What Thou Lovest Well is Remaindered (A Series)

TIME BITES: Views and Reviews
By Doris Lessing
Harper Collins

This is not a new book, but if you haven't read it, it's new to you, as it was to me until recently. After Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, I wanted to catch up with her, and this collection hit the remainder lists, so I got it.

Lessing's “Children of Violence” series (beginning with Martha Quest) made her name in the 1950s, and The Golden Notebook was a popular and important novel with young people (especially women) in the 60s. In the 80s she shocked the literary world by writing the “Canopus in Argos” series of “space fiction” novels, the first of which (Shikasta) was a retelling of earth history (drawn particularly from the Bible and similar books from other cultures) from the perspective of a beneficent galactic empire. Other literary writers followed in exploring such genres. Her most recent novels in this decade presaged the trend towards apocalyptic fiction.

Lessing will be 89 this year. The breadth of her experience as well as the length of her active life are at this point virtually unique in contemporary literature in the English-speaking world. Born in Persia—in what is now Iran—of British parents, she grew up in southern Africa, in what is now Zimbabwe, and was then the British colonial state of Southern Rhodesia. Her family lived on a small farm in the bush country, but her house was filled with books, and she was an ardent reader. Though her formal education ended with high school, she became part of university Marxist groups opposed to racial injustice. After a failed marriage, she moved to London with her son in 1949, and has lived there ever since, although she has traveled widely, particularly back to Africa.

This somewhat eccentric collection of pieces—articles from periodicals, prefaces to other books—touches upon many literary topics, from a delightfully new reading of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to re-readings of once popular but now unknown books that she believes are still classics. But apart from being a window into her own work, I found three areas of special significance in this book. First is her knowledge of Islamic literature: both ancient texts which in many cases precedes and foreshadows western literature, and more contemporary works like those of the English Sufi, Idries Shah.

Second are her essays with geopolitical implications. Like many former Marxists, she is suspicious of ideology (including aspects of women’s liberation and political correctness) but she is not a nihilist or neocon, as some have become. She remains generously human, and asserts human freedom at every level. Third—and this links the preceding two—she champions the role of literature itself in our troubled and changing world.

There are several essays on that point that mirror her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. She writes about the decline of reading and loss of those insights and experiences in the rich West, contrasted with the true hunger for reading in poor parts of the world where books are hard to come by. She writes in a direct, conversational style about all these subjects (and others—she writes very well about cats)—but she is especially vivid on this topic, as she describes isolated Third World villages where people who haven’t eaten in days avidly organize groups to discuss a book they’ve just received. She also pointedly describes a village where the young boys begged for books, and upon her return there several years later, she found that they had become close-minded members of terrorist groups.

Fans of her space fiction will learn more about their cultural sources, and everyone will get a taste of this remarkable writer with a unique set of experiences and valuable point of view.

Writers of the Year 2007
The biggest book event of the year was the publishing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. But the international hoohaw shouldn't obscure Rowling's literary achievement: it all happened because of the actual books that individual people actually read (though some did so in couples and groups, reading aloud or listening to audiobooks, sometimes while reading along in the text--all very literary experiences largely missing from our culture for a long time.) Rowling wrote a series of books that increased in complexity and meaning along with the increasing ages of the characters the books were chiefly about, with important things to say for our time. Has anyone ever done this before? This is an achievement to be celebrated.

Doris Lessing's achievements were celebrated in 2007 when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is a champion of literature in our time, and she made a brilliant case for it in her Nobel address, as well as in essays published in her 2004 collection of nonfiction pieces, Time Bites. She was brought up in rural Africa, has lived in London for many years, and has traveled widely. So her point of view is striking and informed: she sees people in rich societies with easy access to books losing that profound education to consumer obsession, addictive video games and blogs, while people (especially children) in poor societies starving and begging for books and literature.

Lessing had the courage to follow where her writing took her, even to the science fiction series I admire. She had the courage to face hard personal truths and express boldly what others obscured in The Golden Notebook, and then to face down those who wanted to turn it into an ideological tract. In her interviews as well, she takes no nonsense that might limit the complexities and generous spirit she champions in literature. She also writes very well about cats (that's her in the last photo, in 1956.)