Product Description
Love, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her sanity. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous 28-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature 35-year-old director Henry. Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today.Amazon.com Review
The first novel from Doris Lessing in more than seven years, Love, Againis the story of a sixty-five-year-old woman who falls in love.Or rather, SarahDurham falls into a state of love, which is another country altogether, andstruggles to maintain her sanity while there.Closer to The Golden Notebook in its ironiesand complexities than anything Doris Lessing has written since, this is abrilliant anatomy of love -- of longing, grief, an older woman's sexuality, ofall the experiences of love available to a woman in her lifetime -- froma master of human psychology who is also one of the most daring writersof fiction at work today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Too unrealistic to finish.
I won't repeat the plot of the book as it's mentioned in several other reviews. I enjoyed the first third of this book a great deal, where the protagonist, Sarah, explores the nature of the play's heroine, Julie, and Stephen's passion for Julie.I thought Sarah would be drawn to Stephen and that the book would be about Sarah discovering her passion and perhaps drawing Stephen towards a relationship with her, a living woman not a great deal older than he. Of course, the author is not obliged to meet my expectations, but when the novel took a completely different turn, having her fall in love with two much younger men, and they in turn showing a sexual interest in her, a sixty-five year old woman - my reaction was to completely lose interest in the book.One professional critic suggests that some negative reviewers are pulling away from the strong emotions evoked by the book.In my case, this is true - the strong emotion being embarrassment, for the protagonist and the author.The protagonist looks "twenty years younger than her age."Well, I'm a 59 year old woman, and I've never met a 65 year old woman who could be taken for 45. Furthermore, most women I have known think that men even just a few years younger would not be attracted to them, yet Sarah apparently experiences none of these doubts. Years ago, I met a woman who was deluded enough at the age of 62 to think a man in his twenties was attracted to her.He wasn't.So, is the author writing a novel about the nature of an older woman's passion for a young man in a universe where such a passion might be returned?And returned not by one much younger man, but by two?If so, it's not a universe I inhabit. And it seems as silly as those books about young heroines who can deck a 350 pound man with their incredibly well-honed martial arts skills.It would be lovely if it were true. But those are books meant for younger readers.Because I couldn't believe in it, I was unable to enter the author's world.And unfortunately, I found myself wondering is this was the fantasy world of the author, who was the same age as her protagonist when the book was written. In which case, it's rather self-indulgent.

Love, Again by Doris Lessing
Love, Again is a slow-moving and deeply nuanced story about an older woman faced with a bevy of suitors as she and her team put on a new production one summer in England and France. The protagonist of the play is a woman who lived a century before, who was driven to the brink of madness by pain from her lovers. This serves as an obvious parable to Sarah, in the current day, slowly losing her mind, as new and old lovers come and go in her life, and bring with them countless complications. She also suffers deep stress from recent family troubles, and is in a general state of upheaval in her life. Lessing's writing is quite strong here, direct and typically analytical and tightly edited. The story itself, while thin and perhaps long-winded, nevertheless sheds a new light on a topic that is not often discussed in world literature. Still, though, I fear that only hardcore Lessing fans would appreciate it for what it is, as I cannot find someone unfamiliar with her style to find it to be as absorbing an experience as those in love with her work. A mature book for discerning readers.

no title
How I loathed, absolutely loathed this book.Almost three solid weeks of plodding.And I did so much like her other book "African Laughter".But this!Narcissistic, if ever I read one.Lessing at 70 or so is saying, "Here, look at me!At how wonderfully I write."To ask the reader to believe that three men, all under the age of 40, are in love with a 65-year-old woman, is ludicrous.And that she, who, hopefully would have gained some insight and wisdom by now, is so grief-stricken over the loss of the 35-year-old (whom she never sleeps with or even kisses or seems to have any meaningful conversations with) that it takes two years to get over, is simply beyond my suspension of disbelief.These people never really talk to one another, never, ever say what they think, at least what Lessing says they think.The world of theatre and its convulsive relationships.I think not.

A moving book
Sarah Durham is a writer living in London. She is "as the French put it, a woman of a certain age", 65 more precisely. Her husband Alan died when Sarah was 35 and she has two grown children living in India and in America. Sarah is described by Doris Lessing as "a calm and reasonable" woman. She has a brother, Hal, also living in London, who is married to Anne, both being medical doctors. Sarah often has to look after their troubled daughter Joyce who suffers from anorexia and attempted suicide when she was an adolescent. She now lives a rough life with addicts, pushers and prostitutes.
Sarah is known in the theatre world of the West End as the influential manager of The Green Bird after having been for a long time a badly paid hanger-on to the edges of real theatre. She manages The Green Bird alongside three colleagues forming the Gang of Four: Mary Ford, responsible for publicity and promotion, Roy Strether, stage manager, and Patrick Steele.
As the staff prepare the staging of the new play "Julie Vairon" and the new cast start rehearsing, Sarah slowly falls under the spell of Bill Collins, a beautiful young actor. But somehow, love proves to be more difficult when you are a woman "of a certain age".

An exploratory overview of the meaning of love
As a woman growing older myself, I read this book to understand better the feelings and thoughts a woman might experience being in love at a later stage in life.To this end, I was not disappointed.Doris Lessing explores the meaning of love, not just infatuation, but also the loves of friendship, marital love and brotherly love and the their incumbent duties, as well as the (ab)use of love for personal gain or entertainment.It may be true, as some reviewers suggest, that people who have been untouched by love may not appreciate this book as much as those who have, but I think anyone interested in the meaning of love in all its aspects and across generations can get a lot out of reading this book.The main criticism I have is that while the story itself is about the staging of a play, I found the characters in the book and the aspects of love they portray rather over-staged, too.It is as if no character has been wasted in an attempt to explore the meaning of love, and this is a bit tiresome at times.On the other hand, this may be the point - that all people are in some ways generating or responding to the love or lack of love around them.One book I would recommend to readers of Love Again is Love Letters (an anthology) by Antonia Fraser. ... Read more

Product Description
The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead.'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.'In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives.This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land.'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Wars and victims on all fronts
In the first part of this double biography (a fictitious and a real one), Doris Lessing asks herself what would have happened if ... the First World War had not taken place. `That war squatted over my childhood. And here I am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy. And trying to get free.'

But during and after that war, another brutal, but psychological one was fought between mother and daughter: `My battles with my mother were titanic. I hated my mother.'
After all those years, Doris Lessing is still yelling as a madwoman because her mother projected all her love on her younger brother (and left nothing for her): `I can remember (my hate) from the start ... by the birth of my brother.'

In the `if-biography' of her parents, the latter don't even marry. Doris Lessing wouldn't have been conceived. She seems to say that in an `idyllic' world there is no place for war, be it a real or a psychological one, and no place for her. She wouldn't (shouldn't) be there with the monstrous rucksack mounted on her back for the rest of her life.

In `idyllic' England all `war efforts' could have been spent on a higher living standard for everyone. Instead, in `real' England the young generation was slaughtered as cannon fodder. As her father said, `they were such good chaps, such fine men. And they all died in the mud of Passchendaele.'

What saved Doris Lessing's life was literature: `No books have ever had such an effect on me as the great Russians.' But, that `I owe to her, my mother, my introduction to books.'
There are also the feminist notes in these pages: `A fate worse than death, a woman without maternal instinct and no birth control.'

If ... this astonishing non-biography had been real, we wouldn't have known the great writer, Doris Lessing, with her titanic emotional outburst and desperate cries for love.
A must read for all fans of world literature.
... Read more

Product Description
An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security.

A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Great Book
The book is good and the condition of the book was great.I was pleased.

A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing
The second book in Lessing's famous Children of Violence series is, simply, deeper and better than its predecessor. Now Martha Quest is married and goes through the confusion of searching for herself in her husband and (unlikely) child. She leaves behind her life of sundowners and irresponsibility to make a happy home and remain a good and dutiful citizen as WWII is becoming an ever-greater presence in Southern Africa. However, she gradually has feelings of unfulfillment, and must make major decisions in order to keep her autonomy and sanity. We leave her as she starts a new life for herself, and begins to get more involved with the Communist Party.

Lessing gives a great performance here. The book is slow-moving, but filled with startling moments of comprehension and understanding. She has been called a master of the "documentary novel," an odd phrase which seems just right with her, and she presents her characters and their problems in a direct and uncompromising way. Her perception and use of language, however, really separates her; you are able to put yourself in the middle of this world with its seemingly ordinary characters, and know them as you know anyone in real life. The CoV series is a must-read for any serious lit. fan, and it picks up steam here.

Wow.
Doris Lessing remains one of my favorite writers. I first fell in love with her work when I read The Golden Notebook in college, as you do. I'm still slowly working my way through her complete novels.

I really enjoyed Martha Quest, the first book in the Children of Violence. But I was deeply moved by A Proper Marriage. Take the bright young things of a Fitzgerald novel, give them sweat, hangovers and physicality and put them in a troubled country on the eve of a World War. If you can imagine that, then you have a little bit of an idea about A Proper Marriage.

There's something so smart and complicated about the way that Lessing develops Martha in this book. Her disaffection with the excesses of the left lead her into a middle class life, even as her sympathies lie elsewhere. Relationships, war, child-bearing and the colour bar are all woven together into a book that somehow manages to bear the weight of the themes while still givng the reader a very human tale.

Lessing is a simply amazing writer. She works with complex ideas and communicates them without simplifying. Her writing is always lovely and human. A Proper Marriage is one of the best examples of her work. I think that it adds richness if you begin with Martha Quest, but the book can stand on its own right.

Recommended both for fans of Lessing's work and people new to her work.

colonial stile
Doris Lessing is at her best showing the habits of the ruling classes in most african countries -- mainly during the times of Martha Quest's marriage, right before the beginning of the war.
This is the second book of The Children of the Violence series and, as the others, is impossible to put down before the end.

