Customer Reviews

Love, Again

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

Love, Again is a slow-moving and deeply nuanced story about an older woman faced with a bevy of suitors as she and her team put on a new production one summer in England and France. The protagonist of the play is a woman who lived a century before, who was driven to the brink of madness by pain from her lovers. This serves as an obvious parable to Sarah, in the current day, slowly losing her mind, as new and old lovers come and go in her life, and bring with them countless complications. She also suffers deep stress from recent family troubles, and is in a general state of upheaval in her life. Lessing's writing is quite strong here, direct and typically analytical and tightly edited. The story itself, while thin and perhaps long-winded, nevertheless sheds a new light on a topic that is not often discussed in world literature. Still, though, I fear that only hardcore Lessing fans would appreciate it for what it is, as I cannot find someone unfamiliar with her style to find it to be as absorbing an experience as those in love with her work. A mature book for discerning readers.

I write this because of one particular passage that appears near the end. Sarah, the protagonist, has had recurring nightmares in which she is holding her doll and stabbing it with a knife. The doll is bleeding. In this episode, she sees an incident which explains her nightmares. Lessing doesn't say it does, and Sarah doesn't say it does, but the reader knows it because he/she has been shown it. The book is a masterpiece and a heartbreaking scene tops it off. Don't know how she does it.

I won't repeat the plot of the book as it's mentioned in several other reviews. I enjoyed the first third of this book a great deal, where the protagonist, Sarah, explores the nature of the play's heroine, Julie, and Stephen's passion for Julie. I thought Sarah would be drawn to Stephen and that the book would be about Sarah discovering her passion and perhaps drawing Stephen towards a relationship with her, a living woman not a great deal older than he. Of course, the author is not obliged to meet my expectations, but when the novel took a completely different turn, having her fall in love with two much younger men, and they in turn showing a sexual interest in her, a sixty-five year old woman - my reaction was to completely lose interest in the book. One professional critic suggests that some negative reviewers are pulling away from the strong emotions evoked by the book. In my case, this is true - the strong emotion being embarrassment, for the protagonist and the author. The protagonist looks "twenty years younger than her age." Well, I'm a 59 year old woman, and I've never met a 65 year old woman who could be taken for 45. Furthermore, most women I have known think that men even just a few years younger would not be attracted to them, yet Sarah apparently experiences none of these doubts. Years ago, I met a woman who was deluded enough at the age of 62 to think a man in his twenties was attracted to her. He wasn't. So, is the author writing a novel about the nature of an older woman's passion for a young man in a universe where such a passion might be returned? And returned not by one much younger man, but by two? If so, it's not a universe I inhabit. And it seems as silly as those books about young heroines who can deck a 350 pound man with their incredibly well-honed martial arts skills. It would be lovely if it were true. But those are books meant for younger readers. Because I couldn't believe in it, I was unable to enter the author's world. And unfortunately, I found myself wondering is this was the fantasy world of the author, who was the same age as her protagonist when the book was written. In which case, it's rather self-indulgent.

Doris Lessing's 1997 novel Love Again is the story of 65-year-old Englishwoman Sarah Durham's encounters with love--being loved, desiring love, falling in love, being the object of desire--as she produces a musical/play--an entertainment--about a mulatto woman named Julie Vairon who, her time at the other end of the same century, was the subject and object of impossible love. A beautiful woman who attracts the desire and love of Frenchmen whose nobility or social status out-caste her and render her an outcaste, she nevertheless manages to live on her own terms--that is, with the support of the men who have loved her. Julie Vairon occupies a place apart in a forest near a river full of the magic and beauty of the natural world. She realizes the magic of her own womanly ways and creates the poetry and music that will haunt Sarah Durham and the men and women who will come together almost a century later to create a tone poem of her life on stage in her village in France and, less successfully, in England.

Julie has magic that swirls round the international cast who perform her life story and becomes the vehicle by which Sarah Durham travels deep into the truth of love and desire and need--the selfishness and emptiness and hurt that drive us toward and away from each other.

Love and our grasp of it are fleeting things. In those rare moments we break through our isolate to embrace another in those fleeting moments, there is magic.

The thing is to know it.

Engaging story of many kinds of love inspired by the production of a musical play about a romantic heroine already dead one hundred years. Subtle, powerful portrait. Won't be enough action for some. I loved it.

Engaging story of many kinds of love inspired by the production of a musical play about a romantic heroine already dead one hundred years. Subtle, powerful portrait. Won't be enough action for some. I loved it.

Can a 65 year old have a great love life? Can a writer explore that love life using all her experiences and wisdom? Can she engage a reader time and again eliciting an "oh, yes" response? Yes, Yes, Yes. Lessing has done it again, and this one paints falling in love with broad brush strokes. I marked 40 passages to save! From the first descriptions of Sarah in a room of her own, this novel colors the reader with a wash of truths, and hues that will remain. A must read