Scan barcode
freyalh's review against another edition
3.0
While non-fiction is not really my ~thing, this was very beautifully written and an atmospheric exploration into nature and how it ties with our shared histories.
kingjason's review
5.0
Kathleen Jamie is one of my favourite writers, she has the ability to capture the magic out of the smallest thing and come up with beautiful words to describe it. In Surfacing she is removing a layer to see what is underneath, archaeological digs in Alaska and on the isle of Westray revealing human history, losing a parent, kids moving out and searching for what that means for her.
There are 3 big essay's here, two of them are the digs and the third is about time spent in Xiahe in Tibet when China shut the borders down and the students rose in protest. All three of them draw you in and it feels as if you are there, you sense the cold in Alaska, the wind of the Orkneys and the quiet of the monastery at Xiahe. Mixed in between are some short pieces, observations of things around us that we would normally miss, driving along and seeing an eagle and getting lost in the moment watching it glide effortlessly without beating it's wings.
A couple of favourite chapters of mine were the 3rd part of Links of Noltland, thinking of the people who lived there 5000 years ago and asking them question after question about their lives. Then there is A Tibetan Dog, a cancer scare and turning a dream of a memory on it's head, that was some mind blowing stuff. I enjoyed the Links of Noltland sections so much I did a bit of googling to look for pictures and I laughed when I saw one photo of the team and found that Kathleen's descriptions of their clothing was spot on.
Fascinating stuff as always and as usual I'm left jealous of her experiences.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2020/08/16/surfacing-by-kathleen-jamie/
There are 3 big essay's here, two of them are the digs and the third is about time spent in Xiahe in Tibet when China shut the borders down and the students rose in protest. All three of them draw you in and it feels as if you are there, you sense the cold in Alaska, the wind of the Orkneys and the quiet of the monastery at Xiahe. Mixed in between are some short pieces, observations of things around us that we would normally miss, driving along and seeing an eagle and getting lost in the moment watching it glide effortlessly without beating it's wings.
A couple of favourite chapters of mine were the 3rd part of Links of Noltland, thinking of the people who lived there 5000 years ago and asking them question after question about their lives. Then there is A Tibetan Dog, a cancer scare and turning a dream of a memory on it's head, that was some mind blowing stuff. I enjoyed the Links of Noltland sections so much I did a bit of googling to look for pictures and I laughed when I saw one photo of the team and found that Kathleen's descriptions of their clothing was spot on.
Fascinating stuff as always and as usual I'm left jealous of her experiences.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2020/08/16/surfacing-by-kathleen-jamie/
nthcls's review
4.0
Loved this all around, but the last chapter/essay really hit me. I might never read anything but nature autobiography again.
angelayoung's review
5.0
The sea was calm. No one else was on the beach, only some birds and two seals watching me from a few yards out on the water. I stood at the water's edge and sang the seals a song about time and change, and the seals, out of courtesy, listened.This comes at the end of Links of Notland 1 from Kathleen Jamie's Surfacing. She's been taking part in an architectural dig that revealed Neolithic dwellings and Viking dwellings and much more besides. But because Jamie is a poet, when she writes prose she writes poetically. What better way to sum up the times and existences revealed from the digs at Links of Noltland (which, roughly translated, means: The Sandy Dunes of the Land of the Cattle) than with a song about time and change sung, flung perhaps, out towards the seas across which these peoples first travelled?
To read about far-flung places in the middle of one of the world's largest metropoles (there are pieces from the West Highlands of Scotland, eastern Scotland, the Orkneys: the suffixes ey, ay and a mean island in old Norse, as in Westray, Ronaldsay, Hoy; Alaska, Tibet and from the interior of the human mind) is to travel in the mind and to travel large, without moving, through Jamie's inspired and inspiring prose. All manner of things surface from the earth, from the mind, from conversations, from sights unfamiliar.
There are two companion volumes Sightlines and Findings, both of which were published before Surfacing; both of which I've been dipping into (all three were 2019 Christmas presents) and I'll continue to dip into because I'd like Jamie's prose to keep surfacing in my own mind.
sleepyreader's review
Nothing wrong with this book. I just kept not being in the mood for it and then my library loan expired. I might try it again at a later date.
halfmanhalfbook's review
5.0
Life feels like one headlong rush at times. The phone squeaks constantly with notifications, demanding attention now, the 24 hour news fills our lives with politics and despair and yet time goes no faster than it did 5000 years ago. It grinds ceaselessly on, covering memories and objects with its gossamer-thin seconds. To go back in time, we need to unearth our landscapes and memories.