Martha's Quest Continues
In Doris Lessing's second "Children of Violence" series *A Proper Marriage*, we discover that Martha, in marrying Douglas, becomes even more torn in her quest to attain full stature as a woman. Martha, in this story, not only has to reconcile her self to the causes she believes in, to her marriage with Douglas Knowell, and to motherhood, but also to the townspeople with whom she becomes entwined. Another delight of this novel for me is the way Lessing has Martha look at both individual and group dynamics throughout the story, providing seductively keen insight.Lessing's writing promises tension, suspense, and wonder for the engaged reader. *A Proper Marriage* sequels *Martha Quest* in which many of the delights in the first of the series continue on to the second, including the beautiful way Lessing mirrors Martha's interior life with the exotic and varied African natural and elemental landscape. I would recommed reading *Martha Quest* first in order to more fully appreciate *A Proper Marriage.* ... Read more

Product Description
Dorris Lessing's classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950's and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating life into fiction, creating her most complex and compelling character, Martha Quest. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

The Four-Gated City by Doris Lessing
In The Four-Gated City, Nobel winner Doris Lessing ends her massive Children of Violence series with a whopper. Martha Hesse (nee Quest) is newly arrived in London from her disappointing life in Africa. She meanders around, trying to find herself through the city, friends, and lovers, and quickly settles down in Marc Coldridge's large house. The house itself is almost a character, as it is slowly filled with people from the same social class but with widely divergent personalities. Martha, ever the sensible one, works and keeps house, but the gradual influence of the Coldridge family morphs her throughout the course of the book into a fully self-aware person, with a disenchanted but oddly hopeful view of England's new, post-WWII society. The four-gated city of the title could be London, as it was a world into itself, trying to come to grips with recuperation. However, I think the title is also an allusion to the Coldridge house on Radlett Street, as 95% of the book happens within those four walls that challenges, enlightens, and stymies our Martha.

In my opinion, this is Lessing's best novel. It starts off as a conventional story, but the deeper you get the more becomes a statement on the dangerous times facing Europe. Lessing's strengths are in her ability to weave themes and portents throughout the story, but this comes at the expense of some frequently faulty characterization. It is stunning in its psychoanalysis- Lessing writes in a very distinct, almost-too-complex manner Martha's gradual foray into insanity where she faces something in herself which is not the soul, but a subconscious wavelength that makes her privy to all the poisoned thinking around her. It is this thinking that is the impetus for the novel's last part, where the story turns on a futuristic cant (but subtle enough that it shouldn't turn away anyone who doesn't like the genre), and the fabled England is annihilated by a Catastrophe created by centuries of hatred, fear, and negative thinking wrought by history. From this era is borne the eponymous Children of Violence, subtly bringing the series (and perhaps Lessing's view of history) full-circle.

Again, this is a masterful ending to a series that was heretofore distinguished but not particularly urgent. The great majority of it is entertaining, and really sharpens the way you think and view the world. Even its slower moments have a common sophistication rare in fiction but frequent in Lessing's works. Plus it could easily be read on its own, as it really is heads and shoulders above the rest of the series. Highest recommendation.

Bildungsroman
Martha Quest Hesse is a new arrival in London.After staying with people at the docks, in a cafe, and with her friend Jack, she comes upon the Mark Coldridge establishment-- an involving situation.Martha has discovered that hysteria is rehearsal.In the Coldridge household she uses her knowledge of human behavior.As Martha prepares to leave the house of Mark Coldridge, (she never did leave, this was an attempt), Mark tells her that she is seeking a mythic city.Mark and Martha discuss how shantytowns are the shadows of cities.

Mark's brother Colin, a physicist, leaves England, fleeing it for the Soviet Union.His wife kills herself with gas.There is a child, Paul.Martha stays at the house with Mark and Paul.The house is surrounded by journalists.Lynda, Mark's hospitalized wife, wants to return and live in the basement flat with her friend Dorothy.Dorothy's rent payment is sure money for Mark who is faced with school fees for both his own son, Francis, and for his nephew, Paul.

Part Two of the book begins with a quotation from A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES by Robert Musil.When Martha learns that her mother is planning to come to England, she takes to her bed.In anticipating the visit, Martha sees that both she and her mother fear pain.Martha knows that to make a book, for instance, one has to remove the things that are violent, emotional, protesting. In Africa Mrs. Quest had a child servant, Steven.Initially she was unkind to him and came to regret that and the memory hurt her conscience.Mrs. Quest told him stories from Kipling.In the end her visit to England is cut short basically by mutual consent.After her mother leaves, Martha collapses.

The year 1956 is a climactic year given the events of Hungary and the Suez.During the emergencies encountered in the patched-together Mark Coldridge family Martha is able to identify the machinery pertaining to mental illness and juvenile delinquency services.Mark propounds a theory of scapegoating in a matter involving his stepfather.He suggests that friends work quietly to alleviate the problem.Taking political and public stands are not necessarily useful, he argues.

Martha uses a particular personality when dealing with Paul.By the time Francis and Paul are teenagers, Martha is able to hear the thoughts of others.(Lynda has always had this ability.)The mature Paul develops the capacity to be an effective trader.After the children are grown, Martha has little to do as Mark's secretary.

Doris Lessing's blend of realism and fantasy is unusual.This novel is the fifth of a series and provides an amazing and unusual end for the heroine.The improbable conclusion of the political and psychological strands of the story appear in a section called appendix.This is on par with, although more controlled than, THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK.It is a masterpiece.

My Favorite of this Author
Doris Lessing shows her mastery of Sufi story telling methods in this science fiction writing, as well as cleverly embedding Sufi themes about dreams and self remembering.The main character lives in an apocalyptic world in great change.It reflects the "quest" (my main character is Martha Quest) of all of us during this time of change.It is part of a series of writings, but I read it as a stand alone book and enjoyed it a lot.I was less concerned with the plot and more how the character experienced life and the situations she moved through, and how she got in touch with her experience and flowed with her feeling sense of what was going on.I liked the way the situations helped bring out a different kind of psychology that has the Sufi path as its source.The maturity of such themes does reflect the growth of the author on this path.

Thank You Doris Lessing
This was the first book by Doris Lessing that I ever read, nearly thirty years ago.At the time I read it, one part of it in particular had a profound effect upon my life, namely her description of Martha's encounter with the Self-hater.For Martha, meeting her internal Self-hater was like plugging into 10,000 volts of hatred.After the encounter she says she understands how it is possible for a man to rape and murder a young girl, and how the holocaust was possible.She speculates that perhaps Hitler had been taken over by the Self-hater.This was so pertinent to me because I was then going through a very similar experience.(I describe this in my book, "Captain California Battles the Beelzebubian Beasts of the Bible).Reading Ms. Lessing's book gave me a much-needed new perspective on what I was experiencing, and increased my confidence that I would get through it all right.

Since then I have read most of Ms. Lessing's other books, and have reread several of them at least twice.I believe that the common motif of all of them is her conviction that human evil is primarily caused by a lack of human self-awareness, and is therefore something that can be overcome.Her books represent a determined effort to make people more aware of themselves.Ms. Lessing's genius as a writer is such that I can hardly imagine anyone reading her books without being profoundly changed, without becoming significantly more mature.

Inspiring, liberating end to what is a heart rending series
I don't know why Doris Lessing is classified as a feminist.Apparently, she didn't understand that herself.I view her as one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century and the best from the 2nd half.At the end of this book I attained a deep sense of liberation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Obscure Discordian Masterpiece
Many who read this book would be shocked to learn that Doris Lessing dropped out of school at the age of 14, considering the breadth of knowledge she displays.Maybe they would be less surprised to learn that this series was written shortly after she began studying Sufism.This series not only presents a clever way of providing some persective on human affairs, it also give to us a mythology of prehistory as valid as any other I've come across.The Canopean view of Shammat as not necessarily "evil" and the idea of "forced evolution" were especially valuable to me.
Some parts may be difficult but I found it all highly stimulating and obviously it is very well written.If you're unfamiliar with Chinese culture or have no background knowledge, a book on Chinese history may seem terribly boring to you.Similarly, these books may bore you if you haven't any interest in pre-history or spiritual dimensions.This is a work of science fiction and those who appreciate the genre should enjoy it, however, it is one of those pieces with a broader appeal, perhaps comparable to some of Vonnegut's work.
Robert Anton Wilson's introduction to his illustrated screenplay, Reality is What You Can Get Away With, is an homage to this book and confirmed a feeling I had that this should be added to the Discordian Canon.I know very few who have read this marvel and none who were disappointed.I keep my volumes in a place of honor.

Will stay with you for life
One of the most rewarding and thought-provoking series of books you are likely to ever read in your life. By all means go and get them. Of particular interest to me over the years have been "Shikasta" (which I have come to think of as a fascinating parable about the directions you are going to take with your own life and why) and "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four And Five" (a gut-wrenching "fairy tale" about relationships between women and men). Both of those books beautifully show how conditioning cripples our abilities to perceive and evolve. To do this from a space fiction point of view was highly unusual (to say the least) at the point in time the books were written, but with regard to today's smudging of the borders between genres, this seems more commonplace. Anyone interested in the concepts related to the description of Zone 6 (Shikasta), might also enjoy reading "The Active Side Of Infinity" by Carlos Castaneda, whereas women wrestling with the relationship-related kind of conditioning (Marriages), may find "The Sorcerer's Crossing" by Taisha Abelar as interesting as I did.

longwinded and boring
she has some very cool ideas here and there
but for the most part, these books just drag on and on and on serving only to make some personal moral/philosophical statement that i think could have been saved for interviews or personal discussion

Thoughtful, imaginative, thrilling
I am afraid this book may turn out to have a limited audience:too literary and "unrealistic" for science-fiction fans, and too fantastic for literary types.Too bad, because this is a stupendous book,or rather, series of novels.Some may think it strange that an author withas high-brow a reputation as Doris Lessing would stoop to writing"space fiction" (her term), but she has been incorporating sci-fielements in her fiction as far back as The Four-Gated City, and maybefarther, depending on your definitions.What is science fiction if notthe use of extreme and imaginative settings to point out truths invisiblein our crowded world?Science fiction encourages "thinking outsidethe box," a concept that Lessing has explored in a lifetime ofground-breaking work.What are we?What does it mean to be human?Isthere more?Lessing hits these questions with a courageous mind and anarsenal of experience and imagination.

