RIP Doris Lessing

[Bekah]

I read The Golden Notebook some time in the late 1960s and absolutely loved it - I loved the structure and the insights.   I can't say I thought of it as being "feminist" at that point because I wasn't really aware of that sort of thing yet.   Anyway,  I read it a few years ago and it seemed incredibly dated.   Sad -   almost had to read it as a historical piece -  "What was life like for women English Communists in the 1930s and '40s?"   Basically boring and the women were as trapped by the men and their politics as anybody else anywhere?  (LOL!)  

But I did go on to read other books by Lessing -  Briefing for a Descent into Hell,  The Summer Before the Dark,   The Good Terrorist and all of  The Canopus in Argos: Archives series  (as they came out).   -  Had to look the names up on the great Wiki.  
	• Shikasta (1979)
	• The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980)
	• The Sirian Experiments (1980)
	• The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982)
	• The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)

I still have a couple of her books on my "to be read" shelves.  Imo,  she deserved the Nobel for her life-long commitment to good writing and activism for peace.   

Bekah


On Nov 17, 2013, at 1:11 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> I read The Golden Notebook when I was in high school, but never really thought of it as "feminist," especially because the protagonist wasn't likable (autobiographical as she was). What drew me to the book was the structure - the division of the protagonist's self into distinct parts/notebooks, with the yearning to bring them all together in the golden notebook. Very much a psychological novel. This and The Children of Violence series (Martha Quest, etc.) portrayed characters, who I didn't really like or want to be like, but with whom I identified: introspective and self-analytical. I've attempted her "sci-fi" books a couple of times but couldn't make it through. She was an odd bird - deeply analytical, but eccentric, even flaky. SOunds from what I've read pretty fearsome to encounter in person. Not very nice. I enjoyed many of her short stories, including the one you refer to Mark, and One Off the Short List.
> Laura
> -----Original Message-----
> 
> From: Mark Kohut 
> 
> Sent: Nov 17, 2013 3:58 PM
> 
> To: "kelber at mindspring.com" , "pynchon-l at waste.org" 
> 
> Subject: Re: RIP Doris Lessing
> 
> 
> 
> A friend, male, who went to London to meet her, said the force of her personality was palpable....Somewhat dismissed The Golden Notebook, her best known and cited by The Swedish Academy....said it was largely written out of a crush on a 'communist"....who I think was the now-forgotten---his novels are shapeless, Clancy Siegel....(I loved Going Away anyway, more than I ever did On The Road)... I have been feeling vicarious fear all day as the memory of her story of the boy who risked his life to swim thru an underwater rock tunnel comes back to me......then there's To Room 19, this way madness lies.... In her autobio she writes of her young bohemian days in London that there
> was ALWAYS a pot of stew cooking---for whoever showed up, flopped over, etc.....I read this in the middle of my boring middle age and knew too late it was what I had always wanted.....
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l