There are few things better than finding a new favorite author. Clearly, Doris Lessing isn't an author whose books are hidden in the back of bookstores, especially considering that she just won the Nobel Prize for Literature but she is still a new discovery to me.
The Grandmothers is actually a collection of four short novels: The Grandmothers, Victoria and the Staveneys, The Reason for It, and A Love Child. All of the stories except for The Reason for It were based on stories that had been told to Lessing over time by different people she had encountered. This is not one of those collections in which there are one or two fantastic stories with other less-fantastic stories interspersed simply to fill the pages of a book. Each of these stories stands on its own.
The title story is one I will definitely come back to. It most interested the writer in me in that I want to study exactly how she made the story unfold in such a way. She builds a picture of the grandmothers and fathers of two little girls, then completely destroys it, and finally rebuilds it again, along the way making you question your views on sexuality, marriage, love, and social expectations.
Victoria and the Staveneys announces itself as a story of race and class, and how these issues are dealt with within one family. The moral dilemma a mother faces, all the while knowing what decision she will make, is handled extremely well by Lessing. While not my favorite story in the collection, it was still quite good. The themes pertaining to race she visits in this story are ones that she frequently explores.
The story I spent the most time with was The Reason for It. I don't know if this would be classified as science fiction, but Lessing does create an entirely new society with its own politics and history. While reading this story, I found myself wanting to arrange a discussion between Doris Lessing and J.M. Coetzee. In one part of his book, Diary of a Bad Year, his main character makes an argument that it actually does not matter who society is lead by, because (to put it tritely and to seriously shorten his argument) it's all the same in the end. In Lessing's story a society is torn apart because of the chosen leader, but by the end of the story I wondered if she had come to the same conclusion as Coetzee's character.
The Reason for It is another story that I will revisit, which is especially interesting because it is a bit outside of what I would normally consider reading. One of the story's greatest strengths is how the main character comes to view the society's leader over time. He knew this leader as a child, and he comes into contact with him again shortly before death (at over 100 years old.) To see him struggling with the question of how to judge a person's action is fascinating. He states at one point: "Beauty is a terrible thing: but it is dangerous too for a person to be seen as the sum of his or her admirable qualities."
The final story is called A Love Child. This story takes place during the war and expertly shows the trials of James, a young man caught up in politics and poetry in Great Britain who is called to fight in World War II, but ends up in India maintaining Britain's colonization. This tale is one of the best character stories I've read in ages.
The best part of all of this is that Doris Lessing has an extensive body of work. The last time I was so inspired by a writer was when I read The Keep by Jennifer Egan. Within a month I had read her other two books, and now I just wait for new work from her. It will take years, though, for me to exhaust Lessing's body of work. And I am definitely looking forward to the task.
For more information:
Interview with Doris Lessing about The Grandmothers
Audio Interview with Lessing in 2006
Article in which Joyce Carol Oates meets with Lessing
Audio of Lessing reading her work
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