Second book is worth a glance; that's about it.
This entire series is deplorable.The second book held slight interest, but as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with the rest of the series.The ideas are insipid, overused, and uninspired.Long and not worth theeffort. ... Read more

Product Description

At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes. Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and, he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.

Customer Reviews (21)

Depressing
Doris Lessing may be a skillful writer but to anyone who has ever been made to feel like The Other, especially those who may presently feel cruelly estranged and alienated from those around you, SKIP THIS BOOK. It's definitely not going to encourage you or help your life get better.

Flawless
I was looking forward to Ben's story and the epilogue to "The Fifth Child" by the same author.I have enjoyed this book even more than I had its predecessor.This is a book about being different. About acceptance and understanding.A book that pierces the heart.
Ben Lovatt.Who was he?What was he?As vulnerable as a newborn baby, yet at times very wild, instinctive, almost... feral.

May I suggest to read "The Fifth Child" first.This sequel stands on its own perfectly but I still feel that the reader would understand Ben's tale better by reading about his birth and family beforehand.

Once again I have admired Ms. Lessing's writing style (just like before, no chapters in this book, just a few pauses) and her ability to convey an emotional pathos with a simplicity that captivates deeply.This book was gripping, powerful and really sad.The quote from a British newspaper on the book cover -I bought the UK book edition- summarizes my feelings "A wonderful novel, flawless as a black pearl".

Heartbreaking and disappointing
I was expecting some sort of redemption for Ben, but alas, it was not to be.Why didn't Lessing perhaps focus on Ben getting assessed by child specialists so that perhaps he could have been helped and protected?It really made me angry that there was obviously no remorse on the part of Ben's father for putting him in that institution.You would think in the sequel that perhaps Ben's family would have tried to understand Ben a little better, that perhaps Ben's father would develop some compassion for his own son!

The ending was a cop-out.

Award winning author?Bah!
I read The Fifth Child and found it a passable piece of literature:It had a fair amount of character development and an interesting plot.It interested me to the point where I wanted to read more about Ben.Big mistake!While Ben, In the World started off along the same lines as TFC, it changed, horrifically, about midway through.Perhaps Lessing pushed the writing assignment onto a hack as she tired of writing the book.The pages became filled with tripe, plain and simple.All of a sudden, the reader is taken away from Ben, and vice versa, to be fed a bunch of little stories about this side character or that one, and those stories are, at once, insipid and inane.I found myself angry as heck as the book drew to a close.It was easy to see where it was leading, but painful to go along for the bumpy ride.The ending, as written, was not necessary, to strongly disagree with another reviewer here.It was as frustrating to read as the preceeding half of the book, leading up to it.I am now soured on Lessing.I may read a few reviews of other books she has written, but unless I can determine that she is a better writer than what I have been shown in this Ben book, I will pass her by, for good!

Ben
A continuation of The Fifth Child finds Ben on his own.His differences make him stand out.His struggles to succeed makes for an interesting story.Easy to read. ... Read more

Product Description
The celebrated author explores new ways to view ourselves and the society we live in, and gives us fresh answers to such enduring questions as how to think for ourselves and understand what we know. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Interesting topic
But hard to get through. Her writing style seemed dated to me ( which it is of course!) but the topic kept me moving through the book.

plainly spoken, clarion, revolutionary
This is my second Doris Lessing book and this time, a collection of 5 plainly spoken, clarion, revolutionary essays about how we think.Not for a second romantic or rose coloured, but never far from compassion or progress or hope.Ms. Lessing urges acceptance of our "animal" ways, and such internalisation of our brutal groupthink instincts that we grow our societies and ourselves in ways that we've not been able to.I love how she elevates the social sciences as essential tools for understanding ourselves, but mostly I love her honouring of literature (no bias here:) as integral and revealing a field as history.I believe her arguments would appear as compelling to the cynics as to the idealists because she understands and explains the human condition so well.I wish everyone would read this little book.

Still worth reading
I wanted to get the book mostly because of the interesting title, but found it very thought-provoking, still, after some 20 years since it's written. Many things that I have read in other writings by Doris Lessing, but still, very much worth reading.

Transcripts of Some Valuable Lectures
I found this book interesting in several regards.I have enjoyed the writings of Doris Lessing very much.As an author she went through three distinct and overlapping periods, one as a feminist, one as a socialist, and one as a Sufi student.Following the insights gained through her contact with Sufi teachings (which show up strongly in THE FOUR GATED CITY and in the Shikasta series), she shares the theme of "influence", all the ways which we are influenced to conform to group think and to make purchases of items we either do not need or which are not healthy for us.There are roots to why these conformist pressures work, some biological and some sociological.Lessing discusses these.The book lacks documentation for some of the assertions made, but I think this is understandable because they were lecture transcripts and because Lessing herself is speaking more from what she observes.There is an assumption that we can take her words as a lens and look at what is going on through them.Most of the themes are present in our daily lives, if we are awake enough to look and verify them.It takes a kind of self reflection that is part of Sufi training.She does not present her observations as a Sufi exercise, though, but simply invites listeners/readers into a self reflection about what is going on, and then perhaps curving back to ourselves to see how we are influenced and how we can break free of this.This particular edition has a beautiful black and white picture of Lessing inside the front cover and a one page biography.Unlike many of her writings, this book is a fairly speedy read, making it an ideal introduction to her writings.

Beyond Revealing for some, a reminder for others
So often one comes across a piece of literature that asks for nothing from the reader, this is not one of those works.

We are all guilty of branding and labeling, the point is that one examine oneself during the process so that we understand the meaning behind those labels.AS humans we have a tendency to use words in ways that make them meaningless or less powerful.Yet the implications are still evident and strong.So often we fall prey to the whimsy of the age we live in, yet Lessing implores us to look deeper.If you enjoy the metaphysical in literature and other Lessing works such as The Golden Notebook, then Prisons we Choose to Live Inside will be a riveting read.Please do not become discouraged by those who say this is a tough read (or scholarly), this book is a MUST read for those of us who are, or would like to become more self aware. ... Read more

Product Description
In Pursuit of the English is a novelist's account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read about--though they are the real English. The cast of characters--if that term can be applied to real people--includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. Skeffington, a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest, a prostitute, who replies to Lessing's question "Don't you ever like sex?" with "If you're going to talk dirty, I'm not interested."

In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliantpiece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

warm working-class reception...or something
This little book is a gem in every way. Lessing's loving account of how she got along when she first came to London/England is warm, witty, funny and written with an admirable insight into the minds of people she met. Itis never less than very good, and it digs deeply into "the Englishcharacter", if there is such a thing... ... Read more

Product Description

In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays, we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has learned, over the course of a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, to read the world differently. From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays cover an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing's clear-eyed vision and clearly expressed prose.

Customer Reviews (5)

Lessing's Time Bites
THis is a serious book because it brings you to the author's views in a number of subjects, all of them worth knowing.Her points of view are contemporary and useful as a guide for those who wonder why and how come certain things are the way they are. Her observations put light into events very clearly and in especially the events involving the Zimbabwe situation.

LUIS

Decent, sensible, clear but without poetic fire or humor
This collection of small essays reveals to us the world of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. Lessing is an extremely serious writer , one with a strong moral sense. She writes here about a number of her fellow writers, D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, A.C.Coppard, Bulgakov, George Meredith, Olive Schreiner, Tolstoy- about the writer who has meant the most to her Idries Shah, and the religious philosophy he espouses, Sufism- about animals, especially cats, about being young and being old, about the changes she has seen in writers mentality and motivation in her lifetime, about Education , about the tragedy of Zimbabwe,about Opera and her connection with the composer Philip Glass, about the difference between writing fiction and writing autobiography, about the satisfaction of knowing her book 'The Golden Notebook' has been read and enjoyed by so many people in so many different places. She also writes an essay about the wisdom of 'Ecclesiastes'. She writes of its prose. "From the very first verse of Ecclesiastes you are carried along on a running tide of sound, incantantory, almost hypnotic , and it is easy to imagine yourself sitting among this man's pupils, listeningt them..... Your ears are entranced , but at the same time you are very much alert."
I would say of this collection on the whole that there are spots in it in which the reader will be made very alert and feel that they have truly learned and enjoyed. But that there is not real inspiration or fire or humor in it. A decent work.

Lessing on Your Mind
I am old enough to remember a time when every self-respecting woman had a copy of the "Golden Notebooks" on her shelf. I am not sure that books are important to today's hip woman, but I have been a life long reader of hers, and she continues in her 80s to be a great humanitarian if not quite the great writer she used to be. "Time Bites" which could just as well be called "tidbits" is not much in the way of a book. These are not even proper essays really, certainly not prize winners, but they are 'occasional pieces' which is a respectable genre in itself. She writes appreciations of writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, she addresses what she calls the stupidity of political correctness which, correctly, she says has destroyed American universities, she reminds us of the insanity of the American left, but also of the lunatic right, she speaks in her old age of moderation, shares her love of animals, and speaks yet again to the tragedy of Zimbabwe, her former home country. The voice of sanity is rare these days, so I highly recommend this collection, which includes dozens of short, probing, gently critical pieces. Lessing, one feels, cares far more about the world than about herself. How's that for a recommendation?

one to buy
I recently got this book out of the library and had time to read only a few of the essays.I was going to renew it ,but instead am buying it because I found what she had to say so profoundly true, that I had to own it.I am going to have all of my American friends and family read "The Wrong Way Home"--she speaks to the idea of terrorism and cult thinking and how to defeat it with books and education worldwide.
Some of the essays are short but provacative.She covers so many subjects and mentions so many writers that I've never heard of that I think I will have to write them down to read later. I've read many of her other books, The Canopus in Argus Series, Mara and Dan, The Good Terrorist, The Fifth Child, to name a few--they are all so different, and she never fails to take me away to that other place I go to in a good book. And I love that she has an affinity for cats.She is so wise, and so funny sometimes....I'd like to take her to lunch.

