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Title: Under My Skin : Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (My Autobiography, To1949, Vol 1 1949) by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 0-06-092664-3 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 11 October, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Not just an autobiography
Comment: Doris Lessing has led such an interesting life, and writing a diary all the time. She writes of a time completely foreign to me, living a history of the changes in Southern Afica. I find her autobiography a great read, and prefer it to her novels. Interesting and moving, and explains much about her!
Rating: 5
Summary: masterful autobiography
Comment: Under My Skin
Doris Lessing's autobiography traces her political and emotional development from her earliest childhood memories to her growing, overwhelming, disenchantment with provincial (as she saw it) small town life. "Small town" life for her was pre-WWII Salisbury in the (then) British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Salisbury was a complacent capital city of 10,000 white settlers in a country the size of Spain.
Lessing is quick to debunk the myth of the prosperous, close knit, white farming community - poverty was a real fact of life both for blacks and whites. Her most vivid childhood memories are of escaping from the family home and off into the limitless veld. The emptiness of the veld parallels her youthful emptiness and her growing convictions that the communist party represents a real hope for the world.
The book, a masterpiece of autobiographical writing, is brutally honest in parts and wilfully obscure in others. Some of her emotional mistakes are hardly glanced at (leaving her first two children, for example) but others (the joys of being part of a fast, hard drinking sect, embracing radical politics) are wonderfully engaging. Reading her thoughts you could be forgiven for thinking that the "party" was the only opposition to conservative white rule in Salisbury. This is what makes her book so appealing, her supreme skill as a novelist allowing us to enter the heady world of rushed meetings, leftist newspaper deliveries, drinks on the sports club verandah and back in time to find the cook still waiting to prepare supper. Naturally it couldn't last and Lessing is far too intelligent to think that that is all there is to life. The book ends in 1949 as she arrives in London, apprehensive and hopeful in the capital city of her parents.
This is more than a 'who-did-what' from a long time ago, times and dates are (probably deliberately) rarely mentioned. It is the personalities and the ideas - most of all the ideas - sliding from youthful enthusiasm to mature realism which fuse the book with life and vitality. 'Under My Skin', published in 1992, is that rare thing, a candid autobiography written by a consummate novelist with skills to spare. Doris Lessing is a national treasure.
Rating: 5
Summary: Unvarnished.
Comment: This is a candid autobiography with as main themes love, sex (good sex, as Doris Lessing calls it, is a right for everybody) and politics in South-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) ruled by a blank minority.
It is a gripping, moving and realistic picture, wherein the author tries to find answers to personal and more general human questions: why was she so outspoken rebellious and, on the contrary, so strictly loyal to the communist movement?
Why are people fighting relentlessly each other, and on the other hand, striving for happiness?
Are the people of her generation all children of World War I? Why was her father a freemason?
This book is written like an irresistible waterfall. Not to be missed.
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Title: Walking in the Shade : Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962 by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 0060929561 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Grass Is Singing : A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Doris Lessing ISBN: 0060953462 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Golden Notebook : Perennial Classics edition (Perennial Classics) by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 006093140X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 February, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris M. Lessing ISBN: 0060390778 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 14 November, 1987 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Summer Before the Dark by Doris May Lessing ISBN: 0394710959 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1983 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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