Customer Reviews (3)

IT IS SCARY AND TOO CLOSE TO THE TRUTH
DORIS LESSING HAS THE FACULTY OF BEING AND EXTRAORDINARY WRITER, AND FINALLY WON THE NOBLE PRIZE (VERY LATE IN COMING TO HER) . HER DEPTH, KNOWLEDGE AND BEAUTY OF PROSE, MAKE EACH AND EVERYONE OF HER BOOKS A JOY TO BE READ, AND REREAD MANY TIMES... BUT IN THE CASE OF SHIKASTA (CANOPUS IN ARGOS SERIES) SHE GOES EVEN BEYOND HER TALENT INTO THE REALM OF PROPHESY...MANY OF THE THINGS SHE WRITES ABOUT ARE NOW BEING DEMONSTRATED AS TRUE, AND IT IS A BIT SCARY TO READ THE HISTORY OF OUR PLANET IN PLAIN ENGLISH, AND NOT IN QUATRAINS LIKE NOSTRADAMUS.I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK AND THE OTHERS OF THE SERIES, IN PARTICULAR MARRIAGES IN ZONES 3,4,AND 5.ENJOY, AND BE READY TO HAVE YOUR VIEW OF THE WORLD SHIFT.Shikasta: Canopus in Argos-Archives

Science fiction for those who really don't like SciFi
I first read this book many years ago, and had a happy memory of it. I was very pleased that a fresh reading lived up to that memory.
On its surface, it examines the roles of men and women, represented by two estranged, neighboring Zones. The first is pastoral, prosperous, and ineffective. The second is harsh, militaristic, and also ineffective. The two are not really reunited, but they break their polarization and isolation. Peaceful exchange between them is restored, and both are healthier for it.

Saying anything more would be saying too much. I was interested, though, that the nations seemed to imitate the mating of their ambassadors. One nation was archetypically male, the other female. The ambassadors, like germ cells, are living things that pass from one nation to the other, and are united. I never though about it before, but fertilization is destructive both sperm and ovum, even if somthing new comes from the fusion. The protagonists, the envoys of the two Zones, similarly suffer for the greater future. Other metaphors emerge from the story, too, and some may have strong personal meaning for you.

I really can't do justice to the elegance and peaceful pace of Lessing's writing. That, you'll have experience for yourself. Although this book is second in a series of five, they can be read in any order. Each book's story is unrelated to the others, but the set as a whole is far more than the concatenation of its parts. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, and eventually enjoy coming back to it again.

//wiredweird

Love in three dimensions
This second volume of the Canopus in Argos: Archives quintet marks a radical break with the science-fictional style of the first book, Shikasta. Instead, it shares with the fourth, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, a more mythical, allegorical presentation and an aching lyricism of style. In the Canopean universe, the various Zones correspond to states of spiritual being: in Shikasta, Zone Six is a kind of limbo where people wait to be reborn and where the Canopean agent Johor/George Sherban picks up the two who will join him on Earth as his sister and brother. Zone Three, in this second volume, is a tranquil and apparently untroubled realm where, nonetheless, the birth rate is declining and a certain lassitude has overcome the people. Canopus (named here only as "the Providers" who know what is best and must be obeyed) orders the queen of Zone Three, Al.Ith, to marry Ben Ata, the warrior king of Zone Four - an altogether poorer and cruder place. The bulk of the story follows the progress of this arranged marriage from resentful acceptance on both sides through practical working together to solve their realms' mutual difficulties, to the torments of jealous infatuation and out the other side - whereupon Ben Ata must marry the queen of Zone Five, a realm more primitive and deprived than his own, and Al.Ith has become a stranger to her people. But the Providers really do know best, and the three Zones (and Al.Ith, Ben Ata and the queen of Zone Five) continue to evolve, interpenetrate, and share with each other what is needed from themselves. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five works equally well as cultural allegory, psychological myth or lyrical love story; it is also a pleasure to read. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an edited collection offering up-to-date critical coverage of a wide range of Lessing's work. Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and 'space fiction', and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to "The Fifth Child" and "The Grass is Singing", eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories. ... Read more