Books, Operas, Cats & Other Things.
In the preface for the 'Writers' and Artists' 2003 Yearbook,' this author tells about how hard it was to get her first book published."Since I began writing seventy or so years ago everything has changed for writers."This is a collection of sixty-five essays on diverse subjects, all of which comprised her long life.She has written fourteen novels, six non-fiction, two operas, several collections of short stories, poetry, possibly a type of sci-fi about planets 5 & 8, and other writings.

"I do not believe that one can be changed by a book (or by a person) unless there is already something present, latent or in embryo, ready to be changed.Books have influenced me all my life."She says that we take stories and storytelling for granted."The great reservoir of myth, legends, parables, tales, that we dip into for entertainment, use for films and plays, refer to so as to elucidate a point or draw a parallel -- it is alwalys there and we hardly think about it.Tales are as old as humanity, like a long shadow thrown by our history."

She wrote two short stories about felines: "On Cats" and "Particularly Cats.""Whatever was the quality that made Egyptians worship cats was probably the same one that associated them with magic and witchcraft in Europe."She compared Desmond Morris' CATLORE to an earlier: "This new book is because the first, CATWATCHING, was such a success, provoking storms of questions from all over the world.Some are dealt with here.There is, too, more cat history, but I think facts are often just stated and left at that (here and in other cat books) when surely demand further investigation.For instance, why did the Egyptians worship cats?"

She takes umbrage with Jeffrey Masson's 2002 THE NINE EMOTIONAL LIVES OF CATS (which I own) claiming he wrote it as a six-month experiment."The cats in this tale are in a different world from your average London mog or an suburban cat: cats in luck, cats de luxe."But, she wrote an endorsement on the back cover:"I enjoyed this book about our fascinating and often enigmatic friends the cats, and learned from it."He also wrote of another experiment, RAISING THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM which I reviewed in January, 2006, and THE CAT WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD: A FABLE.

Doris Lessing has written in addition to all that previously mentioned three plays, one named 'Play With a Tiger,' and two volumes of her autobiography, UNDER MY SKIN and WALKING IN THE SHADE. ... Read more

Product Description

Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization. With his trusted companions—Mara's daughter, his hope for the future; the abandoned child-soldier Griot, who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories; and the snow dog, a faithful friend who brings him back from the depths of despair—Dann embarks on a strange and captivating adventure in a suddenly colder, more watery climate in the north.

Customer Reviews (8)

Impressive New Novel of a Far Future Earth from Doris Lessing
In "the Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and The Snow Dog", acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing has rendered a most captivating tale about friendship, loss and love, set sometime in Planet Earth's distant future; a time when the world has been plunged anew in yet another great Ice Age that has entombed much of the Northern Hemisphere in great ice sheets. Humanity's great cities are but a distant, almost forgotten, memory, buried under these thick ice sheets or submerged in seas and oceans. In her latest novel, a sequel to her 1999 "Mara and Dann", Lessing focuses upon the trials and tribulations of the adult Dann, now General Dann, and the leader of a great army in the barren wastes of northern Africa. Dann must contend with news of the sudden, tragic death of his sister Mara, and comes to terms with her newborn daughter, and with his own wife and newborn child. It is an emotional, intensely psychological journey that Dann undertakes, and one in which he nearly fails, over the course of years that are so elegantly collapsed within the relatively terse confines of Lessing's novel.Lessing's prose has never been better, and she has crafted such a mesmerizing tale that I found almost impossible to set aside, even for brief moments of time. For those wondering why Doris Lessing deserved the Nobel Prize for her excellent science fiction and fantasy literature, then reading this elegant little novel may provide you with some intriguing, perhaps delightful, answers.

The worlds of ghosts
"Mara and Dann," this tale's haunting predecessor (and, I think, one of Lessing's most powerful and imaginative and accessible books), followed its brother-and-sister heroes as they traversed the African continent at the end of an Ice Age many millennia in the future. Their harrowing adventures brought them to a farm within walking distance of the Rocky Gates (Straits of Gibraltar), the Western Sea (Atlantic), and the rapidly filling cavernous expanse of the Middle Sea (Mediterranean).

The sequel begins nine months later, when Dann decides to fulfill his dream of exploring the Middle Sea to see for himself the ice-covered continent of Europe and ultimately to confront the demons that assailed him during his trek through the desert. The subsequent narrative expands upon two subjects from the first book: the lust for knowledge that fueled Mara and Dann's transcontinental journey and the drug-stimulated schizophrenia that inexorably worsens Dann's ability to lead, as a reluctant "general," the refugees who make up his slapdash army. During Dann's period of incapacity, the task of running the army devolves to a sidekick named Griot; like many messianic figures, Dann requires a loyal administrator to smooth over the public perception of his bipolar outbursts.

Although "The Story of General Dann" will make little sense if you haven't read the earlier book, as a sequel it is both satisfying (tying up loose ends and expanding on earlier themes) and frustrating (leaving just as many loose ends). The book's pacing is admittedly slower and the plot is slighter: this is more a character study than an adventure story. Significant portions of the book deal with Dann's psychological breakdowns, with Griot's hunger for Dann's approval, and with their obsession with finding out as much as they can about the mysteries of the past. This sequel seems, in fact, to be a bridge to a yet-to-be-published finale.

Yet Lessing still conveys her preoccupations with the frailty of knowledge and our continual need to recreate the discoveries of the past: "it's likes seeing the worlds of ghosts.... We are looking at words that were copied from others, written by people who lived long before them." In an interview with John Freeman, Lessing spoke about this theme: "What pains me is that everything the human race has created has happened in the last 10,000 years, you know, and most of it in the recent years. An ice age would just wipe that out. It would. Then we have to begin again then, don't we, which is what we always do." The Mara and Dann books, then, are not simply disturbing fantasies disguised as adventures stories, but parables on the tenuousness and persistence of human civilization.

I want the time I spent reading this back.
General Dann doesn't understand the point of rebuilding because what they achieve will be lost and someone will have to rebuild again someday. Griot wishes Dann would act. The people still love Dann anyway. The book ends.

This was the type of book that I finished because I was hoping the ending would be worth it somehow. It wasn't, and I wanted to throw the book across the room when I had finished. The best that can be said is that it embodies Dann's sense of futility in engaging in any action. And boy, does that NOT make for good reading.

Trip to nowhere
After the first novel, "Mara and Dan," which was a stimulating foray into the Earth's future, this novel was a disappointment.It seems as if Lessing had a gun held to her head forcing her to write a sequel or else, when in fact she had nothing new to say about these characters or the setting.

A theme driven, thought provoking piece
I am currently reading "The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog: A Novel." It's the sequel to Mara and Dann which is number one on my favorites list. This book reads in typical Lessing fashion; propelled by stream of consciousness of the main character. Dann's dilemma, observations and musings, presented in omniscient third person, is the sole narrative. The first chapters seem to be using the spare voice of one re-telling an ancient fable or distant memory. There are few adjectives and detail is saved for seemingly random moments and Dann's inner dialogue. I've already read five years of Dann's life and I still don't feel that the story has begun. There is only the barest of character investment. Seemingly important characters are introduced and discarded within pages.If you have not read the first book then I doubt you would feel any character sympathy at all. As it is, I am familiar with the world Dann inhabits and I am excited to return.

This isn't the desperate, fast paced adventure that "Mara and Dann" was but it does explore some interesting themes. For instance, Dann is obsessed with what he does not know. He is constantly tantalized by fragments of knowledge and remnants of truth. He is frustrated by the complacent incuriosity of those around him and it begs the question: When are we satisfied with our knowledge, world, condition? When do we stop asking questions? It has me examining my own desire to learn and I can empathize with his frustration of apathy.

I haven't finished the book. As I said I am still waiting for the story to begin but I've had that same anticipatory feeling in other Lessing novels and found that I was missing the story, the crux, because I was expecting something else. Once I realized this I could settle down and appreciate the challenge and story she was sharing with the reader. She is a unique writer and her style defies stereotype. Doris Lessing is a true artist whose talent and method of conveyance would be impossible to teach.

On a lighter note a "snow dog" has been introduced as a central character and I like stories that have fuzzy animal friends.

Read it if you are a Lessing fan but not as an introduction to her work. ... Read more

Product Description
"Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But--a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps..."

Going Home is Doris Lessing's account of her first journey back to Africa, the land in which she grew up and in which so much of her emotion and her concern are still invested. Returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she found that her love of Africa had remained as strong as her hatred of the idea of "white supremacy" espoused by its ruling class. Going Home evokes brilliantly the experience of the people, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A review of Going Home by Doris Lessing
It is fifty years since Doris Lessing published Going Home, an account of her return to Rhodesia, the country where she grew up. By then in her thirties, she had already achieved the status of restricted person because of her political allegiances and her declared opposition to illiberal white rule. These days Zimbabwe makes the news because of internal strife and oppression. It is worth remembering, however, that fifty years ago the very structures of Southern Rhodesian society were built upon oppression, an oppression based purely on race.

Fifty years on Doris Lessing's Going Home an historical record of this noxious system, a record that is more effective, indeed more powerful because of its reflective and observational, rather than analytical style. Doris Lessing, a one-time card-carrying Communist, laid a large slice of the blame for the perpetuation of discrimination firmly at the door of the white working class. Though not all white workers were rich - indeed she records that many were abjectly poor - what they had and sought to preserve was an elevated status relative to the black population. She describes white artisans as white first and artisans second. Though trade unions actively sought equal pay for equal work, they never campaigned for any kind of parity for black workers. On the contrary, they demanded the maintenance of racially differentiated pay rates. How's that for the spirit of socialist internationalism and brotherhood! (I accept there is a misplaced word there...). In fact Doris Lessing records that it was the relatively liberal capitalist enterprises that demanded more black labour, their motive of course arising from cost savings, not philanthropy. So trade unions spent much of their time making sure that companies hired their quota of higher paid, white labour.

