Aha. I’ve been meaning to get around to some Doris Lessing for a long time. The Academy is trying to tell me something:
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007 is awarded to the English writer Doris Lessing “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”.
Do you have any favourites of hers you recommend?
Here are some passages from her biography on the Nobel site, talking about some of the works that really got her a great deal of wider recognition, emphasizing her important intersection with other genres such as feminism and science fiction (to pick just a couple):
The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed form reflects that of the main character’s mind. There is no single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience.
Books published in the 1970s included Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), inspired by R. D. Laing. Lessing has characterised her novel from this period as “inner-space fiction”: an attempt in the spirit of Romanticism to expand human knowledge to encompass regions beyond the control of reason and the ego.
In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing expanded the science fiction genre. The series studies the post-atomic war development of the human species. Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles. Among inspirations for the work was the Idries Shah’s school of Sufism that she discovered in the 1960s. Doris Lessing revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004) collection of essays.
NPR’s site on this has a rather nice AP article for you to read as well. Be sure to read the dissenting opinion of Harold Bloom that they quote. Feathers will be ruffled, I’m sure.
-cvj
