In Shikasta, Lessing's lightly veiled sci-fi view of the modern history of earth, published in 1979, she all but predicted the rise of Islamic radicalism. She saw that the social and economic condition of young people in the Middle East could only lead to the kind of global insurgency that we're struggling with now, 25 years later. In The Making of a Representative for Planet 8, also 1979, she describes the human consequences of rapid climate change on a small planet that is transformed from a tropical paradise to a cosmic snowball in a single generation.
Yes, she's a great writer and her books are rewarding as literature. But she's also a proven visionary, a seer of the first order. We ought to look to her for guidance on the way forward, for ourselves and for the planet.
Congratulations, Nobel-Prize winner Doris Lessing! May your wise words be more widely heard, and attended.
Doris Lessing: Nobelist
They could have given it to Philip Roth for paeans to his penis. They could have found some previously untranslated shepherd in Transylvania writing haiku in a language spoken by a dozen other shepherds. They could have found some trendy political prisoner, jailed for his writing. But, amazingly, the Nobel committee decided to recognize a woman writer whose work has opened up the female soul to literary scrutiny, chronicled and questioned the war between the sexes, refused to categorize the human species by cliché or received wisdom and allowed her great imagination to engage the universe. This prize gives me hope that one day women writers maybe celebrated for their creativity rather than diminished for their gender.
Doris Lessing's books have irritated me as much as delighted me. I believe that the greatest writers are irritants. (Think of Jonathan Swift). The Golden Notebook inspired me because its heroine was a woman as engaged by her intellectual and political life as her sexual life. She was a woman in full. I longed to write books about such women -- not mad housewives, not sex-maniacs, but whole people struggling, as most of us struggle, to put the disparate pieces of our lives together.
Doris Lessing inspired me. She still inspires me. I have been less than inspired by the literary choices of the Nobel committee. This year they have redeemed themselves. Now Doris Lessing will be reprinted and able to reach more readers. She will go into the bloodstreams of young writers, filling them with the oxygen of innovation. May she inspire you as she has inspired me.
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Gimme a good science book instead...
Lessing's Decent into Hell opened my eyes to both the tortures of insanity and the ordeals women have been enduring since the beginning of time. I could not put the book down. She well deserves the Nobel.
I'm extremely happy that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She has always been one of my favorite writers. I love her works of science fiction especially. The Canopus in Argos series is one of my favorite series of books, and Shikasta is without a doubt my favorite book written.
Canopus in Argos is a genuine cosmology cleverly disguised as literature.
Hear, Hear! Although I would have been thrilled for the Nobel to have gone to Roth who I believe writes about a whole lot more than his penis, Lessing is a great choice. She was pivotal in my early life as a reader and writer, too. And I applaud the decision to reward her, even as late in her life as it is.
Lunching with my 83 year-old poet friend yesterday, we speculated that Lessing must have outlived the obstacles to her Nobel, and bravo for her! You're right, Erica Jong, that she can be irritating, both personally and on the page, but she created one hell of a body of work.
I was first drawn into her fiction reading The Sundowners about a young woman chafing at colonial life in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe; reminded me of the segregated American South of the thirties and forties as described by my mother. The semi-autobiographical arch of Lessing's work takes her off the farm into the city, then to London, where she struggles with so many issues common to the then-contemporary feminist movement. Finished for a while with that line of inquiry, she delves into futuristic speculations about the course of Western society and interplanetary travel, which annoyed the literary establishment. Then, just to prove that publishers are inhospitable to new talent, she writes two novels under the pseudonymn Jane Somers before fessing up.
I love Lessing because she ruthlessly follows her deepest curiosity whether into (and out of) the Communist party, feminism, anarchy or Sufism or simply about what it means to be an aging but still sexual woman in our time. If anybody earned this, she did!
Re. the notion of literature being inherently silly post-WWW: is democracy a replacement for the sublime, the transcendent? Are all strings of words now equal? The next Nobel to the roomful of monkeys winnowing their way toward Shakespeare. Respectfully, it might be time to log off for a few hours.
Jane Smiley has longed to write books, like Lessing, about women in full? Why doesn't she? And re. the notion of literature being inherently silly post-WWW: is democracy a replacement for the sublime, the transcendent? Are all strings of words now equal? The next Nobel to the roomful of monkeys winnowing their way toward Shakespeare. It might be time to log off for a bit.