Even in the 1950s, she remarks on the likelihood that many Africans were already better educated than their white counterparts. White youth shunned education as unnecessary, while Africans saw it as a possible salvation. She notes that the people who treated the African population the worst were recent immigrants from Europe, particularly those from Britain, who tended to be less educated themselves and drawn from the ranks of the politically reactionary. Such people, apparently, were equally critical of immigrants from southern Europe, and expected Spaniards and Greeks to work for African wages, not the white wages that they themselves demanded.

The situation in Rhodesia, clearly, had to change. Not only was such crass discrimination unsustainable, it was also comic, as are all racially posited class systems. While the South Africans over the border created honorary whites of the Japanese they increasingly had to do business with, the Rhodesians went through their own equally idiotic contortions. An example of such nonsense is quoted by Doris Lessing when she remarks that there was a privileged group of Africans who were granted the right not to carry passes with them at all times, as long as they carried a pass to record their exemption.

But it is also worth remembering that Doris Lessing, herself, was a banned person, unable to travel to certain places and very much under the watchful eyes of the authorities. In Going Home she observes a society that had to collapse under the weight of its unsustainable contradictions. The fact that this took more than twenty years after the book was written was nothing less than a crime, and probably contributed to the subsequent and equally lamentable reaction.

Doris Lessing records seeing a British film towards the end of her travels. She describes it as a "cosy little drama of provincial snobberies and homespun moralities played out in front of African farmers in their big cars". Fifty years on, Britain is probably cosy and provincial, and the snobberies are still rife. But now it is not Rhodesia where these reactionaries look down on people of other races overpay and under-educated themselves. It is not in Africa where corporations would dearly love to employ cheaper labour, imported if need be. Rhodesia's white privilege of the 1950s was obviously absurd. But there are some parallels with economic and class relations in the Britain of today and, like all good books, Doris Lessing's Going Home may even add prescience to its qualities.
... Read more

Product Description

I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.

Customer Reviews (11)

a rambling, self-serving mess
I read this novel for a book club, and was very disappointed.I was shocked at the poor quality of writing, which I suppose can be largely forgiven for an author who is nearly 90 years old.I have never read any of Doris Lessing's books other than this one, but cannot not even remotely recommend Alfred & Emily.That it won the Nobel Prize makes me feel a bit like the little boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes": I feel like I'm suposed to swoon for this marvelously insightful tale of the human spirit, but no one else sees what I see or won't admit what is plainly in front of them-- a book that would not have made it past an editor's desk had the author not been famous for some other work.

Alfred & Emily is the incoherent telling of 2 lives that "never were" in the 1st half.It is a fictionalized story of what the author's parents might have lived like had there never been a 1st world war (and if they never married or parented the author). None of the characters are compelling or even remotely interesting; one never finds out what motivates either character, or what drives them to form their various relationships.Ms. Lessing can't really decide what to do with these people, so she basically does nothing at all with her father, and creates a

Life is hard even if one can make a remarkable story of it
In the first part of the book Doris Lessing imagines her parents lives as if they had lived easier and happier lives, lives in which they did not marry each other. Lessing is a first- rate storyteller and thus this part of the work is readable. But it is not really deep in feeling and not compelling on an emotional level.
In the second part she tells the story of her father who lost a leg in the First War, and also lost most of his good friends there. A tough and determined character haunted by nightmares of the war he went on to make a new life for himself and his family- though the injuries of the war soon got to him and he died quite young at sixty after suffering greatly. Her mother who nursed the father during the war and enjoyed the time of their social whirl in Tehran also had an extremely difficult life. Lessing speaks of her terrible conflict with her mother and her having married to get away from her. She describes the world of her Rhodesian early years and the period of her early adulthood right after the war. She has a great ability to create an atmosphere of Time and Place. In speaking of her parents difficult emotional lives she makes the comment that 'children learn the emotions of their parents'. Certainly she gives a sense of having some of the same kind of toughness, and determination that her parents had. She also speaks of her mother's remarkable storytelling ability and how this was transmitted to her. This comes as a kind of grudging thank- you note to a mother who she repeatedly accuses of having interfered too much her life. Lessing also tells the story of her brother who narrowly survived the sinking of his ship in the Second World War, and who lived for many years with what she calls a kind of 'dullness' of mind. In an incident which sounds like it comes from one of the books of Oliver Sachs her brother received a knock on the head in his latter years, and it suddenly brought back the clarity of consciousness he had had before the ship incident. He died not long after claiming that most of his adult life he had lived being absent from himself. Here too Lessing describes the life of one she is very close to in a very effective way, but somehow without great warmth or loving feeling.
For Lessing Life seems to be hard even if one is able to make a remarkable story of it.

This is a fascinating combo historical biographical fiction and a short biography
"Alfred and Emily: A Novella".Alfred Taylor is a farmer who becomes affluent and marries a warm caring local.Ignoring the rage of her father, Emily McVeagh leaves town and goes to London where she becomes a nurse who marries a doctor.World War I never occurs so they never meet as a wounded soldier and a nurse.

"Alfred and Emily; Two Lives.Alfred Taylor was severely injured in combat on the continent.He was medically evacuated back to a London hospital.There he met Nurse Emily McVeigh.As he healed, they fell in love and got married.They move to Rhodesia after the war and have two children Doris and Harry, but their colonial farm fails.

This is a fascinating combo historical biographical fiction and a short biography.The novella is a terrific alternate history of the author's parents while the biography provides a short guide to compare what if to what happened.Fans of the great author will appreciate this fine book although the fiction overwhelms the nonfiction as the latter is too minute for newbies and too repetitive for fans while the former provides an intriguing look at probably what would not have happened if the liberating of the masses did not happen because the mechanism WWI was never fought.

Harriet Klausner

A Surpising Acquaintance with Doris Lessing
I had not read before any of Lessing's books but I wanted to get to know this Nobel Prize winner writer... First book I found was Alfred & Emily... The first part, I was reading it and asking myself how this "Barbara Cartland"ish style could have won such an esteemed prize... It was so "soapy", "pink", "superficial" in every sense... However, I hung on, I made it to the second part... And there, I made acquaintance with the genious writer in Doris Lessing's person... The abrupt change of style was remarkable... The sentence structure which was so subtle in the soapy part, became shattered when telling the tale of shattered lives... The style which was so easy going in the pink part, became devious in describing the "no way out" life of her parents... Such sofistication of mastery of language is so unique.... Even if only for experiencing this sofistication, you should take "Alfred & Emily" into consideration...

Much less than I hoped for
This is a somewhat unusual book. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing chose to write about her parents, Alfred Taylor and Emily McVeigh, but rather than stick to their actual lives she took the liberty in the first half of the book to imagine them as they might have been had there never been a World War I. The second half of the book deals with them as they actually were.

Lessing imagines her parents as what they seemed to have wanted to be-a farmer and a head nurse-who never married each other. The farmer had a wife and family. The nurse married a doctor who was not a very loving individual and who died young. Alfred and Emily met each other, but never were a couple, in their daughter's imagination.

The imagined story is stilted and old-fashioned in style. Possibly because the main characters were people she knew well in other circumstances, Lessing doesn't do much with their development. While events occur, she doesn't really give any insight as to why the individuals behave as they do. Toward to end of the novella she finally gives them some life, but by then it is hard remain interested.

The second half of the book that tells about their real life is rather rambling and disjointed. Lessing is 87 years old and in the manner of many older people she seems to repeat herself fairly often while describing her parents' life.

The real Alfred Taylor wanted to be a farmer, but he went to "The Great War" and lost most of his right leg from shrapnel wound. He spent a very long time in the hospital recovering and that is where he met his wife, Emily McVeigh, a nurse. She was a wonderfully talented upper-middle-class woman who decided to defy her father's wishes and became a nurse. After the war they moved to the British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Alfred tried to farm, but nothing about the land was like the English farm of his dreams. Emily suffered from a nervous breakdown and Alfred was always suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I suspect that readers who are very familiar with Doris Lessing and her other works might find this book enjoyable. I don't feel that it holds up well alone. Lessing seems to expect that the reader already knows a great deal about her life. That, coupled with the disjointed style, makes the book less than I had hoped for from a writer of her stature.

Armchair Interviews says: Heed this reviewer's comments. ... Read more

Product Description

In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.

Customer Reviews (12)

Four fascinating tales
I'm still trying to work out how long a piece of writing has to be if it's called a novel. The Grandmothers is a set of four "short novels," according to its cover. But how is that different from four novellas?

The first, and title, story is an intriguing family tale of just 53 pages. Two fathers. Two daughters. Two grandmothers. And two mothers who enter only peripherally into visits to a seaside restaurant. The waitress envies their perfect lives, which maybe aren't as perfect as they seem, and the reader is drawn to view images of past innocence with almost reluctant curiosity. A startling, odd, sad tale, and a fascinating read.

The second story, of Victoria and the Staveneys, is an all-too-real description of a promising life turned around by circumstance, and a vivid depiction of the tolerance, love and affection that accompany expectations. I wanted more for Victoria, and in the end, I guess she got more than she was offered. In the end she wasn't who anyone tried to make her, but maybe she wasn't all she could have made herself either.

The Reason for it is the shortest tale of the four, an odd story of how quickly a culture falls apart. It reads innocently and tragically through the eyes of an elderly man, but it's echoes of modern life can't be entirely accidental.

And finally, A Love Child, at 117 pages, is an amazing depiction of wartime Britain and the life of a man who grows up between the wars. Introduced to communism, he finds poetry. Introduced to sickness, he finds love. Introduced to success, he keeps himself to himself and tries to analyze the reason others care for him. But through it all he misses the truth of how he should care for others. A sad story, but totally engrossing.

So now I still don't know how long a novel has to be. But perhaps if you're a writer of Doris Lessing's caliber it really doesn't matter. I'd certainly recommend the book, and I enjoyed the time spent meeting her characters.

