Madeline’s Reviews > Surfacing > Status Update

“It would have been different in those countries where an animal is the soul of an ancestor or the child of a God, at least they would have felt guilt.”

“The innocents get slaughtered because they exist, I thought, there’s nothing inside the happy killers to restrain them, no conscience or piety; for them, the only things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human, framed in the proper clothes and gimmicks, laminated.”

“I sat in the dark, the stroking sound of the night lake surrounding me. In the distance the Americans' campfire glowed, a dull red cyclops eye: the enemy lines. I wished evil toward them: Let them suffer, I prayed, tip their canoe, burn them, rip them open. Owl: answer, no answer.”

Scene moving from American fishers senselessly killing loons for entertainment, fishing to their limit = gluttony, violence, greed

to Anna talking about how David mistreats her, demands she wears makeup, uses sex to hurt or punish her, etc. = eco feminism, domination over all bodies

“Sometimes I think he’d like me to die,” Anna said, “I have dreams about it.”

“Thud of metal on fishbone, skull, neckless headbody, the fish is whole, I couldn't anymore, I had no right to. We didn't need it, our proper food was tin cans. We were committing this act, violation, for sport or amusement or pleasure, recreation they called it, these were no longer the right reasons. That's an explanation but no excuse my father used to say, a favorite maxim.”

“The lake didn’t matter to them, only the system: it would be a reservoir.”

“The next minute he had scrambled up and was capering on the point, shaking his clenched fist and yelling "Pigs! Pigs!" as loud as he could. It was some Americans, going past on their way to the village, their boat sloshing up and down in the waves, spray pluming, flags cocked fore and aft.
They couldn't hear him because of the wind and the motor, they thought he was greeting, they waved and smiled.”

We found that someone had built a fireplace already, on the shore ledge of bare granite; trash was strewn around it, orange peelings and tin cans and a rancid bulge of greasy paper, the tracks of humans. It was like dogs pissing on a fence, as if the endlessness anonymous water and unclaimed land compelled them to leave their signature, stake their territory, and garbage was the only thing they had to do it with.

"Do you love me, that's all," he said. "That's the only thing that matters."
It was the language again, I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.
"I want to," I said. "I do in a way."

2/2 - since then everything had been glancing off me, it was like being in a vase, or the village where I could see them but not hear them because I couldn't understand what was being said.
Bottles distort for the observer too: frogs in the jam jar stretched wide, to them watching I must have appeared grotesque.”