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Stories by
Doris Lessing : Vintage Books, New York/1980
Available at: Amazon.co.uk
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Doris
Lessing, who was born Doris May Taylor, of British parents, in Persia (now Iran) on October 22,
1919, and grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), is simply one of the best short story writers of the last century.
Having recently read the overrated oeuvres of William Trevor and Frank O’Connor, it was a relief to avail myself
of the comparatively low-keyed works of Lessing. Of course, she deals with many of the same topics that Trevor,
especially (as far more of his tales than O’Connor’s are set in England than Ireland), deals with: the bourgeoisie’s
sloth, the ins and outs of romance, yet she does so in far more daring and experimental forms, even as she does so.
And her ear for the upper crust’s patois is far more realistic and variegated than Trevor’s.
Consequently, her tales are more lively and engaging with the characters within.
Another area she excels in is with the little details. She understands that ‘realism’ consists not merely of a
boring recitation of the diurnal, but a poetic focus on aspects of the real that have been overlooked by most
people. Overall, I’d have liked a bit more diversity in her tales, but she has more than most writers, and this
helps with the overall quality of her work. Not all her stories succeed, but her body of work is far more
‘experimental’ than that of PoMo poseurs such as David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, or Rick Moody. Still,
even as her stories stretch form, they all share a very clinical and calculating eye. Lessing really digs
underneath the expected, in the best ways of such psychologically based writers as Richard Ford, while also
exploring emotion in convincing character portraits that are reminiscent of the best of Russell Banks and
Reynolds Price.
Let me now deal with some of the best tales in the book, representative of some
of the major Lessing tropes, although aware that some of the tales could fit into more than one category. I
descried five major categories, with few tales that are not classifiable, and those generally were the lesser
tales. The first category would be tales of love and infidelities. The tale He deals with whether or not
a cuckolded woman will take back her faithless lover. It is a short tale, but one which plumbs the potential
pragmatic consequences of such a decision, for if the woman accepts her lover back just what does that say
about her? The Habit Of Loving deals with a man who tries to reconcile with an old love, but finds out that
old ways are not always replicable.
The aptly titled A Man And Two Women deals with similar choices to be made.
Lessing’s longest meditation on the subject occurs in the novella length The Other Woman. Note how simple
Lessing’s titles are, yet how cogent to the tale’s realities. This tale deals with things in even more pragmatic
terms, as a young woman finds out her older lover, whom she thought was married, is not. Eventually, she is
befriended by her lover’s ex-wife, and decides to leave him to another, younger and even more gullible woman.
It is one of the most empowering tales dealing with infidelities and lies I’ve ever read, yet it is simply
presented, and cleanly told, with none of the hand-wring that usually accompanies such tales, nor the PC
bravado and sermonizing over the correct decision made by the lead character.
Another major theme for Lessing deals with social portraits, usually of
dilettantes. One Off The Short List is a great example of this. A failed writer, reduced to doing
interviews for the BBC, tries to fulfill his fantasy of bedding a famed stage actress. Under threat of violence
(among other suasions) he gets her to submit to his carnal desires, only to have her slough him off in an
even crueler way the next morning. The writer then turns himself off emotionally, and one gets a glimpse at
just how this petty monster came to be, and why. A lesser example is the novella The Eye Of God In
Paradise, a heavy-handed and moralistic tale that deals with post-World War Two Austria, and English
dilettantes on an arts excursion, only to find that the monstrous impulse that led the Aryan psyche to war
still persists. It is one of the few poorly written tales in the book, both for its poor and biased symbolism
and its length attenuating any sense of drama.
Lessing fairs better in her tales that are mostly all portraits of individuals
or groups, such as the realistically grim, but excellent, An Old Woman And Her Cat, which follows the
descent of both titular characters into death. To Room Nineteen is a more famous story, but a bit more
amorphous, as it follows the end of the life of a suicidal woman, in a loveless marriage, whose goals are
circumscribed by social confines she’s submitted to. She decides to rent a hotel room to get ‘space’ to deal
with her frustrations, causing her husband to suspect infidelity. Yet, this only heightens her depression,
until she gasses herself in a hotel room. It is too long and drawn out a story, and by tale’s end you’re
hoping she finally does the deed. Notes For A Case History is an outstanding portrait of a good
looking, but manipulative bitch whose constant scheming eventually backfires, as she finds herself eventually
falling victim to her own emptiness. The Witness chronicles a similar fall from grace, as a pervert
is finally caught and fired from his job. Perhaps the most famed of these ‘portraits’ is the great tale,
Through The Tunnel, which follows the power of will a young eleven year old boy summons as he
determines to hold his breath long enough to explore an underwater cave, and convince himself he has the
stuff to be a real man.
