Customer Reviews

Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962

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3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This second part of Doris Lessing's candid biography, which depicts her difficult beginnings in London, is a more bitter report than the first one. It is full of personal and ideological disappointments.

Like so many young intellectuals in Europe, she finds shelter in the leftist Church (with capitalism as hell, Lenin, Stalin or Mao as Christ the Saviour, and Utopia as heaven) and becomes a believer in heart and soul. She still has difficulties to believe why she was so blind (even after a trip to Russia) and stayed like many others so long with the communist movement.
The agonizing psychological struggle to become an apostate is very emotionally told.

What saved her was art, in which she has a limitless belief: it can overthrow world powers.

This is a moving, uninhibited and realistic work, exemplary for many idealistic but wilfully deceived young people in the ninteen fifties and sixties. Outsiders willing to write her biography will not have many more 'secrets' to reveal.
Not to be missed.

Cold? No way.

Although volume 2 lacks the profound personal revelations found in volume 1, it is a fascinating collection of her memories and point of view of England in the 1950's. She talks quite a bit about her life in a brutally honest way that few writers, let alone people in general, would be willing to admit.

Her witty observations of society and what makes it tick are very entertaining, as well as many insights into what later became The Golden Notebook.

Cold & self-serving? Not this book. It's an oustanding autobiography by one of the most brilliant minds of our time. I think negative reviewers of this book have gotten carried away with their own agenda. Doris Lessing never caters to expectation which makes her writing even more compelling.

Here is a continuation of Doris Lessing's autobiography, now focused on her adulthood in London. Here also is Lessing's trademark sense of humor, thoroughly wry and intellectual, and her down-to-earth views of the world around her. This time she focused mainly on her experiences in travel, having different paramours, and her heavy involvement with the Communist Party. At times it is great escapism- Vanessa Redgrave, Winston Churchill, and even Charlie Chaplin make appearances, and who wouldn't want to read about a midnight walk through London in Lessing prose? Other times, when the story goes through long stretches in the British CP, it becomes heavy reading, but always oddly interesting. What makes this book a real treat, though, is when Lessing writes about how she approaches her craft; how she gets inspiration, particularly for The Golden Notebook, from her friends, her write-nap-write rotation while her son is at school, the adventures she has getting her works published, striving to make ends meet, and dealing with being a pseudo-celebrity (even though you know she probably detests that word). It's refreshing to read about the neuroses dealt with by a writer who would go on to win the Nobel Prize, but then again what else would you expect from Lessing? This s a must read for fans of her original memoir.

I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as Volume I, UNDER MY SKIN. But it's a fascinating book for 2 reasons.

1. The light it sheds on the relationship between fiction & autobiography, & the glimpse it gives of the novelist's mind, how experience is tranformed into descriptions of people, places, events which are placed in the kaleidoscope of a particular work of fiction, shaken up, & emerge forming a different pattern. I probably would have said the same about UNDER MY SKIN, except I haven't read the CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE series yet, which corresponds with the period covered by Volume I of the autobiography. In Volume II, one sees many ingedients that went into THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK.

2. Lessing's observations of the period 1949-1962 in London, & comments on "the States" as she calls us.

It is funny in places, too. I think there's more humor in both volumes of Lessing's autobiography than in anything else I've read by her, and I wonder why this is.

I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as Volume I, UNDER MY SKIN. But it's a fascinating book for 2 reasons.

1. The light it sheds on the relationship between fiction & autobiography, & the glimpse it gives of the novelist's mind, how experience is tranformed into descriptions of people, places, events which are placed in the kaleidoscope of a particular work of fiction, shaken up, & emerge forming a different pattern. I probably would have said the same about UNDER MY SKIN, except I haven't read the CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE series yet, which corresponds with the period covered by Volume I of the autobiography. In Volume II, one sees many ingedients that went into THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK.

2. Lessing's observations of the period 1949-1962 in London, & comments on "the States" as she calls us.

It is funny in places, too. I think there's more humor in both volumes of Lessing's autobiography than in anything else I've read by her, and I wonder why this is.

I love biography. I never thought I would abandon a biography unfinished and feel no desire to pick it up and continue. I found this dull, self-serving and boring. Lessing seems to be busy making excuses and justifications for her 'fellow travelling' with Communists in 1950s London. Oh, pleeeze! So what? Heaps of people were members of the party or fellow travellers. many have also renounced or reassessed their former positions, but they don't feel the need to go into tortuous self-denial as Lessing does. I find her cold as a person - that's fine, one doesn't have to LIKE the subject of a biog/autobiog to be interested in them. But her writing is cold and detatched as a cold-water flat in misty wintry London!