Doris Lessing

[kev67]

Does anyone have an opinion on this author? I picked up a book by her from my late father's bookshelves. It was called A Proper Marriage. I wondered whether I had picked up my step-mother's book by mistake because the cover made it look a bit like a romance. The book was set in Zambia or Zimbabwe about the time of the second world war. The protagonist is a young, white woman who has married someone she does not even like very much. She is left wing and sympathizes with the blacks and feels frustrated by her life. I think my father kept it because as a young man he went out to Zambia to teach, and he was left wing too. I think the book is psychologically very astute. I have never been a pregnant woman. I have never given birth in a nursing home in which the staff behaved in a high-handed a manner. I have never been irritated by a husband's insensitivity. The book makes me feel what that must be like. When the perspective changes to the husband's for a while, you see he is not such a bad person. He feels devastated when he is invalided out of the war before seeing any action. My problem with the book is I just do not enjoy reading it very much. It is quite dense. It takes a long time for anything to happen. Nevertheless, I looked up some of Lessing's other books at a local bookshop, and I noticed she had been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. A Nobel Prize for literature is good going.

[wordeater]

I read "The Golden Notebook" and "The Fifth Child". "The Golden Notebok" is probably her best novel, with a very interesting structure, but quite tough. "The Fifth Child" is also a good introduction to her work.

[TheFifthElement]

She was a great lady. The Golden Notebook I think is recognised as her master work, but she was, apparently, most proud of her science fiction. So far I've read The Fifth Child, which is a good companion read to We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. They have all been good. I would like to read Shikasta (though the UK print quality is awful) and the Martha Quest series. So many books, so little time.

[Seasider]

I enjoyed " The Four-Gated City" the most. She is deserving of The Nobel Prize in my opinion. Although I do not like her Science Fiction.

[mona amon]

I picked up a Doris Lessing book for the 2011 New Authors Challenge - I'd never read her before and I knew she had won the Nobel Prize. There were many books by her on the library shelf so I chose the slimmest - The Cleft. It turned out to be the worst bit of mindless drivel I'd ever read in my life, no exaggeration. Whenever anyone starts a thread like "Worst Book Ever" or "Books that you Consider a Complete Waste of time" I'm there with The Cleft.

I now know that this was her second last novel, evidently written in her dotage, so I was probably unlucky, but it was so bad that nothing will induce me to pick up another novel by this author ever again.

[kev67]

I picked up a Doris Lessing book for the 2011 New Authors Challenge - I'd never read her before and I knew she had won the Nobel Prize. There were many books by her on the library shelf so I chose the slimmest - The Cleft. It turned out to be the worst bit of mindless drivel I'd ever read in my life, no exaggeration. Whenever anyone starts a thread like "Worst Book Ever" or "Books that you Consider a Complete Waste of time" I'm there with The Cleft.

I now know that this was her second last novel, evidently written in her dotage, so I was probably unlucky, but it was so bad that nothing will induce me to pick up another novel by this author ever again.

I would not call A Proper Marriage mindless drivel. I am just not enjoying it very much. It is one of the Martha Quest series, and judging by Wikipedia, I guess it is rather autobiographical. Doris Lessing died last year. She was 93 or 94. Incidentally, she was about the same age as P.D. James. I heard P.D. James on the radio recently and she does not seem to have declined much mentally.

It is interesting that Lessing wrote science fiction. I tend to think of science fiction as more a male genre, but Fay Weldon wrote what was arguably science fiction sometimes. Margaret Atwood, I hear, writes what could be described as science fiction, although she calls it speculative fiction.

[mona amon]

She wrote A Proper Marriage in 1954 when she had a whole lot of mind, judging from her impressive oeuvre. The Cleft was published in 2007 when she was 88. She was certainly not senile or anything. In this video of her reaction to winning the Nobel Prize in the same year, she comes across as a charming, witty old lady - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/c...bel-Prize.html However, The Cleft shows not just a decline in artistic power but a complete absence of any artistic power whatsoever. It's rubbish!

[kev67]

She wrote A Proper Marriage in 1954 when she had a whole lot of mind, judging from her impressive oeuvre. The Cleft was published in 2007 when she was 88. She was certainly not senile or anything. In this video of her reaction to winning the Nobel Prize in the same year, she comes across as a charming, witty old lady - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/c...bel-Prize.html However, The Cleft shows not just a decline in artistic power but a complete absence of any artistic power whatsoever. It's rubbish!

