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Title: Love Again : Novel, A by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 0-06-092796-8 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 09 April, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.9 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An exploratory overview of the meaning of love
Comment: As a woman growing older myself, I read this book to understand better the feelings and thoughts a woman might experience being in love at a later stage in life. To this end, I was not disappointed. Doris Lessing explores the meaning of love, not just infatuation, but also the loves of friendship, marital love and brotherly love and the their incumbent duties, as well as the (ab)use of love for personal gain or entertainment. It may be true, as some reviewers suggest, that people who have been untouched by love may not appreciate this book as much as those who have, but I think anyone interested in the meaning of love in all its aspects and across generations can get a lot out of reading this book. The main criticism I have is that while the story itself is about the staging of a play, I found the characters in the book and the aspects of love they portray rather over-staged, too. It is as if no character has been wasted in an attempt to explore the meaning of love, and this is a bit tiresome at times. On the other hand, this may be the point - that all people are in some ways generating or responding to the love or lack of love around them. One book I would recommend to readers of Love Again is Love Letters (an anthology) by Antonia Fraser.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Late Summer Night's Anguish
Comment: Lessing uses the device of a theater play to provide both the bewitching and the kaleidoscopic variety necessary to a thorough examination of love and its inevitable attendant, pain. Just as the characters of another, much older, play about bewitchment and love reveal themselves more fully only when in the throes of love's terrible enchantment, so here are the various characters anatomized in their different loves. And, Lessing seems to say, each love harks back to childhood, to those terrible (and thankfully forgotten) anguishes that marked us deeply and ineluctably.
For all the weight of its subject matter, this is a delicate book. The conclusions Lessing has drawn are painted for us vividly yet not crudely; nor does she retreat behind a veil of sophistication or good-humour. Instead she takes us on a descent into hell. It is debatable whether anyone who has not experienced something of the sort will be able to resonate with the descriptions Lessing provides. As she herself writes, it is just "words on paper" unless you already know, have already sensed the desolation that lies just behind the outer layers of many people's lives.
Her portraits are generally sympathetic, for all that this is an intensely personal book. Much to be recommended, but not a comfortable read.
Rating: 3
Summary: A moving book
Comment: Sarah Durham is a writer living in London. She is "as the French put it, a woman of a certain age", 65 more precisely. Her husband Alan died when Sarah was 35 and she has two grown children living in India and in America. Sarah is described by Doris Lessing as "a calm and reasonable" woman. She has a brother, Hal, also living in London, who is married to Anne, both being medical doctors. Sarah often has to look after their troubled daughter Joyce who suffers from anorexia and attempted suicide when she was an adolescent. She now lives a rough life with addicts, pushers and prostitutes.
Sarah is known in the theatre world of the West End as the influential manager of The Green Bird after having been for a long time a badly paid hanger-on to the edges of real theatre. She manages The Green Bird alongside three colleagues forming the Gang of Four: Mary Ford, responsible for publicity and promotion, Roy Strether, stage manager, and Patrick Steele.
As the staff prepare the staging of the new play "Julie Vairon" and the new cast start rehearsing, Sarah slowly falls under the spell of Bill Collins, a beautiful young actor. But somehow, love proves to be more difficult when you are a woman "of a certain age".
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Title: The Grass Is Singing : A Novel by Doris Lessing ISBN: 0060953462 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Walking in the Shade : Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962 by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 0060929561 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Under My Skin : Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 0060926643 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 11 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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