– four short novels, Perennial 2005 ISBN
0-06-053011-1
Read from to March 5th 18th
2015
My rating:
All the reviews
on Doris Lessing’s The Grandmothers
I’ve read claim that the book is oddly uneven, with two brilliant and two poor
stories. All of them put A love child
on top, followed by Victoria and the
Staveneys and they generally agree that The
Grandmothers and The Reason of It
are the worst.
Well, I beg to
differ. As usual, Doris Lessing is a master of the literary techniques and the
unity of The Grandmothers is realized
by subtle but strong links between themes, motives, narrative perspectives,
framing, narrative voices etc., that create a pattern of a beautiful discreet
symmetry, giving the book all the coherence it needs to claim its unity either
in structure and literary value.
The main theme
of the volume, that life is deceptive and human values are built on sand, is
proved from all points of view: family, society, politics and the inner self. In
each one of them the characters are pathetic losers, who tried for a while to
step off the fragile conventions that give the illusion life is worthier than
the simple existence only to step back in the end.
The first
story, which gives the title of the book is situated, like the most significant
part of the last one, in the sunny South Africa, and both have, apparently, a
secondary theme, love, doomed because of time, space and social conventions. I
said “apparently”, for love is, in both stories, a simple attempt to evade the
routine, the dullness of life, to conserve something precious but elusive for
which the characters do not have, in the end, the courage to break the rules.
The Grandmothers is a strange and
uncomfortable tale, it’s true, but far from lacking “all the psychological
insight that has distinguished Ms. Lessing's most celebrated writing” as
Michiko Kakutani argues in his New York Time of February 3rd 2004
review. Questioning the force and reliability of personal relationships, be it
family or friendship, it proves that any attempt to ignore the conventional
perspective is so severely sanctioned by a society whose pressure becomes
unbearable that the characters have to comply. A masterpiece of shifting
perspective in order to stress the difference between appearance and essence,
the story is told from three points of view: external, omniscient and partial.
In the beginning, we see it through the eyes of Theresa, a waitress who keeps
admiring the perfect harmony of a little group formed by two young fathers,
their mothers and two children in which the only discordant notes are the wives
of the men, who fortunately appear only from time to time. Then an omniscient
narrator takes over, familiarizing the reader with the uncanny lifetime
friendship between the two “grandmothers” and their almost incestuous
relationships with their sons. In the end it is Mary’s voice, one of the wives,
that, discovering a bunch of letters, thinks, in ironic contradiction with the
facts, that she finally understands all – while understanding, in fact only the
reason for her unhappiness.
A Love Child (which, curiously, I must
say that, despite its obvious literary qualities, I enjoyed less) explores the
drama of the inner self, of the soul forever in search of an ideal but shying
away from its fulfilment. James’s lost love is his excuse to endure a mediocre
life he mocks from time to time unconvincingly. His most quoted words (‘You
see, I’m not living my own life. It’s not my real life. I shouldn’t be living
the way I do.’) reveal his pathetic attempt to make an epic sense of his so
ordinary destiny, to reverse reality by denying its jailors: time, space and
society.
Another attempt
to reverse reality is Victoria and the
Staveneys, this time in a social context. In that perfect parallel
announced by the title, the story gathers the main social oppositions to
emphasize the hollowness of the political correctness that hides but never
fills the gap between black and white, rich and poor, educate and illiterate
and so on. Victoria has made of the Staveneys the ideal of the perfect family
with the perfect lifestyle, although she is reluctant to let her daughter
become one of them, whilst the Staveneys have always forced themselves to act
as liberal, unprejudiced persons, although they keep their distance from
everything Victoria represents. The sadness of it is that all of them act in a
sort of pathetic good faith because they are decent persons, unaware of all the
social prejudices their subconscious carries:
She was pleased, rather than not, that the little girl was black because, as she never stopped complaining to Edward, his friend were all much too white, now that he lived in a multicultural society.
The
Reason for It – a tale whose value everybody seem to doubt – I kinda liked.
A lot J. Built as a framed story (the motive of the found manuscript) it tells
the story of the rise and decline of a civilization. Despite its maybe too
obvious allegory, the truth of the message is simple, forceful and sad at the
same time: stupidity is a surer destroyer than maleficence, and stupidity is
not always opposed to intelligence, often it lies inside intelligence. This is
how a stupid ruler was democratically elected by a wise council, thus managing
to end the golden period in the life of his people, in no time, with one
powerful weapon – indifference, born from ignorance. Why? Because his beautiful
appearance blinded the others as to his lack of essence:
It was not that he had forgotten. Not that he had deliberately destroyed what was good. He had never known it was good. He had never understood. He had seemed to be part of it all, but he, Destra’s son, the graceful and charming and delightful DeRod, whom we had all admired, had been a blind person among us.
Among the many
threads that intertwine to form this beautiful book, from which I listed only a
few and which would deserve an analysis much more extensive than mine, there is
one, in the last story, that could be the motto of the volume: the first
strophe of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Cities
and Thrones and Powers, synthetizing the blind frenzy of humanity to exist
and repeat its own mistakes, to burden the planet with idiots, to revolt for a
while only to better retreat into conventionality again, to live ephemerally
while dreaming of eternity :
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers
Which daily die:
But as new buds put forth
To glad new men
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.
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