The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels [Hardcover]

Doris Lessing (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2004

With the four short novels in this collection, Doris Lessing once again proves that she is unrivalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition.

The Grandmothers

Two women, close friends, fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, promising a respectable old age.

Victoria and the Staveneys

A poor black girl has a baby with the son of a liberal middle-class family and finds that her little girl is slowly being absorbed into the world of white privilege and becoming estranged from her.

The Reason for It

Certain to appeal to fans of Shikasta and Memoirs of a Survivor, it describes the birth, flourishing, and decline of a culture long, long ago, but with many modern echoes.

A Love Child

A soldier in World War II, during the dangerous voyage to India around the Cape, falls in love on shore leave and remains convinced that a love child resulted from the wartime romance.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest by the prolific Lessing is a collection of four novellas that vary considerably in quality, with the best of them, "Victoria and the Staveneys" and "A Love Child," showing her at the top of her very impressive form. They are both at once intimately detailed yet infinitely expansive in their suggestions of a lost world only recoverable by a profoundly observant writer. In "Victoria" a young London black woman of charm and great fortitude survives and transcends the hardest of all assimilations: acceptance by a free-thinking, liberal white family. The shades of racial and social subtext here are evoked with a sure hand that even a Zadie Smith could envy. "A Love Child" powerfully evokes a strange aspect of a familiar time: a terrible ocean voyage, during WWII, by a hapless British regiment sent to the Far East to help protect India against Japanese invasion. James Reid, a young conscript, puts ashore in South Africa in the course of this nightmare voyage and embarks on a liaison that transforms the rest of his life. The detail and almost hallucinatory power with which an era and an ethos are recaptured are Lessing at her best, comparable to Ian McEwan's amazing war scenes in Atonement. The other stories are on a much lower level. The title story is about an odd relationship between two older women and each other's young sons; it is an original idea, but curiously lame in the telling. And "The Reason for It" is one of those peculiar tales in the SF/fantasy genre that Lessing does well enough, but that never seem to be quite her m‚tier. Still, the two prize pieces here are well worth the price.
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From The New Yorker

The subtitle of this collection of stories—"Four Short Novels"—announces their ambition: each unfolds over decades, tracking with dispassionate precision how youthful notions come to define, and even defeat, a life. Two women seal their friendship by seducing each other's teen-age son; an aged counsellor recounts the decay of a mysterious ancient civilization ruled by a handsome but foolish despot; an impoverished black girl bears the child of a middle-class white boy, and is welcomed by his self-consciously liberal family. Lessing's scathing intelligence ranges widely, but her tales tend to wobble under the weight of her ideas. She is at her best in the final story, which extends from England to the outposts of empire in South Africa and India during the Second World War. A British soldier has a brief affair with an officer's wife, and in later years becomes obsessed with the idea that he might have fathered a son, a possibility that appears to him as the key to the life he should have led.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper (January 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060530103
• ISBN-13: 978-0060530105
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,282,507 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth it just for "Love Child", January 26, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (Hardcover)

Doris Lessing's compilation of four novellas (called "short novels" in the title) shows Lessing at both her best and worst. Only the last, "Love Child" comes close to showing her sheer power as a writer, and this novella is so artfully written, even as it meanders through a man's life, that it's well worth enduring the others to get to it.

The most annoying of these novellas are "The Grandmothers" and "The Reason For It," the latter because of its allegorical didacticism. In a collection otherwise about impossible love, "The Reason For It" stands out as not belonging, for it concerns the lessons of unearned (and unreasonable) power. "The Grandmothers" fails for a different reason: it is simply too neat, too devoid of true emotion, too hard to accept as something more than an exercise in fiction. Two women, largely indistinguishable except by name, have two sons, also indistinguishable. Each woman, for no believable reason, takes the son of the other as a lover. The two sons grow up, marry indistinguishable women and have between them two indistinguishable daughters. The women are repeatedly described as "pretty" with "brown legs" and their sons are "handsome" and "desirable." At times well-written and other times bland, this novella ends up being only mildly interesting. Especially after recently reading Paul Theroux's THE STRANGER AT THE PALAZZO D'ORO, I wonder why such skilled but aging writers are exploring older women being lovers of younger men when they can't write convincingly about it. At least the novella following "The Grandmothers", "Victoria and the Staveneys," an exploration of love and race, manages to find the emotion in an unusual situation.

And then, finally, the reader, if she hasn't given up already, reaches the last novella, "Love Child." Here, Lessing takes her time to develop the circumstances of a lower middle class man who is drafted while still in college to serve during World War II. Slow to unfold but honest at every turn, this novella is a delight in detail and character, with its protagonist James earning the right to the reader's affection. With a few minor exceptions, what happens is both convincing and natural. By the end of it, I felt Lessing had redeemed herself both as a writer and an observer of the human condition.

"Love Child" alone makes this collection worth reading. Thank goodness Lessing chose to include it, for otherwise I would have been greatly disappointed.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Read it for "A Love Child", March 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (Hardcover)

I almost rated this book "5 stars" in spite of the fact that the first novella ("The Grandmothers") is almost unreadable, because "A Love Child" is one of the most moving and beautifully-written things I have ever read. I almost missed it because after I read "The Grandmothers" I nearly put the book away in disappointment.

Buy the book, read "Victoria and the Staveleys" and treat yourself to "A Love Child".

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lessing gives idea after idea in these novellas., February 6, 2004

By 

Linda Lazarus (Feeding Hills, Ma United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels (Hardcover)

Each idea in these 4 novellas and the characters involved is fascinating. Over and over I found myself unsure with which side I agreed . Given the real life choices her characters faced, what would be the best course to follow? I was never sure.If you have read Lessings' work you will see her returning to problem areas she has tackled before. I am grateful she did.These novellas remind us how complicated it is to be sure of why we think as we do.The issue of betrayal, of love outside the boundaries set in society, of race and class divisions, of war, of the chaos in crumbling modern societies and of living a life that is 'not your own' --these are just a sampling of the bounty here.