Poet and fiction writer Rahul Soni, 28, is the first guest author on Free Speech. Besides his research on Franz Kafka, he has published poems and short stories and has edited some online magazines. He came to live in India when Iraq invaded the country of his childhood in 1990. To read him more, visit www.phingerphood.wordpress.com.
Staving off stiff competition from Japan’s Haruki Murakami and, perennial contender, U.S.A.’s Philip Roth, Doris Lessing was declared the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. In the process she became only the 11th woman to win the prize and, at just a few days short of her 88th birthday, the oldest.
Doris Lessing, nee May Taylor, was born in Iran in 1919 and brought up in Zimbabwe, where her father owned a farm. In 1949, after two failed marriages, she left Africa and moved to London to try her hand at writing.
She is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of 20th century issues and concerns, from the politics of race that she confronted in her early novels set in Africa, to the politics of gender which lead to her adoption by the feminist movement, to the role of the family and the individual in society, explored in her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
During a career extending more than half a century, she has published some 50 novels, short-story collections and memoirs, either under her own name or the pseudonym, Jane Somers.
Her 1950 debut, “The Grass is Singing” - which examines the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant - was an instant bestseller. The book broke new ground, both in terms of its outlining of an interracial relationship and in the sheer detail given to the characters’ internal lives.
This was followed by the “Children of Violence” series comprising “Martha Quest” (1952), “A Proper Marriage” (1954), “A Ripple from the Storm” (1958), “Landlocked” (1965) and “The Four-Gated City” (1969). It describes Martha Quest’s awakening to greater awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman. The series, which is somewhat autobiographical, has been described as Lessing’s most substantial work. With these books Lessing created a modern equivalent of the bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century.
Her real break-through, though, came with “The Golden Notebook” in 1962 (read excerpt here). 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 complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. Notably, Lessing herself does not agree with its status as a feminist classic. She would go on to write that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one’s self from illusions had been overlooked by critics. Lessing did not like the idea of being pigeon-holed as a feminist author. When asked why, she replied:
“I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women’s movement... Whatever type of behavior women are coming up with, it’s claimed as a victory for feminism - doesn’t matter how bad it is. We don’t seem to go in very much for self-criticism...
“... What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, ‘Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.’ Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I’ve come with great regret to this conclusion.”
When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the “Canopus in Argos” series. These books show, from many different perspectives, an advanced society’s efforts at forced evolution. The Canopus series is a blend of science-fiction and Sufi concepts.
Besides these books, she was short-listed for the Booker prize 3 times: in 1971 for “Briefing for a Descent into Hell”, in 1981 for “The Sirian Experiments” and in 1985 for “The Good Terrorist”.
In the citation for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Lessing was described by the Swedish Academy as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”.
Nevertheless, her selection has not been without controversy. The American literary critic Harold Bloom called the academy’s decision “pure political correctness. Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable… fourth-rate science fiction.”
Her latest work, The Cleft, is a sci-fi novel which imagines what happens to a mythical all-female world when men are introduced.
Doris Lessing, nee May Taylor, was born in Iran in 1919 and brought up in Zimbabwe, where her father owned a farm. In 1949, after two failed marriages, she left Africa and moved to London to try her hand at writing.
She is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of 20th century issues and concerns, from the politics of race that she confronted in her early novels set in Africa, to the politics of gender which lead to her adoption by the feminist movement, to the role of the family and the individual in society, explored in her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
During a career extending more than half a century, she has published some 50 novels, short-story collections and memoirs, either under her own name or the pseudonym, Jane Somers.
Her 1950 debut, “The Grass is Singing” - which examines the relationship between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant - was an instant bestseller. The book broke new ground, both in terms of its outlining of an interracial relationship and in the sheer detail given to the characters’ internal lives.
This was followed by the “Children of Violence” series comprising “Martha Quest” (1952), “A Proper Marriage” (1954), “A Ripple from the Storm” (1958), “Landlocked” (1965) and “The Four-Gated City” (1969). It describes Martha Quest’s awakening to greater awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman. The series, which is somewhat autobiographical, has been described as Lessing’s most substantial work. With these books Lessing created a modern equivalent of the bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century.
Her real break-through, though, came with “The Golden Notebook” in 1962 (read excerpt here). 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 complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. Notably, Lessing herself does not agree with its status as a feminist classic. She would go on to write that its theme of mental breakdowns as a means of healing and freeing one’s self from illusions had been overlooked by critics. Lessing did not like the idea of being pigeon-holed as a feminist author. When asked why, she replied:
“I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women’s movement... Whatever type of behavior women are coming up with, it’s claimed as a victory for feminism - doesn’t matter how bad it is. We don’t seem to go in very much for self-criticism...
“... What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, ‘Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.’ Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I’ve come with great regret to this conclusion.”
When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the “Canopus in Argos” series. These books show, from many different perspectives, an advanced society’s efforts at forced evolution. The Canopus series is a blend of science-fiction and Sufi concepts.
Besides these books, she was short-listed for the Booker prize 3 times: in 1971 for “Briefing for a Descent into Hell”, in 1981 for “The Sirian Experiments” and in 1985 for “The Good Terrorist”.
In the citation for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Lessing was described by the Swedish Academy as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”.
Nevertheless, her selection has not been without controversy. The American literary critic Harold Bloom called the academy’s decision “pure political correctness. Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable… fourth-rate science fiction.”
Her latest work, The Cleft, is a sci-fi novel which imagines what happens to a mythical all-female world when men are introduced.
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