Underrated
I am not sure it's good practice to comment on other reader's reviews, but I have to do it (although I shouldn't perhaps use the word "readers", as we'll see). There are three reviews which gave the book one star only, and none of the reviewers, plausibly, has read the book. One is from a person who is angry at amazon for not having received the book; a second is from someone who heard an interview to Doris Lessing and thought she was racist (?!?). A third is from a reader who has at least started the book, but has not finished it, judging it too bad.
This is a shame, because this is a true masterpiece. Two at least of the short novels are worth the book by themselves. Personally, I think the most beutiful story here is not "Love's child", which is also wonderful, but rather "Victoria and the Staveneys", which narrates the ways the life of a working-class black woman meets at various points with the lives of a rich, albeit leftist, white family. In the course of reading that, you'll come to know some lovely characters, and some disturbing truths about both our society and human psychology; "disturbing" is the adjective one of the negative reviews used about "The grandmothers", the short novel which gives the title to the collection. Disturbing they are, these short novels, disturbing and fascinating at the same time, as only really great literature and life itself can be.

Two jewels out of four
Deserves five stars for the first two novellas in this set of four.The third is too science-fiction for my taste and the fourth is too loosely plotted;but all four are beautifully written, with a spartan style which is all the same vividly descriptive.

Do Not Give Up, Read On: Two Stories are Interesting, and One is Exceptional
As I post this review, I have read six of Lessing's novels from different time periods in her career all the way from her first novel in the 1950s to this more recent 2003 collection of four stories. This present novel is from the end of her career, published in 2003. As with all of her works, it contains some of the feminine perspectives, dialogues, analysis, and commentary that we associate with Lessing. The present stories are short and the social commentary is toned down drastically from other novels

Doris Lessing (1919 - ) is the 2007 Nobel Prize winner in literature. She has a score of novels and many other works. Her complex novel The Golden Notebook (1957), her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950), and The Summer Before The Dark (1973) are considered to be her representative works. I read those three plus a few more. I have set up a Listmania list on her books.

I had to force myself to read the book since the prose is difficult to follow, unlike her earlier books. One has flashes that Lessing has lost her ability to write coherently as one reads. I had to read the first part of the first story, The Grandmothers, at least five times before I could develop much enthusiasm for the story. It is about two grandmothers, not related by blood, but who are lifelong friends. They have a somewhat bizarre relationship with each other's sons. I did not like the story.

The second story Victoria and the Staveneys is a much better story about a young and poor black woman who has a child with a younger man from a middle class family. It is a far more interesting story and it has some emotion.

The third story The Reason For Its is almost unreadable and many will quit the book at that point. My recommendation is to simply skip the story.

The last story A Love Child is a brilliant and entertaining story, easy to read, interesting on almost every page, and a satisfying read. It should have been placed at the front, and The Grandmothers at the back.

I liked the book and would recommend it as a loaner from a library and just read stories #2 and #4. It is a short quick read that takes an evenings to read. It does not contain the feminine arguments found in some of her longer works, but the present work is far easier read than The Golden Notebok (far, far easier). But, only two stories are well written. Skip the others. If I had to pick one book that is easy to read and contains her arguments, I would recommend The Grass is Singing. It is a more innovative work and also easy to read.

The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels
I REGRET I AM YET TO RECEIVE THE BOOK, EVEN AFTER A MONTH HAS ELAPSED. SUPPOSED TO COME BY "EXPRESS INTERNATIONAL DELIVERY" OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT. ... Read more

Product Description

Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons Eve with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances's feet. And the world's political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination....

Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream-and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward -- from one of the greatest writers of our time.

From swinging-'60s London to liberated sub-Saharan Africa, the author depicts the human faces of a broad canvas of issues in this polemical piece. The novel ranges from anorexia to AIDS to casting a questioning eye at the morality of the travelers on the World Bank gravy train. Moving from London to the tragic landscape of post-independence "Zimlia" (a thinly veiled Zimbabwe), Lessing documents the social movement and lost dreams of a post-war generation, for whom "it is always The Dream that counts." --Rachel Holmes, Amazon.co.uk ... Read more

Customer Reviews (20)

Should Our Dreams Ever End?
It's the sixties and Frances Lennox and her two sons try to make the best of their situation, which requires that they live with her conservative mother-in-law, who is the German matriarch of this English family. Francis's ex-husband, who is a Communist rabble rouser, dumps his second wife's problem child Sylvia with Frances and she takes charge of the girl as if she were her own in this excellent and dramatic novel that takes you back to the tumultuous sixties. The book moves forward through two decades, reliving the politics of the times through the voices and views of Ms. Lessing's well drawn characters. A super story laced with satire.

THE PRICE OF SUBJUGATING ONE'S NEEDS
In this testament to a time long ago, The Sweetest Dream: A Novel reminds us of a colorful era when the boundaries were blurred, the issues were paramount, and many young people (and some older ones) were celebrating the revolution.

Frances Lennox is trying to make it on her own, raise her two sons, and manage to maintain a household for the seemingly ever-growing group of hangers-on that shows up regularly at the house owned by her former mother-in-law Julia, whose generosity she depends upon.Neither of them are very happy when ex-husband Johnny (and black sheep son) shows up frequently, expecting the king's treatment.

During one of these moments, Frances gives in to the feelings she often hides.Her ex has just savagely put down his son Colin, whose first novel is being published; in his rant, Johnny reams his son out for his bourgeois beliefs and attitudes.Frances calls him to task for his behavior, which goes against the grain for her and wrings her out emotionally.

Following this dramatic scene, Frances gives in to her feelings, showing them freely, for the first time ever:"And then, a surprise to herself, Frances laid her head down on her arms, on the table, among all the dishes.She sobbed.Andrew waited, noting the freshets of tears that renewed themselves every time he thought she had recovered. He was white too now, shaken.He had never seen his mother cry, never heard her criticize his father in this way."

But despite the emotional moments Frances suffers, from time to time, she continues the task of cleaning up other people's messes.

Throughout this tale, I wanted to shake this woman; but I also knew that she was, in a way, a victim of her times.

The book was long, with relentless moments such as these, which I found tedious, despite being able to relate to the story.Nevertheless, the most I can offer is four stars at this time.

It Lacks A Good Storyline And It's Very Unbalanced
I was attracted to this book by the title and by the fact that Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2007 (highlighted in the cover). The book starts by narrating the life of Frances in London in the 1960s in a big house with several residents. It dwells on the popularity of communism at that time, and its failed promises, often reminding me of 'Animal Farm'. Overall, as a book and as a novel, I found it uninteresting and difficult to read. There are too many irrelevant characters such as Jill and Geoffrey; the timeline is sometime very slow, sometimes very fast, sometimes skipping several years at once; some major events take only some paragraphs, while other more trivial ones take several pages; and the focus of the book shifts from one character to another, to Sylvia. It definitely lacks a storyline that gives cohesion and life to the book, it lacks drama, suspense, romance... and it left me wondering what was the book title all about.

"The infinite incongruity that life was capable of"
"The sweetest dream" of the title is a world of equality -- a world in which no one is poor, no one is oppressed, and no one is inferior.It is a dream that has beguiled many, including, in her youth, Doris Lessing.The particular variant that captivated her was British Communism of the Thirties and Forties.She became disillusioned with communism in the Fifties, and in this novel she excoriates it as well as other forms of political thought (mostly liberal or leftist in nature) that ignore the sanctity and dignity of the individual life and, as this review is entitled (borrowing a phrase from the novel), "the infinite incongruity that life [is] capable of."Life is messy, some people are evil, and others are weak, while political doctrines are far too neat and tidy . . . and, in their oversimplification, ultimately hypocritical.

The story of THE SWEETEST DREAM is almost epic in scope.It is told through the lives of three generations of ordinary but extraordinarily strong women:(i) Julia Lennox (nee von Arne), who was born into a solidly bourgeois German family and escaped that country as it turned to Nazism via her marriage to Englishman Philip Lennox; (ii) her daughter-in-law Frances Lennox, who married Julia's son Johnny, but then was left to fend for herself and their two sons, with considerable help from Julia, as Johnny (shamelessly self-centered and all the while going by the sobriquet "Comrade Johnny") pursued his lifelong worship and support of Stalinist communism; and (iii) Sylvia Lennox, who as the daughter of Johnny's second wife became his step-daughter but whom he also foisted off on Frances and Julia to provide meaningful and loving parenting.For the most part, the action of the book is divided between the mid-1960s in London, where Frances and Julia open their home to a motley assortment of alienated and/or rebellious youth, and the 1980s in Africa -- specifically, "Zimlia", which is Lessing's name for (I believe) Zimbabwe -- where Sylvia heroicly tries to carry on as a doctor in a rural mission midst AIDS and wretched poverty while the post-colonial African rulers and the self-righteous international aid community flatter and enrich one another in air-conditioned resorts and hotels.

While epic in scope, the novel is not quite as grand in execution.Like life, it too is messy, but on this score art need not mirror life.It is not just that the narrative could be more refined.(In some places, it bears the all the indicia of first-draft status.)It is also that the political commentary could be somewhat more subtle.Lessing is scathing in her portrayals and denunciations of various breeds of ideologues, so much so that at times THE SWEETEST DREAM itself verges on becoming a screed.For example:

* On feminism:"The beginning of the new feminism in the Sixties resembled nothing so much as a little girl at a party, mad with excitement, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes glazed, dancing about shrieking, 'I haven't got any knickers on, can you see my bum?'"

*On leftists:"The most immediately visible likeness was the hostility to people not in agreement.The left-wing or liberal children * * * maintained intact inherited habits of mind.'If you are not with us, you are against us.'The habit of polarisation, 'If you don't think like us, then you are a fascist.'"* * *"They all used words like fascist all the time, anyone they might be having a tiff with was a fascist.They were so ignorant they did not know there had been real fascists * * *.They did not seem to know that fascist, Nazi, were words that meant people had been imprisoned, been tortured, had died in millions in that war."

* The most bitter and derisive portrayals are reserved for communism. For example: At the end of the novel, an aged Comrade Johnny gathers around himself disciples and comrades of yore, who "reminisce as if the great failure of the Soviet Union had never happened" and "with tender admiration * * * drank to possibly the cruellest murderer who has ever lived."

Even more than communism or other ideologies, what Doris Lessing really detests are hypocrisy and people who do not think for themselves.No doubt many readers will experience a blush of discomfort. Still and all, despite the polemics and occasional ham-handedness, THE SWEETEST DREAM is worth reading, even if just for the sprawling story.

