Friday Fiction: Doris Lessing

--by Hanje Richards

.
Doris May Lessing (born October 22, 1919) is a contemporary British writer and the author of groundbreaking works such as The Golden Notebook and the Canopus in Argos series.

.
In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature, described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny." Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to win the Literature Prize.
.

In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."

.

Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme (1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (and to which she returned in The Good Terrorist [1985]); the psychological theme (1956–1969); and the Sufi theme, which was explored in the Canopus in Argos series of science fiction (or as she preferred to put it "space fiction") novels and novellas.

.

Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars, but notably not by the author herself, who later wrote that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one's self from illusions had been overlooked by critics. She also regretted that critics failed to appreciate the exceptional structure of the novel.

.
Alfred and Emily - In this extraordinary book, Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War (World War I). 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, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel.

.

In the fictional first half of the novel, Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war; a story that begins with their meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, of the family's move to Africa, and of the impact of her parents' marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land.

.

Ben, In The World: The Sequel to The Fifth Child - 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 how he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.

.
.

The Cleft - In the last years of his life, a Roman senator embarks on one final epic endeavor, a retelling of the history of human creation. The story he relates is the little-known saga of the Clefts, an ancient community of women with no knowledge of nor need for men. Childbirth was controlled through the cycles of the moon, and only female offspring were born – until the unanticipated event that jeopardized the harmony of their close-knit society: the strange, unheralded birth of a boy.

.

The Doris Lessing Reader - This reader has been assembled by Doris Lessing herself, and it provides a representative introduction to both her fiction and non-fiction. The book enables the reader to see her ideas evolve over the years as they recur and develop throughout her work. The excerpts are taken from The Grass is Singing, Children of Violence, Canopus in Argos, The Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark, and The Good Terrorist, as well as two of her nonfiction books, Going Home and A Small Personal Voice.

.
.

The Fifth Child - Mildly eccentric English couple Harriet and David Lovatt are the contented parents of four healthy children. Suddenly, their peace is forever shattered by their fifth child, Ben, a fiercely malevolent goblin-child with a penchant for violence. It is suggested that Ben is a throwback to an earlier, pre-civilized time, that he represents a random settling of Neanderthal-like genes that all humans carry. Only Harriet tries to civilize the boy, and he gradually learns to function on a primitive level and even collects a band of similar outcasts about him. Unwanted, they leave their homes to wander England like modern-day troglodytes. Society's complicity with their fate is a reflection of its callousness.

.
The Golden Notebook - Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one, she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one, she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one, she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

.
Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.
.
The Good Terrorist - This novel follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpected challenges in their quest to incite social change against complacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of the intersections between the personal and the political, Lessing creates a compelling portrait of domesticity and rebellion.

.

.

Love, Again - 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.

.

The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches - 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 piece are 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 façade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.

.

.
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog - 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.

..

The Sweetest Dream - Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – her two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and fresh-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 live with Eve, her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances' 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.

.
.

Under My Skin (Volume 1 of My Autobiography, To 1949) – The memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. With honesty and overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that make her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.