MAY:- author Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing died in 2013 at the age of 93. As a writer she moved between genres - sci fi, literary fiction, plays, poems, essays and autobiography. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

JOAN:   The Grass is Singing
This was her first novel published in 1950. It was set in southern Rhodesia and was an instant success in Europe and the USA. The book tells the story of Mary, a stenographer who marries Dick, a kindly but inefficient farmer. Life on the farm is solitary and harsh.
The black and white racial situation is a constant theme through the story.
Joan described the novel as original, hard, honest, grim and sad. It was beautifully written and worth reading.
Doris Lessing spent her early life in Rhodesia and used her experiences there as the basis of much of her writing.
Joan also read Under My Skin the autobiography of the early part of her life. She had a terrible relationship with her mother, a fantastic woman who only wanted the best for her child. She rebelled against her mother as her own mother had too.

PAULINE also read The Grass is Singing.
She agreed with Joan's summary of the story but was not as enthusiastic in her praise. In fact she felt quite ambivalent about it. While she admired the descriptions, the characters and the writing in general, she thought it a depressing book. All the relationships were depressing, there was no happiness in fifteen years. This amount of misery put her off reading any other books by this author.

CONNIE was another to The Grass is Singing.
By coincidence she happened to see the Swedish film version of this story while reading the book. The film was very gloomy but showed how good was her writing. Her could recognise her descriptions of the landscape and her characters in the film, just as she had read them.
She thought it was storyline in which not much happened, and there was not one nice person in the book.

TAM:   The Habit of Loving
This is a book of short stories. Tam thought she was a very good writer who explored characters well, was very observant about human nature and described scenery with great realism. In these stories she explored and described different relationships - eg mother/son, homosexual. Her writing always made you think, sometimes she used symbols for hidden and implied  relationships.

 JULIA & CLAURINE:    The Fifth Child
Set in the 1960s in England and features 2 people who don't fit into the era of the 'swinging sixties'. They are married and want a big family. Life is wonderful with their 4 children and they recall great times with their extended family.
The 5th pregnancy is very difficult and is vividly described in the book! A 'horrible' child is born, looks like a troll and is a difficult baby. By the time the child is 3 years old he had killed the cat and dog. The other children are afraid of him and he takes over their life. It is hard to love him. They eventually have to put him into a home, but the mother feels very guilty about this.
There are no chapters, and neither Julia or Claurine were able to finish the book.

ANNE:   Ben in the World
This is the sequel to the previous book. Ben is now 17 or 18 years old, he is horribly grotesque, hairy, a freak and not very bright. At 18 he looks 40 years old!
Throughout his life he is bullied and taken advantage of often because of his great strength. But some women do befriend him and try to help him.
Anne thought it a grim, sad, but honest book. She was only able to read about a quarter of it.

JULIA:   The Old Age of El Magnifico
Lessing was obsessed by cats, and this was one of several books she wrote featuring them. In this short book, she shows great kindness towards animals.

DIANE:   On Cats
Published in 2002, this is a collection of stories some of which had already been published separately.
Again, it shows her obsession with cats. Cats take over their owner's lives even to the extent that they chop trees down to keep the birds away. Diane thought it was wonderfully written especially the description of an incident in South Africa when the cats look out for and protect the snakes.
She wouldn't recommend it though unless you adore cats.

ED:   The Cleft
The story is narrated by a Roman historian, during the time of the Emperor Nero. He tells the story as a secret history of humanity's beginnings, as pieced together from scraps of documents and oral histories, passed down through the ages.
Humanity was made up, in the beginning, of solely females who reproduced asexually. These females were a calm race and had few problems. They lived by the sea and were partially aquatic. They called themselves "Clefts" - after The Cleft - a fissure in a rock which the females deemed sacred, and which had a resemblance to the female vagina.
One day, a cleft gave birth to a male child - to what the clefts dubbed a "Monster". This caused such a fright that the boy was killed by the clefts. But more "monsters" were born, and the clefts left them on a rock to die. Eagles, which lived nearby, saw the dying babies and swooped down and carried them off, to deposit them in a nearby valley where they were then suckled by beneficent deer. The children gradually grew older and able to fend for themselves. Soon, as more boys were brought by the eagles, a tribe emerged.
One day, a female wandered over to the valley and was raped by the now adult men. She fled and gave birth to a new, mixed child nine months later. When she told her story to the rest of the clefts, the two tribes soon came into contact with each other. The matriarchs of the clefts, however, feared the "monsters" and decided to try to kill them off.
A very weird story, published in 2007 and from the sci fi genre.!!!!!

JUDY J:   Alfred and Emily
Published in 2008, this is the last book she wrote. Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh are the writer's parents and this is a book in two halves. The first section is the novelist's fictional version of her parents life. There is no war, England is prosperous and life is good. Alfred lives in the countryside, marries kindly Betsy, raises twin boys and lives the idyllic life as a farmer in rural England.
Emily, also lives in the same village, but goes to London to train as a nurse. She marries a wealthy doctor, who dies only a few years later after a loveless marriage. With her now considerable wealth she spends the rest of her life setting up schools for the underprivileged.
The second part tells their real story. The horrors they both suffered through the war, Alfred loosing a leg and Emily suffering great distress while nursing the wounded. The move to Rhodesia was a very difficult one but shapes her attitudes and character and gives her much inspiration for her future writing.
A very interesting read and having listened to other books discussed, Judy could recognize common themes in many of them.

LESLY:   The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels
Lesly's comment was that Lessing writes very well, her characters are sensitive and very intuitive. 
One of the stories involves two women who have been friends since boarding school. They continue their intense friendship after they marry and each has only one child, a son. They are always together. It is so well written that you begin to feel uneasy about the relationship. When one husband had died and the other leaves because of this friendship, they both begin affairs with the other's son! The sons marry but the affairs continue.
The other stories are about racial issues, fantasy and gender ageist issues.
Lesly quite enjoyed them but they made you feel uncomfortable. Her writing is subtle but not graphic.

JUDY G:   The Diary of a Good Neighbour
This is one of two books the author wrote using the pseudonym Jane Somers. It was published in 1983. Judy only read one chapter..... A professional woman befriends a dirty old lady. The writing is so descriptive you can almost smell the dirt! The book becomes very depressing, horrible and very traumatic. Judy thought it seemed similar to other books that people had spoken about except this time she is writing about age and aged care.

JO:   Love, Again
After reading the blurb she decided she "couldn't read it". Her only other comment was that she was a daring writer.

BEV:   The Sweetest Dream
Written in 1982, it revolves around a number of very different people who move through a large house in London and are all connected by one horrible man, Johnny. Bev found it a mammoth effort to continue reading it.....so she didn't!

PAMELA:   The Golden Notebook
When this was published in 1962 it was extremely popular and admired. Maybe this was because she appealed to the liberated woman of the sixties as her books often scrutinized the plight of emancipated women of the day.
The book was 650 pages long and small print. So Pamela didn't read it having other priorities she preferred to pursue.

ROSEMARY wanted to recommend a book she had recently read.
The Last Lecture is written by Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg. After he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given three months to live, he his asked to give his last lecture entitled 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams'. It is about living your life better and the issues he faced when told he had so little time left. There is much humour as well as it being very uplifting.
After reading it you feel that what ever is in your life, you can get over it. This is how he lived his life.
 “The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. ”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture 

NEXT MONTH Our subject for June will be Natural Disasters. Everyone is welcome.