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annevoi's review against another edition
4.0
This book of twelve essays explores, with depth of spirit and a noticing eye, memory, meaning, and the reach of time, as well as landscape as place and home, not just of humans but of all life. Jamie is also a poet, and it shows in the exquisite details and descriptions she renders. I thoroughly enjoyed this book—especially the long essay "In Quinhagak," about an archeological dig in Arctic Alaska, for her musings and her appreciations. There was something about the huge tundra landscape on the edge of the Bering Sea, and the people who live there so in tune with the land, that seemed to blow her heart wide open.
ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
“One had to make allowances for this extraordinary light. But then again, maybe it showed how readily, in this unfixed place, the visible shifts. Transformation is possible. A bear can become a bird. A sea can vanish, rivers change course. The past can spill out of the earth, become the present.”
TITLE—Surfacing
AUTHOR—Kathleen Jamie
PUBLISHED—2019
PUBLISHER—Penguin Books
GENRE—memoir essays
SETTING—here, today & yesterday; & hopefully tomorrow
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—environmental changes, indigenous communities, archaeology, travel writing, Yup’ik land, culture & history, sub-arctic tundra life, seasonality in hunter-gatherer communities, the evils of settler colonialism & colonization, alcoholism & christian missionary fascism, Orkney islands, Neolithic settlements, dreams, death, cancer, travel writing, a sort of universal human cultural history, Tibet, forest bathing
WRITING STYLE—🌕🌕🌕🌕🌖
CHARACTERS—🌕🌕🌕🌕🌖
STORY/PLOT—🌕🌕🌕🌕🌚
BONUS ELEMENT/S—the “In Quinhagak” essay was *excellent*
PHILOSOPHY—🌕🌕🌕🌕🌖
PREMISE—🌕🌕🌕🌕🌚
EXECUTION—🌕🌕🌕🌕🌚
“He told me that the dig was revitalising traditional skills which had been lost, that local people were so interested in the rediscovered artefacts that they were making replicas, and that meant relearning old techniques—ivory carving, for example. That was the point. Although the dig had turned out to be rich beyond imagining, it wasn't a treasure hunt; it was rebuilding a whole culture lost to colonialism, to missionary zeal.”
My thoughts:
I didn’t leave myself enough time to read this as leisurely as I would have liked to and ended up having to skip some essays altogether but the ones I did read I loved—especially “In Quinhagak” which is one of my new alltime favorite essays. I thought Jamie wrote about her subjects with great humility, respect, and reverence, and her very literary writing style was beautiful.
Another excellent selection by the Archaeo Bookclub!
I would recommend this book to readers who enjoy memoirs in essay form, poetic writing style, lots of philosophical meandering. This book is best readleisurely.
Final note: I’ll definitely be picking up a copy for my shelves to read in the future!
“Dropped by accident, thrown in temper, perhaps grieved over—they all ended up on the midden and were eventually ploughed into the field along with the dung, where they remain, sometimes to resurface for a while. Now you have a handful, spanning centuries. And there's another piece, winking from the ground; this could become obsessive. Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from the empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead... You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, and all the fields… They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again.”
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌖
Season: late Summer
CW // cancer, death of a parent (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- MY GARDEN BOOK by Jamaica Kincaid
- LIVING BY THE WORD by Alice Walker
- THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES by Thomas King
- SISTER OUTSIDER by Audre Lorde
clarissa_pos's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
4.75
readingrara's review against another edition
relaxing
slow-paced
3.0
A book about archaeology that floats away on a tangent.
swirls's review against another edition
4.0
Quietly beautiful. A mix of nature, archaeology, personal memoir, geology, and cultural studies. Not at all my usual cup of tea, but her prose drew me in. Definitely something to be slowly savored on cold nights.
izzyhardern's review against another edition
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
beautiful and one of a kind. i really love a memoir
nicktomjoe's review against another edition
5.0
My review -of sorts: really some reflections- of this magical book, so full of amazingly vivid turns of phrase, is to be found here: https://nicktomjoestory.news.blog/2020/02/26/inner-tube-at-mikes-house/ Personal and yet looking somehow beyond Jamie as narrator, this is moving, well crafted and enlightening.