The Woman Upstairs – 2/5 Stars I found this book because of a list listing “Famous angry women in books” or something. And it’s true that the lead character and narrator of this book is very angry. I was hoping she’d be angrier and less articulate about her anger in this book. What’s this book about? It’s about a woman in her early 40s who was an artist who is also an elementary school teacher. She becomes friends with the mom of one her students. […]
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
This is the second book of a series of five novels that Doris Lessing wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, called “The Children of Violence.” The first book dealt with our protagonist, Martha Quest, growing up on a white-owned farm in Rhodesia (to be clear she is white and of British heritage). So this is a second in the series, and certainly an observant reader could pick up this book without needing a lot of information from the first book to move forward, but knowing […]
We were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard
The Memoirs of a Survivor – 3/5 Stars Amending a previous review of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things to 3/5 stars, I want to also give this novel the same grade. In part, though I have really loved a lot of Doris Lessing novels (but by no means all of — I actually really dislike one of her books) this is not one I liked that much. It’s similar to the Auster novel, which is why I bring it up, and like […]
“Don’t put me off, Anna. Are you afraid of being chaotic?”
The structure, the writing, and the vision of this novel are absolutely brilliant. At times, the complexity of these three components can make this a difficult novel and even a frustrating one. One section might be incredibly emotionally complex and even harrowing in some ways, gutting in its own right, and then the next might be dry or ironic or amusing. The novel itself is chunked out into six different components. A frame narrative taking place in the present which is called here “Free Women,” […]