Ummmmm, I believe this was written by Erica Jong- NOT Jane Smiley.
Hacks who will never win any prize may still choose to cite Robert Browning and say, "Praise for the living is tainted praise.". But that doesn't sell books or buy a beer to cry in.
I may not always enjoy Lessing's work as much as I might enjoy some others, but I always learn something from her -- something that can't always be said about many modern writers. For me, more than anyone, she has better explored what it was like to try and navigate womanhood in the 20th century than any other writer. Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
I didn't appreciate the crack at Philip Roth, who is a wonderful writer.
I'm glad a woman got it.
It is too late. Vonnegut is dead.
Indeed. Part of my awakening as a thoughtful, questioning person was the reading and re-reading of "Cat's Cradle". His body of work may not be quite as literary as Lessing's to some people's way of thinking (although"The Golden Notebook" was my salvation as I staggered through a professional world populated by hostile men and I am thrilled she won), but like Lessing, he continued to write words with reading into his eighties. He was wonderful on "The Daily Show" before he died and left us a wonderful legacy of outrageously good reading.
Looks to me like the Fifth Child made it to the White House...
and now we're Briefing for a Descent Into Hell
Don't like the Philip Roth remark. He's an original writer who also deserves Nobel recognition, but writing honestly about sex in relationships is something the Nobel people have an aversion to. Henry Miller has also been victimized by the same unimaginative Nobel mentality. Of course, Both Roth and Miller have written much more than about sex, but expecting the committee to see beyond its fears would be as impossible as spotting a unicorn in Central Park.
Harold (legend in his own mind) Bloom says that the Nobel committee choice of Doris Lessing was a "purely political choice."
What drivel! This woman is a brilliant writer who at 88 years old sees the world from a much larger perspective than her "peers".
Thank you Nobel committee for an insightful and more importantly, meaningful choice.
Bloom has been driveling for some time. It's a prerogative of tenure. Remember this is the man who dismissed LotR as true trash. Seen through the right glasses, any Nobel choice is "political."
I bet she isn't in his "Canon". Wouldn't know. Don't think enough of the arrogant man to inquire.
In this day and age, for anyone to expect an American to win a Nobel prize for literature is ridiculous. And to expect Roth to be awarded one ... preposterous!
As for Bloom, old fart, a has-been getting progressively more senile.
It sure seems intersting that women appear to the be the only ones commenting on this....don't exactly know what this means, but I fear it might be an indicator of how long we still have to go until most of our primitivistic drives are placed on the shelves and a more "universal" sense begins to permeate the culture.
Hopefully the Nobel stiffs can start ot shed their cobwebs and indeed honor what must be honored. I raise my glass to Doris.
For the record, didn't the Nobel committee honor an American black woman recently? Toni Morrison? Is that so last week?
The 'THRILLER' writers like HIGGINS AND CUSSLER have been and continue to be ignored by the NOBEL Committee even though their plots and their writing is first class and deserving of being called literature, in the same class with Doris. Or is this just a minority opinion?
As a novelist myself, I agree with the others who replied that there is a huge difference between the writings of Higgins, Cussler, Sandford, Childs, Grafton, T. Jefferson Parker, and so on and great literature. These writers are accomplished and I love to read them. But there is a difference between skilled language and great language. I do feel, incidentally, that lots of "literary" writers who are hailed for their prose are completely boring. Great fiction requires a mastery of language, a mastery of human nature, and the ability to make a story compelling. Miss out on any one of the three and you may have something good, but you do not have the very best.
Sorry, old chap, but it's a minority opinion!
Try her short stories, or African Laughter.
I find Cussler strangely addictive, but that does not mean he is a great writer. Can't really explain why, but I don't think being entertaining and being great are the same thing. Maybe, one could say the great writers do much more than entertain, they make us examine, learn, question, hope, feel, think, and try to improve ourselves as humans.
Henry Miller famously called your idea of "being great" the myth of the
GOLD STANDARD in LIERATURE
He was absolutely right.
Take Cussler's arguably best thriller TREASURE.
IT is a masterpiece of American literature and
clearly Dirk Pitt need not lower his head to
anyone...
There is an art to the page turner...forget the gold standard myth....
MOTHERS FOR ANSWERS
MOTHERS OF INTENTION
For me Doris Lessing was the Marianne who pointed the way from the barricades to my life ahead.
