guy last time around, David says jokingly) and the familiar smell of road dust fuming behind and around us mixes with the gas-and-upholstery smell of the car.

    Thought you said this would be bad, David says over his shoulder, it’s not bad at all. We’re nearly to the village already, the two roads joining here but widened—rock blasted, trees bulldozed over, roots in the air, needles reddening—past the flat cliff where the election slogans are painted and painted over, some faded and defaced, others fresh yellow and white, VOTEZ GODET, VOTEZ OBRIEN, along with hearts and initials and words and advertisements, THÉ SALADA, BLUE MOON COTTAGES ½ MILE, QUÉBEC LIBRE, FUCK YOU, BUVEZ COCA-COLA GLACÉ, JESUS SAVES, mélange of demands and languages, an X ray of it would be the district’s entire history.

    But they’ve cheated, we’re here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered; as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.

    CHAPTER TWO

    We slur down the last hill, gravel pinging off the underside of the car, and suddenly there’s a thing that isn’t supposed to be here, MOTEL, BAR BIÈRE BEER the sign reads, neon even, someone is trying; but to no avail, there aren’t any cars parked outside and the VACANCY notice is up. The building is like any other cheap motel, long gray stucco with aluminum doors; the earth around it is still chunky and raw, not yet overgrown with the road weeds.

    Let’s pick up a few, David says, to Joe; he’s already swerved the car.

    We head towards the door but then I stop, it’s the best place to leave them, and say You go in and have a beer or something, I’ll be back in about half an hour.

    Right, David says. He knows what to avoid.

    "Want

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1