I am enjoying Doris Lessing’s the sweetest dream. (2002) Not knowing anything at all about this author except that she recently won the Nobel for Literature and then discovering that I actually must have heard something about her and only forgot – evidenced by her name being in my t-b-r book (see my post on my Dad’s great idea here), I was dismayed and intrigued by her Author’s Note:
I am not writing volume three of my autobiography… [Uh, do I need to read her vol 1 & 2 of her autobiography!??! skip it.]
…I hope I have managed to recapture the spirit of, particularly, the Sixties, that contradictory time which, looking back and comparing it with what came later, seems surprisingly innocent.
I have become involved and emotionally invested with most of the characters: with a mother who allows her sons and friends to ‘take over’ the house living ‘freely’ – rent free, respect-free, in a house actually owned by the mother’s EX-mother-in-law who also has a fascinating past and upbringing which contrasts greatly with the culture of the Sixties. With the ex who is somewhat one-dimensional, yet you know his unfolding of character will be slow. He is frowned greatly upon by his mother and ex-wife and sons. Deservedly so yet the reader may still be detached from KNOWING him. He is ADORED by the sons’ friends.
Lessing teases and allows obvious statements to hook me and to color my thinking; she has a skillful use of sarcasm. Yet something simmers… wait and watch – big things are coming up soon! It’s not like a plot twist, more a promise. WHERE ARE WE GOING?
A few characters are just so unlikable! and confusing to understand why they are the way they are. Lessing uses other characters to ask the very questions the reader is asking!
Passages follow that for some reason stimulated me to turn down the page (which is a no-no since it is a library book…. oops!)
Rose had taken books off the shelves, but she did not enjoy them. It was not that she read slowly, she did: but she was nothing if not persevering, and she stuck at it. A kind of rage filled her as she read, getting between her and the story or the facts she was trying to absorb. It was because these people had all this as a kind of inheritance, and she, Rose . . .
So they seemed to each other and themselves, on their bad days, like shadows a bare branch lays on the earth, a thin and empty tracery, no warmth of flesh anywhere, and kisses and embraces are tentative, ghosts trying to meet.
I’m not quite half way through…
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