Assorted insights and opinions dom assorted book reviews, essays,
interviews including a new preface to The Golden Notebook which
redefines Doris Lessing's best known book from several facets
(which she claims eluded most critics) and not necessarily as a
pro-feminist statement (even if Anna did say - did she not - that
the real revolution of our time is that of "women against men"). We
know the various positions Lessing has taken and they are of course
asserted here - whether on the disintegration of society and
perhaps worse to come (which will make Women's Lib only seem
"quaint" at some future time); on education (she left school at
fourteen and benefited from her own ability to read or discard what
she wanted); on madness or breakdown as she interpreted it, before
Laing, as a form of self-healing; on the falling away of life in
general and the small-mindedness of the systems imposed on it; etc.
etc. etc. There is a touching piece on "My Father" who ended up "a
thin shabby fly-away figure under the stars" and the reviews are
variously on Malcolm X and Idries Shah and Sufism, Vonnegut and the
little known Eugene Marais, Isak Dinesen and Olive Schreiner whose
Story of an African Farm (1885) was recently reprinted. Necessarily
in this form, or rather these forms, a certain repetitiousness is
invited; inconsistency is also not hard to find; but all of that is
incidental to what is really important for and about Doris Lessing.
The title essay is where you will find her at her strongest -
contending that the realistic novel, particularly of the 19th
century, is the "highest form of prose writing" and that the novel
should entail warmth, compassion, a love of people (as against
Camus, Sartre, Genet, Beckett and their "acceptance of disgust"
which betrays it) and make "a statement of faith in man himself."
All in all, both controversially and reconcilably, a stimulus, an
illumination, a pleasure. (Kirkus Reviews)
An essential and definitive collection of the Nobel Prize for
Literature winner's finest essays, reviews, reminiscences and
interviews from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. 'The novelist talks as
an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice. In an age
of committee art, public art, people may begin to feel again a need
for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into
writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being
needed, the warmth and humanity, and love of people which is
essential for a great age of literature.' In this collection of her
non-fiction, Lessing's own life and work are the subject of a
number of pieces, as are fellow writers such as Isak Dinesen and
Kurt Vonnegut. There are essays on Malcolm X and Sufism,
discussions of the responsibility of the artist, thoughts on her
exile from Southern Rhodesia, and a fascinating memoir of her
fraught relationship with her mother. Lit throughout by Doris
Lessing's desire for truth-telling, 'A Small Personal Voice' is
both an important collection of writings by and a self-portrait of
one of the most significant writers of the past century.
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