Sweetest Dream, Laughable Reality
Doris Lessing is a writer of many locales and many genres. Of British parentage, she was born in Iran when it was called Persia. At age six she moved to Zimbabwe when it was called Rhodesia, and in 1949 she moved to London where she has remained ever since. In her 83 years, she's written over thirty books: realistic novels, science fiction novels, and some that she calls "inner-space novels."She's written plays, an opera libretto for Phillip Glass, and an autobiography.
Her latest realistic novel, The Sweetest Dream, begins in the early 1960s, and concerns Frances Lennox, a forth-something actress who has turned to journalism out of financial need. She has two adolescent sons. Their London house serves as a crash pad for teenagers with family troubles, so prevalent in the `60s. Frances' husband, Johnny, has abandoned her and the boys in order to pursue his own ambitions within the Communist Party. The story traces the gradual growth of all of the characters, youth and adult, into the late 1980s. Some remain in London, others go to the States, and still others wind up in Africa.Halfway through, the novel shifts direction and concerns itself with Sylvia, one of the flophouse kids, a once-anorexic waif who, having become a doctor, devotes her life to helping poor people with AIDS in Africa.
But the novel's first half deals mainly with London's Swinging Sixties. Lessing, herself once a `60s communist radical, is now deeply critical of the movement. In an interview with Salon, she has said, "We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks -- everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people."She's still incredulous at the current political correctness that has survived since the `60s. The Sweetest Dream seems to ask: did we really want our society torn down and rebuilt again by twenty-one year olds?
The sweetest dream that Lessing writes about is the dream of altruism, our dream of helping people, of serving others, of actively doing our parts to create a better, even a perfect world. What Lessing adds to the pot is that the character of altruism leans greatly upon the all-too-human personalities that practice it. Differing temperaments create different brands of social idealists.
Frances, for example, is the Good Mother whose instinct is to help wayward youth, to clothe, shelter and feed them. Her altruism falls naturally like rain, she cannot help but help. Her weakness is that she cannot say no. She is often taken advantage of and occasionally trounced all over. She has altruism with all heart and no head.
Her husband, Johnny, is altruism with all head and no heart. He is a young, charismatic Communist Party idealist whose dream is to unite the workers into an ideal society in which no one will suffer anymore. If it means sacrificing some individuals who get in the way, then so be it. Like many western European and American communists of his time, he remains in denial of Stalin's wholesale atrocities. Not to mention that, while he's out fighting to tear down the bourgeoisie, his sons remain fatherless at home.
Perhaps the novel's deepest flaw is that tends to meander. Anecdote gradually follows anecdote, and sometimes the reader is left wondering which was important and which wasn't. It reads like memories piled upon memories with very little rising drama, except for the question you might ask about any actual, living person: what will become of them in thirty years?
And this is what's compelling in The Sweetest Dream. The characters themselves are lively and varied. We watch them grow, or refuse to grow. Interestingly, the old adage that character is destiny only seems to apply to the novel's purely villainous characters. Communist Johnny remains a helpless, charming, deceitful dreamer until the end. Rose, the snot-nosed, vindictive teenager has become, appropriately, a tattletale journalist for a British tabloid. Lessing's villainous characters, lacking dimension, are unable to change into anything except self-caricatures. And it seems likely that the author intends it so.
But the more sympathetic characters such as Frances and her sons evolve in the most surprising and yet plausible ways. And even poor Sylvia, whose brand of altruism in Africa is rooted, like her anorexia, in a martyr's self-denial, changes in a most satisfying way. She grows from being helpless to being undeniably strong.
In showing the long-term evolution of her characters, Lessing has created a rich novel about personality and politics. In The Sweetest Dream, as in most of her work, there's a constant awareness that what at first seems only personal balloons into the political, and what's political affects us all in the most deeply personal ways.
For more writings of a literary nature, see www.maninquotes@blogspot.com
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Product Description
Martha Quest, the embodied heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In a Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing charts Martha Quest's personal and political adventures in race-torn British Africa, following Martha through World War II, a grotesque second marriage, and an excursion into Communism. This wise and starling novel perceptively reveals the paradoxes, passions, and ironies rooted in the life of twentieth-century Anglo-Africa.

A Ripple from the Storm is the third novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

Customer Reviews (5)

A Ripple From the Storm by Doris Lessing
Martha Quest's adult life continues in Lessing's third volume in her massive Children of Violence series. This volume focuses on Martha's sense of self doubt, and her attempt to get self-actualization through becoming further involved in Communist politics. As such, the majority of this book is dedicated to her learning all she can about her Communist Party, and it becoming an encroaching presence in her life. Whereas the first two books in the series can be read as stand alone, with this one the reader is in for a much deeper and rewarding experience if they had read the two books beforehand. There is a whole new cast of characters, but only through knowing about Martha's journey to get there can you understand her motivations as she turns increasingly inward and makes a second unfortunate marriage. The story itself is rather dry- especially since it follows the absorbing A Proper Marriage- and is mainly dedicated to a political movement that is predominantly marginalized these days. It is slightly forgettable, and only leaves an afterthought of a group of intellectuals arguing about stale political concepts in a swelteringly hot room. Still though, it is part of a series that should be mandatory reading for fans of literature, and tales of Martha's maturity with Lessing's typical sophistication.

Strong third book in the Children of Violence sequence.
A Ripple From the Storm continues the Children of Violence series that began with Martha Quest: A Novel. I had honestly hoped that her well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature would bring some more attention to this under-rated sequence of books. Sadly, from looking at the numbers on Amazon, that seems to be far from the case. Too bad. I write this review in the hopes that more people will pick it up.

Martha Quest is a privileged young white woman growing up in a fictional colonial country in Southern Africa. (Echoing Lessing's own upbringing in then-Rhodesia) The first book is a coming of age story (at least of a kind); the second (A Proper Marriage) tells the story of Martha's embrace and eventual rejection of the classic housewife role. This third book in the sequence tells the story of Martha attempting to find her way in local radical politics-- both as a white person and a woman.

Although all of the Children of Violence novels can ostensibly be read independently, I would think that this volume would be the most trying if you hadn't gotten to know Martha already in the first two books. The politics of the time seem so foolish and innocent and her abandonment of her child so callous, that she is very difficult to understand in these pages without backdrop. Those very elements are a lot of what make it so interesting for me. What I admire very much about this series is the unflinching way (that word gets used a lot, but I think that Lessing really deserves it here) she examines the intersection of race, gender, youth and politics in a setting that is fundamentally bad from the get-go. Whether it is the debates among the white communists as to whether they should work openly in the townships or whether it is Martha wryly commenting on the nearly permanently marginal role of the women within the communist party-- it is a fascinating discussion. If the first two books tell about the development of Martha's life, then this book treats the development of her mind. This all sounds very intellectual, but I found it quite moving. I flinched at her second marriage and the way that she seems to try to abandon herself in the name of ideals in which she can't quite honestly believe. It's a brilliant book, and a powerful look (much like Dostoevsky's Demons) or de Beauvoir's The Mandarins) at the evolution of political ideals as shaded a bit from the larger conflicts of the times.

I highly recommend the whole series, at least so far. Looking forward to Landlocked.

This woman!, I've named my daughter after her: DORIS
This woman!, I've named my daughter after her: DORIS

So few reviews for such a great book
Trying to understand the mid-20th century?Race relations, facism, colonials, communism, sexual politics?Take a ride with Doris Lessing through her strange and fictional small town in southern Africa.This was probably my favorite book of the Children of Violence series, perhaps because in it, Martha actually takes some action.Admittedly, she and her friends are running around like rabbits and will never accomplish anything substantial in the field of race relations, but they're trying, desperately, as they marry the latest currents in European liberal thinking to the absurdities of colonial life.

Steal this book!

the story of a ripple
Lessing presents us here to a third (or forth) phase in the life of Martha Quest, a white woman in "Zambezia", a colonialist state inAfrica."children of violence" which consists the present bookis a highly recommended series as a whole, but the whole is to bedifferentiated as the fifth book belongs to a different genre if to anyexisting one.the former books, this one included, on the other hand, makean important contribution tofemale bildungsroman, as Lessing tells uswith what i heard to be a tone of apology, in the end of the fifth book. "a ripple in the storm", specifically, suggest some morecategories.it faces us with a small comunist group in"Zambezia" through world war 2 which implies all the domain ofquestions from justice to power in its external and internal spheres, tothe state of an individual inside a storm.the story is rich, clever,subtle.it leads us to the continuance of changing and growing of Martha(the author seems to hold a certain popular enough judgement of comunism assomething to grow of personally and historically, though not withoutretaining something of it).it leads us there as if by ourselves.it'snot that you want to be or feel yourself to be Martha, actually Martha ishalf hidden - to herself too - in the turbulence of activity, this is partof the story.it is that you can imagine your shade appearing there in thelittle rooms.another point,one gets a sad description of the status ofwomen in an example of an ideologically egalitarian organization. this factis made clear thoroghly by description.one might believe the authordoesn't even know this fact (but of course, one shouldn't). ... Read more

Product Description
Between East and West applies Sufi thought to some of Doris Lessing's novels and studies the manifestations of Sufi influence on Lessing. Various Sufi-like characters and their unconventional lifestyles are evaluated and explicated for Western readers unfamiliar with Sufism. This book also evaluates the role of spirituality in Lessing's work and considers the implications of taking Lessing's Sufism seriously when reading her works on when doing Lessing criticism. It also impresses upon the reader the degree to which Lessing is seriously offering her space-fiction utopias as plausible and even necessary alternatives to our Western ways of life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Doris Lessing Meets Idries Shah
If you haven't read this book you don't understand either Doris Lessing's life or work.Galin also provides a fair overview of the various phenomena under the name "Sufi" for those unfamiliar with this spiritual Way, and distinguishes Idries Shah's Sufism, which influenced Lessing, from other, better known types. ... Read more

Product Description
The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the pieceare set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, its transitoriness, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing's fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Real Thing by Doris Lessing
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches is just that- brief vignettes about about people in crises or challenged in some way by their interrelationships. Some entries are actual stories with plot and character development, and some are short glances as people go about seemingly mundane things. All this is written in Lessing's typically erudite language, which is always a pleasure to read. However, with this volume her talent runs short, as the stories are by and large sterile and void of great urgency or feeling. There are no great discernible truths to what the characters go through here, and the reader is left unfulfilled. The first and the last stories are noteworthy but little more. For the best in her short fiction I would suggest her Stories collection, and leave this for Lessing completists.

