- #Lessing, doris. the grass is singing perennial modern classics, 2001 skin#
- #Lessing, doris. the grass is singing perennial modern classics, 2001 full#
It is set in what was formerly Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and concentrates on Rhodesian white culture with its racist and prejudiced attitudes. It is a savage and stark indictment of South Africas apartheid system. I read the back-cover description of a poor white woman’s place in the complex racial politics of white-ruled Southern Rhodesia. The Grass is Singing is Doris Lessings first novel, published in 1950. 3 I can still recall the worn cover of Lessing’s first novel: a photograph of a black male servant’s torso, his hands holding a tattered tea service.
In the library’s boxes, I found books by Lessing, Ngugi, Achebe, and other writers in the Heinemann African Writers series.
#Lessing, doris. the grass is singing perennial modern classics, 2001 skin#
2 I learned later that Banket-where Lessing grew up and where she too rifled through boxes of books with anticipation and pleasure-was only about forty kilometers away ( Under My Skin 88–89).
#Lessing, doris. the grass is singing perennial modern classics, 2001 full#
I had only one or two books with me, and so rummaged through the cardboard boxes full of well-read books in the mostly empty school library. It was 1989, and I was an undergraduate student posted as a volunteer teacher at a secondary school in the chrome-mining village of Mutorashanga, Zimbabwe. In fact, the first Lessing book I read was The Grass Is Singing it was also the first properly African book I read-notwithstanding David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels when I was an adolescent. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebookand The Good Terrorist. Having mostly avoided it for the last twenty-five years-which I attribute to being an Africanist-it is my turn to tell a complicated story of my own reluctant engagement with Lessing’s magnum opus. Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. "Sobre este título" puede pertenecer a otra edición de este libro.Many readers-whether devotee or dissenter-have personal and sometimes even visceral recollections of reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. But after many years, trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny house, the lonely and frightened Mary turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding.Ī masterpiece of realism, ‘The Grass is Singing’ is a superb evocation of Africa’s majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a fearless exploration of the ideology of white supremacy. As Eliot did, Lessing uses the modemist doctrine of difficulty to. Set in Rhodesia, ‘The Grass is Singing’ tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush and viciously abuses the black South Africans who work on their farm. Lessings early novels and two later autobiographies. The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa during the years of Arpartheid.
More than any other white African writer of her generation, Doris Lessing is aware of the seductive cruelty of colonialism, and is one of our strongest, fiercest voices against injustice, racism and sexual hypocrisy.’ Independent on Sunday Reseña del editor: ‘“The Grass is Singing” focuses on the blighted life of a woman whose spirit is destroyed by a disastrous marriage and by an environment to which she couldn’t respond. In “The Grass is Singing”, you can feel the dynamo-like throb of a formidable talent by its side, most novels of 1950 look like crochet-work.’ The Times Fiction Kindle edition Hodder & Stoughton 384 pages 2009. ‘Doris Lessing responds more passionately than most writers to people or situations: often she responds with hate or rancour, but always with passion. ‘Original and striking.full of those terrifying touches of truth, seldom mentioned but instantly recognised.’ New Statesman