29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Original and striking, January 27, 2004
Doris Lessing's "The Grass is Singing" opens with the death of Mary Turner. How could Mary's life have ended with such a tragic fate? As the reader progresses through the novel, he discovers Mary's insufferable existence, her life destroyed by a disastrous marriage to a farmer, Dick Turner. Mary is forced to live in a rural environment in South Africa for which she is ill-suited. Furthermore, Mary's relationship with her husband rapidly deteriorates as she realises that Dick is unable to manage the farm successfully and they are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. A truly superb novel, tragic and moving to the very last line. Mrs Lessing's wonderfully captures Africa's majestic beauty, the difficult relationship between the whites and the Natives. The psychological portrait of her heroine is exceptionally intense.
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marriage can't get worse than this, November 20, 2002
This review is from: The Grass Is Singing: A Novel (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)
When a colonial woman with a not unconventional upbringing who is not the luckiest person, decides to go for broke and marries as she is getting on, what could happen?
The anatomy of the master servant bond is one of the main themes of this book. Before welfare systems, all cultures had master servant relationships as the rich employed servants. The master servant relationship was stark in colonial Africa. The masters had to know the natives so that they could get work out of them and a certain amount of loyalty but the masters in Africa also had to keep the natives down, almost like animals, so that they could remain the masters and the servants could remain servants.
The natives of course as servants, could also benefit as underdogs as all servants do, being loyal, friendly and pleasing but not above their masters. Mary in the book, starts with preconceptions about her relationship to the Africans, and as things get from bad to worse, she if faced with a mistress servant relationship going horribly wrong.
Her husband is a fool, tied to the land and unable to organise his ambitions or get anything out of his farm. She knows better, but luck is never on their side. One actually has a respect for Mary and her penetrative intelligence, but the book describes how this very human intelligence with its stiff attitudes (she marries when she understands people are sniggering about her behind her back, in any case, women at the time did not have much choice in this), breaks down, collapses utterly.
Harrowing, hot hot weather with the dry beauty of Africa described by a veteran. This is a book that unravels in your hand and is a literary masterpiece for a first novel.
Lessing describes herself as a colonist and is known to be unconventional and vaguely feminist. She displays a keen erudition of the issues, language and sights of her once native Africa - and brings it home.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Less neurotic than The Golden Notebook!, January 21, 2001
This review is from: The Grass Is Singing: A Novel (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)
Though she is a renowned author, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, generally thought to be her best work, I found garbled and depressing.
'The Grass is Singing' was written when she was much younger and more stable, but it is still depressing, dealing as it does with the appalling treatment of the blacks by the whites in Africa. The prejudice and cruelty Lessing evokes ring true,as does the characterization of Mary. Personally, I found it impossible to empathise or even sympathise with her, and wasn't exactly upset at her fate. It is Moses one feels sorry for.
Lessing is able to be at once detached and involved in the lives of her protaganists and is only judgemental by implication. The collapse of Dick and Mary's relationship is well delineated and inexorable. Her descriptive powers are impressive - Africa comes through very strongly and one can almost smell the dust and the rain and the blossom. A good read.
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