That was a charming interview, and seems to tie in with the main protagonist of the book I am reading, presuming it was autobiographical. I suppose the fact she was 88 goes some way to explaining why the book you picked up was no good. This sort of makes me interested in what P.D. James last books were like. She wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice several years ago, called A Death at Pemberley, which was at least good enough to be made into a BBC mini-series (not that that says much these days).

I wonder whether the whole Martha Quest series was autobiographical. I am also intrigued by her science fiction. What sort of science fiction was it? Always a moot point with science fiction I find.

[Dark Muse]

I read the Grass is Singing and very much enjoyed it. I thought she did a very good job of portraying racial tension and race relationships in South Africa.

[Lykren]

mona, I think you're being too harsh - not on The Cleft, which I haven't read, but on Doris Lessing herself. Just about every author writes crap at some point, although it does usually come at the beginning of the career rather than the end.

Anyways, I have read The Golden Notebook and I can assure you it was worth reading. Not the greatest book in the world, probably not even the best of its time, but there were some powerful and beautifully written sections in there. I remember a scene where a group of friends is out hunting in South Africa in the heat, and the description of the butterflies and the heat and the conversation among the friends was wonderfully, vividly drawn. The book as a whole, through all its chronologically scattered episodes, evokes a sort of tremulous heartache weighted down by gravity but desiring freedom.

[mona amon]

No, no! I've only said good things about Doris - "charming" "witty" "impressive oeuvre" and I've cast no aspersions on her other work or her (no doubt well earned) critical reputation. All my harshness is for The Cleft, which truly and honestly is the worst book I've ever read. No story, no structure, no quotable quotes, no artistry, beauty or mind. It makes the Da Vinci Code look like a deep and stirring masterpiece in comparison.

That was a charming interview, and seems to tie in with the main protagonist of the book I am reading, presuming it was autobiographical. I suppose the fact she was 88 goes some way to explaining why the book you picked up was no good. This sort of makes me interested in what P.D. James last books were like. She wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice several years ago, called A Death at Pemberley, which was at least good enough to be made into a BBC mini-series (not that that says much these days).

Haven't yet read Death Comes to Pemberley. I tried searching for "novels by octogenarians" but didn't come up with anything much. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of my Melancholy Whores hasn't got good reviews. I think Ursula Le Guin has written some good stuff in her 80's, and there's Picasso who was both prolific and inventive in his old age. Of course it's not just the old people who lay goose eggs. Thirty something Zadie Smith has written some very good novels, but her latest work N-W is awful.

[hazelk]

I loved "The Fifth Child" and "The Diary Of a Good Neighbour".

[Lykren]

What I meant when I said you were being too hard on her was this:

However, The Cleft shows not just a decline in artistic power but a complete absence of any artistic power whatsoever. It's rubbish!

which implies that she never had artistic power to begin with.

[aliengirl]

I read Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist a couple of years ago and I won't say I enjoyed it. Interesting it was, but not pleasing. The plot was too drab for me. I felt frustrated by the way the main protagonist's character (Alice Mellings) unfolded. She seemed to hop from one failure to another. However, if Lessing wanted us to feel her protagonist's frustrations and anger, she succeeds.
Like Mona, I feel I picked up one of Lessing's novels which was not right for me. But I've not written her off yet. I may go for Grass is Singing.

[mona amon]

What I meant when I said you were being too hard on her was this:

However, The Cleft shows not just a decline in artistic power but a complete absence of any artistic power whatsoever. It's rubbish!

which implies that she never had artistic power to begin with.

Now you've got me bamboozled about whether what I said means what you say it means! Anyway, I meant two things -

1. The Cleft does not show "a decline in artistic power". (The 'decline' usually indicated by passages of artistic brilliance, but the whole not living up to expectations, eg: Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch. There are no flashes of occasional brilliance in The Cleft)

2. The Cleft shows no artistic power whatsoever.

So it's all about The Cleft. It would be a comment on her previous work or her artistic power only if I had implied that one lousy work completely negates all the previous work of that author, which is of course not the case.

Now out of curiosity I'd like to give one of her other books a go, but, so many books, so little time.