Comments on: Doris Lessing wins the Nobel!

By: LivingSmall » Lessing’s Nobel Speech

LivingSmall » Lessing’s Nobel Speech — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:01:04 +0000

[...] Now, I’ve written before about how important Lessing has been to me — how she’s always been a writer I’ve turned to for courage, and here she is again, at 88 years old, giving me faith and courage to continue. Because let’s face it, spending your weekends in your basement office is an odd and anti-social thing to be doing with your time. Turning down dates, or dinner invitations and refusing to join in social activities because you only have two days a week to yourself and you’ve discovered that they must be guarded is weird. And here’s Lessing, as always, telling me that yup, kind of weird, but if that’s what it takes to access “that empty space” then, well, that’s what it takes. So maybe in honor of Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize we should all turn off the screens for a bit, and immerse ourselves in an evening with a good book — spend a couple of hours not looking at a screen, but looking at pages … Stumble it! [...]

By: Kristi

Kristi — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 05:01:01 +0000

I’ll have to dig out my Women in Lit notes to see if Lessing was mentioned. I’m sure she must have been, but she wasn’t one of the women we focused on in that semester. I’m curious now, though, what mention was made of her, so next time I”m in that part of the household archives, I’ll peek around.

Margaret Atwood has suffered some of the same attitude problems with her two speculative-fiction titles. (In fact, when Michiko Kakutani reviewed “Oryx and Crake” for the NYTimes, she began with the sentence “Margaret Atwood has strayed from us before.” Uck!)

Both of the intros are by Lessing, the fascinating one is dated early ’70′s, about a decade after the book was originally published — I think this is the one you’re talking about — it mentions her own take on the work and how she was surprised by readers’ focus on other aspects of it. That one fascinated me in part because that was one of my own challenges when I first started sharing my writing with others — people were not seeing the things I intended (admittedly, in large part due to weaknesses in my own writing) and they were seeing things I hadn’t really given much attention. I had to learn to let the work have its own life, that was difficult for me and may actually be one of the things that holds me back still. Then there was a briefer one added in the ’90′s that was interesting as well.

As for dated, it will be interesting to see how that affects me. I very much like some “dated” writing — certain types of sentences you see rarely any more seem quite natural to me and I enjoy reading that. However, I was just noticing that the Pulitzer Prize winner the year that GN was released was Revolutionary Road, a book I had heard great things about but just couldn’t get myself to read past page 25.

I’ll dig into GN sometime next week and let you know how it goes!

By: cmf

cmf — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:06:59 +0000

Really — you never ran into her in college? The women’s studies people were all over her — in fact, I know a number of women our age who can’t stand Lessing because they had her shoved down their throats — the other thing that happened with Lessing was that the science fiction really freaked out the people who thought of her as a “feminist” writer — there are always people who don’t like when a writer changes her spots and a number of feminists took the sci fi as a betrayal …

Who wrote the intros in your copy? Is it the one where Lessing keeps revisiting the history of the GN and answers to them?

I hope you like it — it’s a little dated, and I haven’t reread it in years, but it’s a book I really loved. The other one that’s worth a look is The Sweetest Dream — she wrote it instead of the 3rd volume of her autobiography and it’s about the postcolonial history of Rhodesia — there’s a character who could be read as a young Mugabe — it’s really interesting –

By: Kristi

Kristi — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:55:19 +0000

So, I dug out my copy of “Golden” and read the two introductions before bed last night. Several things got my attention — one: how did I get through college without ever hearing about this novel or even hearing the name Doris Lessing? (My degree was in philosophy) two: why did I never hear about this book until I was in my 30′s, nearly 40 years after it was published? three: Holy cow, she’s writing about a lot of things that are on my mind right now.

I’m really looking forward to reading this book. I’m so glad she won the Nobel, I think it will give her literature a weight that it apparently lacked in the late 1980′s when I was supposedly getting an education.

By: Mouse

Mouse — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:45:18 +0000

Fabulous post
and all I can say is absolutely!

By: Kristi

Kristi — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:52:58 +0000

I just looked it up — I love being able to track my orders on Amazon! — I bought it in July 2004, three weeks before my daughter was born. No wonder I haven’t read it!

By: Kristi

Kristi — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:47:27 +0000

I just saw the news, too, and came to see which of my favorite bloggers have already posted about it. Congratulations, you’re the first!

I’ve had “The Golden Notebook” for years now, possibly as many as 8 or 9, but never read it. I sure would like to, though. I think I’ll be making time for it soon.