Customer Reviews

Martha Quest (Children of Violence S.)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

i can't quite fathom why this series is not more widely discussed and celebrated, can only be enormously grateful to the bookstore clerk who was so enamored of it she approached me on some instinct as i browsed the woolf section and said, "you have to read lessing's 'children of violence' series"..i read through all five novels and was struck by lessing's extraordinary insight into the mind (and heart) of young women: with martha quest, the literary characterization of the young woman emerged from half-told shadows in full astounding complexity. this alone makes the series significant. add to that lessing's brilliant writing about organizational politics and psychology, landscape, history, etc etc, and this series is truly a masterpiece. read it, pass it on to friends, read it again.

We meet Martha Quest as a resentful 15 year old girl, growing up on a farm in Africa. As noted adequately here, this is the first book in her Children of Violence series-- held by many to be Lessings most important body of work (with the exception of _The Golden Notebook_).

I'm one of these Lessing fans from back in the day when _The Golden Notebook_ changed my life, and I haven't read much of her other work. I was impressed by Martha Quest-- it falls in the category of our classic coming-of-age novels, and as such stands well on its own as a novel. Lessing's Martha is at times so frustrating you want to shake her, but I think that's typical for the age of the character portrayed. Martha is all sharp edges-- she can't seem to fit with her parents, the men around her, the people with whom she tries to interact. With the blindness of her age, she's able to acutely feel how hard she has it, without really feeling the struggle of others around her who may have an even more difficult time. By turns infuriating and attractive, it can be painful to read Quest's story precisely because so it's so human as to be disturbingly familiar.

A should-read book.

The greatest purchase I ever made in my life was when I picked up a copy of 'African Stories' for $1.75 at a used bookstore in Hollywood. The 30 short stories in that book represented some of the most ecstatic writing I had read since Nabokov and Stendhal. To this day it remains my favorite book. The first two parts of 'Children of Violence'--'Martha Quest' and 'A Proper Marriage'--are like an expansion of some of those stories and a comprehensive analysis of everything that can possibly happen within and without the psyche of a young girl becoming a woman in Southern Africa. I'm not exaggerating when I say that almost every page of these two books is a revelation. They're works of genius pure and simple. In fact, no psychologist could've dug this far. Read them or suffer a permanent lack.

MARTHA QUEST covers part of the same time period as UNDER MY SKIN, volume one of Lessing's autobiography, girlhood through marriage. I loved the autobiography, so I expected to love the fictional version.

I was already disappointed in Part 1, in which Martha is a teenage girl living on her parents' farm in Southern Africa. I can understand why generations of girls and young women in the grip of resenting the family and place into which they did not choose to be born have loved this book. I, however, am old enough to have put such feelings behind me, but not so old that I don't cringe at being reminded of them. The landscape that was so lovingly described in UNDER MY SKIN here is seen through the eyes of someone who hates it, and wants to be gone. The descriptions do not transcend the dissatisfaction of the character, and I didn't enjoy reading them. I found the endless conflict between Martha and her mother tiresome. I was impatient reading about months of quarrels about the childish clothes her mother forced her to wear, with both parties complaining to Martha's father, trying to get him to take sides. This feud was finally resolved when Martha took money she had been given for Christmas and bought fabric to make her own clothes. I couldn't help comparing this with the much briefer but immeasurably more enjoyable passage in UNDER MY SKIN in which she strides out into the bush with a rifle, shoots some birds, sells them to the butcher in town, and uses the money to buy the fabric. Problem solved, without endless whining.

In Book 2, Martha takes a job and moves into town. I enjoyed the account of her first week of work as secretary at a law firm. I liked her uncertainty about what she was supposed to do, how surprised and disconcerted she was when she realized she had no skills, and the descriptions of office gossip and politics. Pretty soon, though, her social life takes over, and she becomes a girl about town. I have two problems with this. One, she is a very unlikeable character. Vain, passive, mirror-mad, and eerily detached. I remember having the same reaction to THE GRASS IS SINGING, Lessing's first published novel. I couldn't stand any of the 3 characters in it, and didn't enjoy reading it at all. The difference is, I was utterly riveted and couldn't put it down. Which brings me to my second problem. The narrative is painfully analytical. Much of the time I don't care about the situation, I don't want to know what is going to happen, and so I am not willing to put up with such painstaking prose. (Example: "She was just about to telephone Jasmine, when the phone rang for her; but not at all as simply as that statement sounds. First, the instrument on Mrs. Buss's desk gave a shrill and prolonged peal, so that Martha, who had been about to pick it up..." Do you really want to know how that sentence ends?) There are passages like this in later Lessing novels, but the prose is more gracefully contructed, and the situation warrants the analysis. Here, much of the book is written this way.