The last two categories have a good deal of overlap, and I call them moment
pieces and experiments. The moment pieces are just that- pieces that describe a place or a time. In A Woman
On The Roof Lessing shows that dilettantes are not her only forte, that she can sketch the working classes,
as a group of blue collar roofers take notice of a gorgeous woman sunbathing on a rooftop not far away, and one
of them actually gets up the nerve to try to approach her, only to be handed his balls on a proverbial silver
platter. She also goes outside her comfort zone with Outside The Ministry, which is a game of political
oneupsmanship between four politicians from an African nation newly freed from.
Britain’s colonial rule. Then there are a series of brilliant mood pieces, such
as A Room, which describes a room, and its surroundings, in great detail, only to discover that much of
what is known by the senses is not what it seems. Homage For Isaac Babel follows the mere recommendation
of the author’s work, and its outcome. A Year In Regent’s Park is just what the title says- a series of
vignettes about a year in a park’s life. Lions, Leaves, Roses… is a tale in a similar vein, as is The
Other Garden, which is a pastoral meditation.
The final sort of tales are the experiments, such as Not A Very Nice Story,
which heavily plays with form and points of view as it details a pair of intertwined marriages, which ends on a
very despairing note. This truly postmodern tale (as opposed to the slop that usually has that label applied to it)
opens in this provocative and well written way.
Report On The Threatened City is Lessing’s only science fiction tale in
the collection, and has a very Twilight Zone like appeal. England Versus England and Two
Potters are two minor, and mediocre tales that also fall into this last category.
Through all her tales, though, Lessing never relents from the basic existential
crisis that is at the heart of most literary stories of quality: who am I and how did I get here (to where the
story starts)?, or its subtle variants She is very much a literary writer, in the best sense of that term, and,
at least in her short fiction, I’ve found none of the specious and frequent comparisons made between her and
Virginia Woolf to hold up. Woolf was a horrendous short fictionist (and her longer fiction was not much better,
if at all), while Lessing is a premier talent and accomplished wordsmith. Her best tales read almost like
emotionally charged psychological chess matches between antagonists, or a protagonist and the cosmos, and
she has a good ear for real conversational tones, inflections, and offhanded poesy.
Reviewed by Dan Schneider: Cosmoetica
Dreams of my Russian Summers by Andrei Makine: Simon & Schuster/1995
Available at: Amazon.co.uk
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This charming novel is written by a Russian
 émigré who sought asylum in France and has been living
there since 1987. The translation by Geoffrey Strachan appears to be faithful to the
original. The descriptive prose comes into its own when describing the beauty of the great
Russian Steppe in high summer, the extreme harshness of a Siberian winter and the pleasure
of two boys fishing through the ice of the frozen Volga.
At the outset we meet the narrator and his sister around
the age of 11 years. They are staying with their French born grandmother in the remote
Siberian town in which she lives on the edge of the Russian Steppe. The long, languorous,
summer evenings are spent on Charlotte's balcony where she regales the children with tales
from her past, particularly her experiences of her early life in Paris, during the Belle
Epoque (between the wars). She brings the street life of that great city to life to the
delight of the children.
At that time I must have been almost your age; It was
the winter of 1910. The Seine had turned into a real sea.
The people
of Paris travelled round by boat. The streets were like rivers;
the squares,
like great lakes. And what astonished me was the silence…"
On our balcony
we heard the sleepy silence of flooded Paris. The lapping
of a few waves when
a boat went by, a muffled voice at the end of a drowned
avenue. The France
of our grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging
from the waves.
On many of these evenings Charlotte also read poetry
to the children. Her admiration of French writers such as Baudelaire, Hugo et al
fostered in the boy a great love of words, and an early realisation of the possibilities
therein for his own self-expression.
Over time, on subsequent summers spent with Charlotte,
nuggets of her personal life showed through. The narrator, though very young, is
sufficiently perceptive to notice that some of his grandmother's references seem to
cause her great sadness. Eventually Charlotte shares a deeply traumatizing event from
her youth with her teenage grandson, thus cementing further the bond of their
extraordinarily close relationship.
At the early stage of his life the boy embraces fully
his French background, feeling himself different and superior to his Russian schoolmates.
However, growing into his teens, this identity works against him and he is bullied
and jeered at school, considered an outsider, and therefore fare game. Gradually,
the reality of his Russian life filters through what he calls 'the French implant'.
After watching young soldiers driving tanks and dismantling firearms he experiences
a great feeling of fellowship with these young men.
This life, actually a very Soviet life, on whose
margins I had always
lived, now exalted me. To blend into its
easygoing and collectivist routine
suddenly seemed to me like a brilliant solution.