Time is a spiral. What goes around comes around.
The book opens with her in Alaska helping at an archaeological dig in a Yup’ik village. The site is normally frozen most of the year, but in the summer the cold relents, normally allowing the top four or five inches to be uncovered, however, climate change means that the permafrost is thawing to a depth of half a metre allowing more secrets of its hunter-gatherer past to be revealed. The objects that they are finding are enabling the village to re-discover their past. They found dance masks that were discarded after missionaries told them it was devil worship and for the first time in a very long time performed a dance that was pieced together from the elder’s memories.
The landscape was astonishing. There was nothing I wanted to do more than sit quietly and look at it, come to terms with its vastness.
Her next excursion to the past is at the Links of Noltland, up in Orkney. This Neolithic site has been covered by dunes and what they have found here was last seen by human eyes thousands of years ago. The need to excavate and understand just what is there, is urgent as it is subject to erosion from the storms that the Atlantic brings, as well as the other pressure of funding to carry out the work being stopped because of budget pressures. These people were only a step away from the wild and had short brutal lives and yet they were skilled enough to have devised a method when they built their homes to keep out the relentless wind.
They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again.
Jamie writes of time spent in Xiahe in Tibet in her younger days, at the time of the student protests and the clampdown of martial law in the region and the palpable tension in the area. They explore as much as they can, but because they are foreigners, they have an undue amount of attention directed towards them, including the inevitable night raid by the police. There are other essays in here too, almost short interludes between the longer pieces. She stops her car to watch the mastery an eagle has over the air and consider the timelessness of a woodland. Some of the essays are more personal too, she recalls the moment of her fathers passing and struggles to hear her mother and grandmothers voices in her mind.
A new Kathleen Jamie book is a thing of joy, and Surfacing does not disappoint at all. Her wonderful writing is layered, building images of the things that she sees, until you the reader, feel immersed in the same place that she inhabited. Some of the essays are very moving, Elders in particular, but also The Wind Horse where you sense the tension in the town from what she observes. Her skill as a poet means, for me at least, that her writing has a way of helping you seen the world around in a new and different light, revealing as much from the shadows as from the obvious and this book is no different.
Time is a spiral. What goes around comes around.
The book opens with her in Alaska helping at an archaeological dig in a Yup’ik village. The site is normally frozen most of the year, but in the summer the cold relents, normally allowing the top four or five inches to be uncovered, however, climate change means that the permafrost is thawing to a depth of half a metre allowing more secrets of its hunter-gatherer past to be revealed. The objects that they are finding are enabling the village to re-discover their past. They found dance masks that were discarded after missionaries told them it was devil worship and for the first time in a very long time performed a dance that was pieced together from the elder’s memories.
The landscape was astonishing. There was nothing I wanted to do more than sit quietly and look at it, come to terms with its vastness.
Her next excursion to the past is at the Links of Noltland, up in Orkney. This Neolithic site has been covered by dunes and what they have found here was last seen by human eyes thousands of years ago. The need to excavate and understand just what is there, is urgent as it is subject to erosion from the storms that the Atlantic brings, as well as the other pressure of funding to carry out the work being stopped because of budget pressures. These people were only a step away from the wild and had short brutal lives and yet they were skilled enough to have devised a method when they built their homes to keep out the relentless wind.
They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field again.
Jamie writes of time spent in Xiahe in Tibet in her younger days, at the time of the student protests and the clampdown of martial law in the region and the palpable tension in the area. They explore as much as they can, but because they are foreigners, they have an undue amount of attention directed towards them, including the inevitable night raid by the police. There are other essays in here too, almost short interludes between the longer pieces. She stops her car to watch the mastery an eagle has over the air and consider the timelessness of a woodland. Some of the essays are more personal too, she recalls the moment of her fathers passing and struggles to hear her mother and grandmothers voices in her mind.
A new Kathleen Jamie book is a thing of joy, and Surfacing does not disappoint at all. Her wonderful writing is layered, building images of the things that she sees, until you the reader, feel immersed in the same place that she inhabited. Some of the essays are very moving, Elders in particular, but also The Wind Horse where you sense the tension in the town from what she observes. Her skill as a poet means, for me at least, that her writing has a way of helping you seen the world around in a new and different light, revealing as much from the shadows as from the obvious and this book is no different.