In the sixties, while some were pointlessly intent on going zipless, I first read, over and over, like most women of my generation, the Golden Notebook and heard the warnings of what it would be like.
Taking it to heart would be another matter.
But the book that has the strongest life-long influence in shaping my thoughts was The Four-Gated City.
I think of it's premise more often than I would expect, especially since we are now in pretty much the same war-warped mindset as when it first appeared, that the world is in a constant flux of slow pendulum swing between political left and right. It's the self-correction that is is so beyond us.
Re-reading it is always on my to-do list. It's about time I get around to doing it. And so should you.
I keep wondering what Lessing would have been like had she had access to all that we have today and not veered into such an unexpected and depressing place.
But that's Lessing's lesson for you. Find your own road and tread it fearlessly.
I have always thought that her earlier works and all of Muriel Spark, Lessing's exact counterbalance, who died recently after an enviable writer's lifetime, were not just the highest standard of modern writing. They were insidiously life-changing.
Spark found universal truths in her deceptively facile, witty and incredibly astute observations.
Lessing lost parts of her personal self in her compulsive introspections.
My life has been so much more for having heeded them both.
gala
gandolina@hotmail.com
Bravo Nobel Prize Committee! Doris Lessing is indeed a worthy winner, long overdue. She was such an inspiration in my young adulthood. She opened my horizons as a woman and gave me permission to think thoughts I didn't even know were taboo!
Doris Lessing is that rarest of writers - and persons: an individual capable of thinking her own independent thoughts. The prize is well deserved.
I saw a list of first rate writers who never were awarded the Nobel, and James Joyce was not even on THAT list.
Pearl Buck won it, but not Borges or Henry Miller. That says it all.
There are certainly more deserving writers than the award can be given to. But Henry Miller? Come on. He may be important to you and to some others, but he is monotonous and his prose is difficult to endure.
What exactly does it say? That self-indulgence doesn't always cut it? Oh, and you forgot Roth, who never thought a sentence that didn't begin with "I".
Nothing "says it all." The Nobel is awarded to someone who deserves it. That doesn't mean anyone who doesn't get it didn't deserve it. And your "nominees" illustrate the problem of awarding the prize. Henry Miller?? How about John Fowles? Margaret Atwood? Wallace Stegner? And....
"Says it all" is, how shall I say...
Yes, a figure of speech. There are many of them.
You might have known this, but you were probably too busy reading Margaret Atwood and Wallace Stegner.
HENRY MILLER should have won and would have found something to do with all that loot! What is incredible is that the NOTION of literature is
still viable in a post WWW univrse, and that alone makes it valuable, however romantic, however silly.
I love Doris Lessing, and the award is way past due. The world seems to place so much significance on every little twitch or tiny thought of a man (the road trip; the buddy film; the coming-of-age story; the war movies; the middle-aged man who has an affair), yet women's lives and experiences are too often disregarded.
A few years ago I was in a women's book club and I chose The Summer Before The Dark by Doris Lessing. I highly recommend the book. It is about a middle class 40-ish woman in London with husband and children who ends up locked out of her home, with family scattered across the globe, for one summer. So she rents a room in a flat with a group of young non-conformist people, and begins to see her life very differently.
Some of the 40-ish women in my book club recoiled from the book, insisting that they found the story to be silly and meaningless. I saw panic in their eyes and heard a tremor in their voices. And as the years have gone by, when I run into those particular women and I see the fine wrinkles, the changing hair color, the frantic god-knows-what-they're-taking speedy quality they have, I feel sorry for them.
Congratulations to Doris Lessing, and for those who have missed her, enjoy.
Even in my twenties, (in the early seventies), many, many women were afraid of the effects of living alone and having to make one's own choices and accepting the consequences.
As an independent "Leftie". I reveled in her willingness to criticize the Leftists who were as blind to the weaknesses in their behavior and political analysis as anyone else. She has shown me over the years how to evolve as I have grown older and remain relevant in my thinking.
By the way, despite my recent love affair with www's and blogs, my first love will always be the printed word on paper that cannot be deleted with the pressing of a button. Literature has never been more necessary to keep us grounded and in touch (pardon the cliche') with our intellectual roots.
Spoken like true breakfast champion! You
Posted October 11, 2007 | 10:59 AM (EST)