To live the life of everybody
else! To drive a tank; then when demobilized, to pour
molten steel amid the
machines in a great factory beside the Volga; to go to the
stadium every
Saturday to watch a football match. But above all to
know that this succession
of days, tranquil and predictable, was crowned by a
great messianic
project -
the communism that, one day, would make us all perpetually
happy, clear as
crystal in our thoughts, strictly equal…"
This then is the core of Dreams of My Russian
Summers--the struggle between the emerging young adult's two identities and
his ultimate acceptance of the value and importance of both in his life. And it
is, of course also a love story in the true sense, between grandmother and grandson.
The novel reads like an autobiography and one suspects that many of the beautifully
drawn characters are perhaps people from Makine's own life - grandmother, Charlotte
Lemmonier, the wonderful Pashka (his 'dunce' friend), his loudmouth aunt, smartass
school mates, his shadowy parents. This slim novel (241 pages) takes in, through
Charlotte Lemmonier's experiences, all the major events in Russia's history of the
20th. Century - the fall of the Tsar and his family, war with Germany, the Stalinist
purges, the dehumanising conditions of industrialisation and ultimately the fall of
communism.
Why did a woman of such refined sensibility as
Charlotte stay in what must have been to her, in so many ways, an alien environment?
Love. Love for her husband Fyodor, a war victim buried in the local cemetery.
Reviewed by Emer Duff
The Republican by TS O'Rourke:
Killynon House Books, Mullingar/2006
Available at: Amazon.co.uk
|
When I was asked to review
The Republican, the latest novel by Irish crime writer TS O'Rourke I was a little
uncomfortable. Crime fiction I am used to, historical fiction less so. History brings back
images of my schooldays and long, boring history classes--something that most of us would
prefer to forget.
I ploughed on regardless, and within a few pages I was glad
that I had made the effort. If you have read Liam O'Flaherty and enjoyed it, then you'll love
The Republican. The thing about this book is that it opens up the past quite quickly
and realistically without losing pace or getting bogged down in poetic allegory and strained
literary devices that many books in this genre rely on. It is well, yet simply written, in a
style that genuinely reflects the time that it depicts.
The story follows the actions of a young Dublin IRA man
throughout the Civil War in Dublin City. The Republican is an unusual and enlightening
book that has been painstakingly researched and written with great respect for those that
fought on both sides of the Irish Civil War. This is not a novel aimed at opening old
wounds--rather of healing them.
Including nearly all of the main political figures of the day,
The Republican paints a broad canvas that goes into details that most novels would
gloss over with literary abandon. This respect for the historical facts of the Civil War
serves to heighten the sense of realism and draw the reader into the story. Sympathetic
characters may be hard for some readers to find, but not all. It's an emotive novel that
will provoke a response one way or another - but it won't necessarily be a negative one.
The overwhelming emotion that it generated in this reviewer was one of sadness.
The breakdown of the events that led to the start of the
Civil War, the difficult personal choices that people made, and the tragic events that
followed form the backbone of this story. It is, in essence a foot soldier's view of the war
in Dublin City. Like Sebastian Barry's main character in the critically acclaimed novel
A Long Long Way, TS O'Rourke's central figure is a man who starts off certain and
strong-willed, only to descend into a state of moral confusion. Whilst the Civil War is
raging on the streets of Dublin, another more personal battle rages in the mind of the main
character, Jack Larkin.
This book will probably generate some controversy due to the
subject matter. But this is a relatively impartial piece of fiction--even though it depicts
the anti-Treaty side of the conflict.
There are few authors who could tackle this subject and do it
justice. TS O'Rourke's credentials as Ireland's foremost hard-boiled crime writer seem perfect
for this type of story. This is no light-hearted historical romp--this is life and death,
fear and betrayal, love and loss at its grisly best.
TS O'Rourke's first novel Ganglands, penned in the mid-90s, is
arguably one of Ireland's seminal crime novels. For the last number of years O'Rourke has been
silent - perhaps dismayed by the creeping development of the crime genre in modern Ireland.
Amidst the chick-lit and rustic replays of 'modern' Irish
writing, O'Rourke is a gem in the raw--a strong voice with an equally strong attitude. I have
a feeling that he takes great pleasure in kicking the drowsy beast that Ireland has become
in an effort to provoke a reaction--any reaction. So if you feel slightly uncomfortable at
times while reading this book, it is probably the author sticking the boot in.
If you expect your fiction to follow the rules of engagement,
then perhaps The Republican is not for you. If you think history is boring and passé,
you haven't read enough.
My walks through Dublin have been altered forever thanks to
this book and its vivid description of the Civil War in Dublin.
If you don't read this one, you've missed something special.
Reviewed by Michael Conroy.
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© the Dublin Quarterly 2006.
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