If you're wondering whether you would like this book, balance this review with the others before deciding. Many people have loved this book. If you've disliked other Lessing books, you won't like this one. I usually at least like, if not love, Lessing's work, and I don't like this one at all.

Doris Lessing writes an absorbing story of a young, naive woman learning to be accepted for who she is. It's a struggle between resisting what she is expected to be and figuring out what she wants to be. Very good descriptions of mixed emotions in coping with a fascist environment.

it's been so long since i read this, i'm ready to read it again! the incredible vulnerability of someone like martha, who has no self through which to really make sense of her emotions or her options in life - is really quite heart rending and astounding... Martha's story really helped me to find compassion and understanding for my own younger self, not to mention other young people in my life... it's darned difficult to manage without much of a self. that is for sure. poor martha. But! even with all that, it's still fun to read, believe it or not!

the whole series is amazing...though not perfect, a really really great, somewhat sudsy read...

hey, when are they going to make this a miniseries anyway?

"For the majority of women everything, including the greatest of sorrow, resolves itself into a question of trying on."

This Proust quote opens the third part of Martha Quest, and while its really insulting, it describes Martha to a tee. She doesn't really know who she is so she tries on different personas. I normally can't stand coming-of-age novels (hated Portrait of a Young Man, This Side of Paradise, Look Homeward Angel) but this is a wonderful book. In the background there are issues of race and culture - the arrogance and insensitivity of the colonialists.

Martha can be a frustrating character, but she is fascinating and the readers have the edge because we can see her missteps. Her worst trait, perhaps, is she takes ideas and views for granted. When someone asks her if she agrees with equal rights for the native people, she nonchalantly says "Of Course," and doesn't think of it anymore.

I disagree with the reviewers who say this book can stand on its own. I would be upset if it ended so abruptly and didn't have a sequel (or in this case, four.)

Martha Quest is the first novel in Doris Lessing's massive Children of Violence series, which cumulatively consists of five books and 2,100+ pages. Because of the breadth of the series as a whole, the first book here acts as a general introduction, and can be frustrating to read simply because it isn't a complete story in and of itself. We get to know Ms Quest, where she comes from and what she wants out of life, but little more. The heavily autobiographical protagonist leaves her childhood farm, moves into a busier city, lolls away at a job, goes to nighttime party after party, dates a few different men, gets caught up what an assorted group of friends, becomes more perceptive at the different social classes around her, and marries a somewhat mysterious man at the end. This is all in pretty general brushstrokes, and a reader may not find much interesting here, and Quest not a particularly appealing character. Trust me, stick with it and you will find Ms Quest to be as interesting and fully-formed as anyone you have ever met. This is a lukewarm gateway to an incredibly impressive series of novels.

It took me a while to get through, but this book was really, really good. It was, perhaps, one of the better written, more psychologically perceptive novels that I've read. The way Lessing builds the character of Martha Quest is as close to perfect as I've ever read. Martha is annoying. It's pretty hard to like her at all. You don't really sympathize with what she does or her motivations, since she's pretty clearly an impulsive idiot kid. Nonetheless, it's impossible not to believe what she does or see her actions as extremely genuine. There are no simple stereotypes here. I've called her an impulsive kid, and that's what she is, but I don't want to oversimplify. Just like any impulsive kid, she doesn't always do what you expect. She's not stupid, and doesn't always make the wrong decisions. She is 100% herself, and even 60 years after the book was written, she feels fresh and new.

I was quite taken with Martha Quest. Her experiences as a teen and young woman, the irritation she felt against her mother in particular, felt very real. I can understand going through your teenage years feeling alienated, trying to make sense of the world around you only to find unsatisfactory answers to all your questions. The vast generational gap that existed between Martha and her mother fueled Martha's rebel streak. When you are Martha's age, it is normal to feel lost, and not to grasp that you're in the driver's seat of your own life. Martha does very little to effect change in her life, other than move to town and start a job. But when it came to personal relationships, she was like a boat at sea, totally left to the mercy of the waves and the wind. We are so foolish in our young years...

I was a bit disappointed with the ending, but now I understand this is the first book in a series. I look forward to reading more about Martha, and hopefully Joss Cohen.