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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An exploratory overview of the meaning of love,
By
This review is from: Love, Again (Paperback)
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.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Melancholy and Romantic,
By A Customer
This review is from: Love, Again (Paperback)
"Love, Again" is one of Doris Lessing's "later" novels and it focuses on an older protagonist caught in the snares of romantic love. Sarah Durham is sixty-five and describes herself as not having been in love in decades. All that changes when she, the widow of a founding member of "The Green Bird," a successful London theatre company, decides to stage an avant-garde operatic play concerning the enigmatic Julie Vairon. Vairon lived most of her life in an isolated French village, writing music and painting and was virtually unknown until her "discovery" in the 1970s.It is Julie Vairon's tortured love life that really interests Sarah, however, even more than does her strange and eerie music. Vairon was romantically involved with two Frenchmen, yet neither romance had a happy ending. Vairon did, however, find love at last, or what passed for love, only to have everything end both mysteriously and tragically. As Sarah and her company of actors at "The Green Bird" begin work on their rendition of the life of Julie Vairon, Julie's own eroticism seems to be working its magic on the cast. Everyone seems to be falling in love with everyone else...and some of the romances are of the most improbable imaginable. Although someone not familiar with Doris Lessing's writing may think the above premise sounds more than a little silly, let me assure you that it is not. You won't find any lovesick fools running around in this book. Rather than reaching the heights of ecstasy, the lovers in "Love, Again" are anguished souls who become involved in relationships that don't have even a ghost of a chance of working. And Lessing, a superlative writer, makes us feel the grief and sense of loss experienced by her characters. We don't laugh at them; we grieve with them. Stylistically, "Love, Again" is a different sort of Doris Lessing novel. It is intricate, very internal and reflective. It is also something of a double narrative, a literary device that I, personally, like very much. Lessing very cleverly and skillfully lets the melancholy and tragic ghost of Julie Vairon haunts the love lives of her present-day characters. And the life of Julie Vairon is the perfect background on which to tell the story of Sarah and company. As much as this book concentrates on love, however, love is not its central theme. The book revolves around Sarah Durham and how she copes with her own sexuality and attractiveness in light of the inevitability of growing older. This is subject matter that Lessing has delved into before: in "The Summer Before the Dark" Kate Brown was a woman attempting to deal with the first pangs of growing older and lost youth. Sarah, however, is older and seemingly beyond the changes that sent Kate into a literal panic, but she does have problems of her own to deal with. Sarah's problems are the most problematic area of "Love, Again." While I can readily accept the idea of one "thirtysomething" man falling madly in love with Sarah, the idea of three doing the very same thing is a little too much...no matter how great Sarah looks or how charming she is. Lessing, however, is such a good writer that she can make us suspend our disbelief and buy into the proposition that three gorgeous and very sought-after men are madly pursuing Sarah. It may sound a bit preposterous in this review, but I'm not Doris Lessing. In her hands, it comes off just fine. As for the ending, I'm not going to give it away, but let's just say that Lessing is too melancholy to buy into the happily-ever-after scenario and she doesn't write fairy tales. The ending is satisfying and fits the book perfectly. "Love, Again," is more than enough to satisfy anyone who is looking for an engrossing story with characters to really care about and believe in. I wish I could find more books like this one.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Late Summer Night's Anguish,
By
This review is from: Love, Again (Paperback)
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.
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