I was assigned this book back in school and didn’t have any idea what it was on about. Now, having lived through grief, loss, failed relationships and a few pregnancies, I find it speaks to me. The main character is so troubled, but in a “who would blame her?” Kind of way that you find yourself cheering for every advance.
This is, foremost, a love story of the Canadian wilderness, at risk of invasion from Americans, who spoil it all and who don’t respect it. It seems completely prescient as with many of Atwood’s books- I do wonder if she is a time-traveller from some wiser future…
Not a cheery book. Contemplative. High-residue. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
Glad I reread it. ( )

This book was a tough read for me. The copy of the book I have made it sound like a real thriller! I thought I was going to get a mystery/thriller book from the almighty Margaret Atwood. Since I was expecting that, this book didn't sit well with me. It was not the mystery or thriller I hoped for, but rather a character study of going crazy in the woods looking for.... something.

I would have liked this book more if I had an English professor breaking down Atwood's incredible prose and storytelling. I'll be doing that myself now with a little research, but for what I thought it was... not as good. Because I went in with a synopsis that didn't reflect the book well, that leads to my two star ranking. The prose is good, but it just didn't keep me with it well.

Two out of five stars. ( )

A jagged work entered into awkwardly. Thankfully it gracefully unfurls into a masterful mysticism, allowing those strained moments of trauma that suddenly erupt within the prose to be steadily calmed and reintegrated into the spirit.

I was introduced to this work in Mark Fisher’s essay Inside Out: Outside In: which is a piece of writing I couldn’t recommend highly enough, he situates this book nicely in the fin-de-Sixties tradition of wishing to push outside the Symbolic Order to where only the dead belong. The father is lost in the woods, the tree cancer is approaching, and the man talking about American Pigs and free love is nothing but a mere husk who would rather treat sex as two detached appendages flying spasmodically into one another. Order is created by knives, Hitler can no longer be the measure of Evil, and the metallic American neoliberal ideal is slashing the psyche with its self-righteous, pedagogic claws. Where to go but to these leering woods that promise a language without words? To a primordial state of being that endows one with an immediate identity that multiplies yet sticks? To the bottom of the lake where essential truths lay concealed under jellyfish and refuse? Toward a personal god that proffers an indifferent absence one can subsist within?

Just do yourself a favour and read it. You won’t like it at first but you’ll soon be hooked, like a frog in a jar. ( )

This was rather odd. Told in the first person we spend a lot of time in the narrators head and it is a very strange place to be. She remains un-named while we learn about her past and her present. She is at her parent's cabin, isolated on a lake in the Canadian North. It is miles from the nearest village and she grew up isolated by both location and language, the sole English speaking family in a French speaking area. She is seeking her father, who has gone missing in the wilderness. She thinks she discovers a code and wall art in some papers he has left, but finds no trace of him. With her are her current partner, and a couple who have their own, different, problems in their marriage.
It's not so much a coming to the surface as a descent into madness and we seem helpless as it happens. ( )

. En compañía de su amante y de una pareja de amigos, la narradora parte hacia una isla lacustre para intentar encontrar a su padre, un viudo solitario que ha desaparecido. Sumida en una profunda crisis de identidad, los siete días que permanece allí se revelarán como un espacio exento en el que descubrirá el trasfondo de sus acompañantes, hará un balance de su infancia y de su vida afectiva, y experimentará un RESURGIR, con nueva intensidad, de sus obsesiones y deseos más
profundos. Una naturaleza virgen, vasta e indómita y unos apuntes, plagados de símbolos, de su progenitor serán la llave que le abra el camino al enfrentamiento con su auténtico ser y a la aceptación, finalmente, del aislamiento y la soledad.