Law and Letters (Free subscription) | yesterday
Really, a great recent discovery of mine, even though she's been writing forever and I should know better. Wait until I read the Joyce Carol Oates trilogy and that gigantic collection of John Cheever. The Stare A Mild Attack of Locusts
UNSANE AND SAFE (Free subscription) | yesterday
The other thing about Doris Lessing's GOING HOME that I do not like only becomes apparent to me upon reflection. She writes in such a way that whatever subject comes under her microscope is demonstrated to have monstrous, ridiculous and vulgar aspects. This works to paint the white colonials in a wholly negative and idiotic light. Lessing does uphold a particular group of people as being above reproach,...
UNSANE AND SAFE (Free subscription) | 09/02/2008
I'm now reading the Lessing book, Going Home (1957). One thing I feel is that the book has the quality of being a bit dated, ideologically, from my perspective. She really is very enmeshed in identity politics, and it seems to come across as a concern for 'authenticity' in the Sartrean moral sense, which I feel is incredibly dated, too. 'Authenticity' = one must obey what is true to one's essence (which,...
Times Online - Alan Coren (Free subscription) | 08/27/2008
A few months ago Doris Lessing, the novelist and Nobel laureate, was discussing the life-expectancy of Barack Obama, should he win the race to the White House: “He would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president,” she mused. “They would kill him.”
Reading matters (Free subscription) | 08/26/2008
Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 236 pages; 2002. Having recently got over my fear of reading Doris Lessing, I decided to try another book by this Nobel Prize-winning author.The Summer Before the Dark was first published in 1970. At the time it must have been a very contemporary novel, and perhaps a little controversial, because its central theme is the role of women in society. The main character, Kate...
Tales from the Reading Room (Free subscription) | 08/22/2008
I’ve been reading some great memoirs lately. Too lazy here to do proper reviews, but here are two extracts. From Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing ‘I hated my mother. I can remember that emotion from the start, which is easy to date by the birth of my brother. Those bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands: I [...]
Easily Distracted (Free subscription) | 08/21/2008
I’ve been quickly re-skimming Doris Lessing’s African Laughter, her musings on a number of trips to Zimbabwe after 1980. In 1988, reflecting on a friend’s growing disillusionment with official corruption, Lessing writes, “To be in love with a country or a political regime is a tricky business. You get your heart broken even more surely [...]
Gurteen Knowledge (Free subscription) | 08/19/2008
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Eve's Alexandria (Free subscription) | 08/16/2008
I started reading the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography yesterday, quite by accident. In other words, I picked it up at work and then couldn't put it down. Readers of this blog will remember that Lessing and I have...
Progressive Bloggers (Free subscription) | 08/15/2008
One of the things we did last weekend was take in a fascinating exhibition of engravings done by artists associated with Atelier Circulaire. Called La première et la dernière, it features early and recent work by about 35 artists. Some of the pairs show a great difference in theme or technique but other demonstrate a continued interest in ideas that have evolved over time.I've thought of the contrasts...
normblog (Free subscription) | 08/13/2008
It's said only in interview, I know, a very few words off-the-cuff. And yet, it's what she says. She being Doris Lessing: In "Alfred and Emily" you re-imagine the lives of your parents, as if the first world war had...
Black Arts Diary (Free subscription) | 08/13/2008
Doris Lessing (winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007) on the political situation in Zimbabwe: The political degradation just goes on and on. I can’t imagine why somebody hasn’t assassinated Mugabe—such a wicked man, and he’s still alive. The trouble is, you see, he’s got a gang [of] people like himself who are just [...]
Times Online - David Aaronovitch (Free subscription) | 08/13/2008
Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature are entitled to grand pronouncements, or else what is it for? So Doris Lessing, last winter, anathematised the entire internet, declaring that it had “seduced a whole generation into its inanities”. According to Lessing, the web helped to create “'a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned, and where it is common for...
Flos Carmeli (Free subscription) | 08/11/2008
The Orwell Diaries Blog --Serialized as blog entries for the day appropriate to the diary, hitherto unpublished. And, the announcement of this year's Hugo Awards , featuring a novel by Michael Chabon. I know that Doris Lessing was at one time nominated (not certain that she won).
Afrigator (Free subscription) | 08/10/2008
And to think the other day I thought she stilll made sense. This is what she said in a Newsweek interview: I would never have believed that I would ever think like this, but now when I look back, I take it for granted that the whites suppressing the blacks was a pretty horrible thing, but I also think of the good things, like the railways and the post offices–the infrastructure, which is now destroyed....