The way of Women
I love this book. Doris Lessing described every true feeling of women's innermost heart, happiness, anger and sorrow. Every short story presents different feeling of different events and ages. Women are so sentimental,so easy to be touched and have so much affection. Doris didn't leave wordsfor ending in each story; however, she left the room for our imaginationand we all know what is going to happen next.

The way of Women
I love this book. Doris Lessing described every true feeling of women's innermost heart, happiness, anger and sorrow. Every short story presents different feeling of different events and ages. Women are so sentimental,so easy to be touched and have so much affection. Doris didn't leave wordsfor ending in each story; however, she left the room for our imaginationand we all know what is going to happen next. ... Read more

Product Description
A searching first biography of the celebrated literary rebel who continually reinvented herself and the world in her prodigious work, this book is based on exclusive interviews with the fascinating Doris Lessing's lovers, colleagues, and friends. This first biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers uncovers the woman that Lessing herself withheld in her autobiographical novels and memoirs. For beyond the courageous, resourceful figure who fearlessly challenges the status quo in works like the four-volume Children of Violence or Lessing's masterpiece Golden Notebook, this revealing study finds an emotionally fragile woman forever in search of her essential identity. Displaced and rebellious, Lessing also always broke the rules. Born in Persia to a hypercritical mother, and a father who had been shell-shocked in World War I, she was raised in Rhodesia. Twice married and divorced by the age of thirty, she moved to Britain with an unpublished manuscript in her suitcase and only one of her children in hand. An ardent Communist before and during World War II - when she was married to a German - she distanced herself from the Party shortly thereafter. Similarly, she ardently embraced and then discarded feminism. A prolific writer, she continued throughout her career to chart new territory, most famously with the series of science-fiction novels she submitted to her publisher under a pseudonym, and to reinvent the formidable persona masking the far more frangible self that this book reveals. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Klein on Lessing
Carole Klein, whose earlier biography of Aline Bernstein (ALINE) was published toacclaim, has once again written an important book. Well-schooled in the work of Lessing, Klein's latest volume is yet another example of her careful research and writing on what can only be a difficult subject. It is must reading for anyone interested in Doris Lessing, her work, and biography in general.

Badly written and irrelevant.
There's not much in this book that Lessing herself hasn't already said in her autobiographies and in interviews.

Klein's obnoxious second-guessing at Lessing's decisions and how she's lived her life is unappealing.The few new facts she has dug up about Lessing are irrelevant.Lessing herself is far more interesting and impressive than Klein can ever hope to communicate in this badly written, even more badly edited, book.

"Must" reading for all Doris Lessing fans!
Doris Lessing provides a fine biography of a great American writer, based on interviews with her associates and friends and following her life and times. Prior readers of Lessing's works will consider this required reading as it lends many insights into her literary influences and career.

Less-ing and More: A Wonderfully Balanced Biography
From the opening pages of this remarkable biography, the reader realizes he/she is in the hands of a master writer as well as an unusually able researcher and interviewer. In just a few pages at the start, Klein manages to vividly describe the backgrounds of Doris' mismatched parents, Alfred and Emily Tayler (Emily later exchanged her second name, Maude, for her first)and of the generation that preceded them as well. The concluding lines of this introductory chapter are surprising and perfect, as are the endings of almost all the short and immensely readable chapters. I won't spoil the story--and like all good biographies, it is a story--by revealing what those lines are. Suffice it to say that they set the tone for all that follows, starting with Lessing's generally unhappy childhood in the Rhodesia whose beauty cast a lifelong spell on the young girl, and continuing through the unbearable tensions between Doris and her mother, which Klein makes agonizingly understandable.Klein's insights into Lessing's complicated involvement with politics in general and apartheid and Communism in particular, her early marriages, the now-well known abandonment of her family (she took only one of her three children) in pursuit of her all-consuming muse, and the origins and themes of her ground-breaking books are keenly and wittily set out. Though feminists took what is arguably the best known of these, The Golden Notebook, as a Bible,Lessing, in typically contradictory mode, denied--and continues to deny--any such intent. It is in dealing with her prickly and elusive subject that Klein is at her best.She wasable not only to unearth much new information, a great deal of it from previously untapped and (initally) unwilling sources--among them Clancy Sigal, who is generally assumed to be "Saul Green" in The Golden Notebook-- but to interpret and integrate her findings with skill, charm and sensitivity.Most remarkably, she resists the temptation to make Lessing a villainess, and shows real sympathy for her difficult and famously private subject, recognizing the fragility that underlies and perhaps caused her to develop into the woman and writer she became.

Seeing Doris Plain
Now in her eighties, Lessing continues to publish fiction and memoirs,still prolific if not as readable as she once was. But for the generationof women seeking idols in the 1960-70s, she was inspirational, her"Golden Notebook" required reading. We her curious admirerswanted to know what the woman really lived, from what magical spring gushedall those stories. This juicy, very readable biography, the first aboutLessing, is unauthorized because the irascible Lessing is not one to blessa biographer. Nevertheless, Carole Klein renders her judgments crisply andfearlessly. She allows Lessing her virtues, despite the fact that she is nolovable old lady. ... Read more

Product Description
The tales of "Kalila and Dimna", also known variously as "The Panchatantra", "The Fables of Bidpai", "The Lights of Canopus", and "The Morall Philosophie of Doni" originated in India almost two thousand years ago.

These charming and humorous stories about animals have found their way in one form or another into the folklore of every major culture and tradition. What links the fables is the core message about managing power, wise leadership and the value of true friendship.

In his re-writing of this world classic, Ramsay Wood deftly knits several oral story-telling traditions into captivating modern literary style. This version from all major ancient texts is the first new compendium in English since 1570. These beautifully illustrated tales will be treasured by young and old alike.

'Racy, funny, vigorous, contemporary.'DORIS LESSING

'Wood's superb stories should be set aside Italo Calvino's retelling of the folktales of Italy.'CARLOS FUENTES

'Stories as closely interfolded as the petals of a rose.'URSULA LE GUIN
... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

What the?
This is an excellent book... Except it is missing pages 193-224. These are the pages where the conclusion to the Kalila and Dimna part would be. I have a paper due. You guys suck.

Exquisite and funny
Ever thought people at the office were animals? After reading this book you'll be able to name exactly which ones. The animals in these stories behave with perfect logic - for themselves - and surprising and touching outcomes. Even if you know the ancient tales, the retelling here is succinct and poignant with a rich vocabulary and just the right turn of phrase. Wolf, Rat, Mice, Turtle, Bedbug - all come to life in ways you will recognize - from your fellow humans. Bring the book and a blanket to the park and enjoy your afternoon among the critters.

Lessons to live by
This is a beautiful book with a message appropriate for any time and people of any age.It is wonderfully complex and yet basic.I found myself rereading sections frequently and getting a different take on the message each time.If you want to read something both evocative and uplifting, give this book a try.You will not be disappointed.

Great Read!
Great read! If you enjoy Aesops Fables or Sufisim, you will also enjoy Ramsay Woods - 'Kalila and Dimna'. The stories within stories of the animal kingdom keep you entertained until the last page.

Listen to two of these and call me in the morning...
This refreshed edition of Kalila and Dimna is "smashing."Ramsay breathes life into the stories with unexpected and often hilarious phrasing and great timing.The stories are obviously a labor of love for him and make a great impact-- they are carried in a way where the quips and temporal slips create a pace, moments, and mnemonics that only a great storyteller can facilitate.This collection is highly recommended and will form a great continuum of night time reading with the rumored release of more Dr. Bidpai in 2009. ... Read more

Product Description
Shikasta is the first volume in doris Lessing'scelebrated space fiction series celebrated space fiction series,'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. In this interlinked quintet of novels,she creates a new, extraordinary cosmos where the fate of Earth isinfluenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerfulgalactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and their enemy, Puttiora. Blendingmyth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionarycreation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world fromits earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.

In Shikasta the story of the final days of our planet is toldthrough the Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Twentieth-centuryEarth, named 'Shikasta, the stricken' by the kindly paternalisticCanopeans sho colonised it many centruies ago, is under the influenceof the evil empire, Puttoria.War, famine, disease and environmentaldisasters ravage the planet.To Johor, mankind is a 'totally crazedspecies', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity sethim what seems to be an impossible task. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

This really is astounding
Shikasta is a huge, imaginative, and thoughtful novel, presenting the history of humankind, and its eventual fate, through a series of reports and letters. This immense history is woven through and connected with a deeply understood and beautifully presented spiritualism that is a real pleasure to experience. I often found myself picking this book up to read in the evening, and then sitting lost in thought after re-reading a single paragraph.

Shikasta is a rare find, and I look forward to many repeat visits.

The best in socio-cultural sci-fi
Shikasta is my all-time favorite sci-fi book -- and I've been reading sci-fi for over 40 years! If you like Ursula LeGuin's work, you'll love Shikasta, by Doris Lessing. It is a gripping, visionary tale. Written over 20 years ago, the story seems prophetic, as it describes much that is happening on our planet today. But it's not a sociological treatise. Far from it! The story revolves around the lives of three siblings, and the agony of trying to remember and then fulfil the reason they decided to reincarnate on Earth during a time of global crisis.

Shikasta ties together the very personal, the immediate global, and the cosmic at the heart level.While there is plenty of action, this is not Buck Rogers. The story of Shikasta is the story of real people, human and non, struggling with the issue of how an individual can make a difference.

I'm buying another copy because I lent my tattered one to someone who kept it! ... Read more