Product Description
The fifth and final volume in Doris Lessing's visionary novel cycle "Canopus in Argos: Archives". It is a mix of fable, futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Very timely, yet again
As I write this, Jessica Lynch is in the news, and analyses of the strange un-truths that led to George W's war, and legislation (by men) of medical practices (applicable only to women), and ... Maybe today isn't really different from all the other days in all the other years. As I read this book today, though, it speaks directly to today's triumphs of self-serving word-play over honesty and sanity.
Lessing's point is scarcely exaggeration: the intangible faculty of reason is subject to contagious disease, just as the physical body is. The first part of this book is a case study of a particularly acute and severe attack of rhetoric. Though not scientific, it gives enough detail for you to recognize the ailment when you see it yourself (and you will). Except for the details of topic, that poor sufferer's rantings could have come from yesterday's TV news.

Although I found the first half of this book very strong and clear, I felt that it weakened towards the end. The trial, prosecution of a culture instead of a person, barely sustained the thesis. I found the final passages of the book frankly disappointing, given its promising start.

In spite of the book's weaknesses, I find it very worthwhile. I will probably find it worthwhile and up to date when I read it again, years from now - although timely, this topic is timeless. Even more, it makes a satisfying companion to Lessing's other 'Canopus' books. I recommend it.

//wiredweird

Very timely, yet again
As I write this, Jessica Lynch is in the news, and analyses of the strange un-truths that led to George W's war, and legislation (by men) of medical practices (applicable only to women), and ... Maybe today isn't really different from all the other days in all the other years. As I read this book today, though, it speaks directly to today's triumphs of self-serving word-play over honesty and sanity.

Lessing's point is scarcely exaggeration: the intangible faculty of reason is subject to contagious disease, just as the physical body is. The first part of this book is a case study of a particularly acute and severe attack of rhetoric. Though not scientific, it gives enough detail for you to recognize the ailment when you see it yourself (and you will). Except for the details of topic, that poor sufferer's rantings could have come from yesterday's TV news.

Although I found the first half of this book very strong and clear, I felt that it weakened towards the end. The trial, prosecution of a culture instead of a person, barely sustained the thesis. I found the final passages of the book frankly disappointing, given its promising start.

In spite of the book's weaknesses, I find it very worthwhile. I will probably find it worthwhile and up to date when I read it again, years from now - although timely, this topic is timeless. Even more, it makes a satisfying companion to Lessing's other 'Canopus' books. I recommend it.

The realities of Rhetoric
The final, and funniest, instalment of the Canopus in Argos: Archives quintet finds Klorathy, the Canopean agent who befriended Ambien II in The Sirian Experiments, dispatched to the Volyen Empire to rescue a fellow agent who's fallen victim to the dreaded disease of Rhetoric. The Volyen Empire, until now a minor outpost of the collapsing Sirian Empire, is in the throes of revolutionary independence, and the intense prevalence of rhetorical disorders on all sides has made the inhabitants nearly as crazy as those poor unfortunates on Shikasta. The Canopean victim, Incent, alternates between charging about the system trying to reform everyone, and collapsing into hopeless languor when his efforts go inevitably askew. Klorathy introduces a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases (tactfully disguised under the name Institute for Historical Research) and, in between chasing Incent around the place and apologising for his own occasional lapses ("Incent, WHAT are we going to do with you?"), manages to bring matters in the Volyen Empire to a fairly satisfactory conclusion. The conclusion to the quintet, however, is more than just fairly satisfactory. The light touch Lessing brings to this work may seem at odds with the epic or lyrical tone of the preceding four, but it enables the author to do two very difficult things. First, she can finish her massive enterprise on a suitably Canopean note - neither triumphalist nor sentimental, nor even, thanks to the satiric style, capable of being interpreted in a triumphalist or sentimental fashion. Second, she can point to a partial solution for some (most?) of the problems she's been talking about all along. It's slightly discomfiting to find that the super-civilised Canopean archivists list Tchaikovsky and Wagner under "Nineteenth-century Emoters and Complainers"; but the discomfiture serves to show how profoundly human beings are addicted to Rhetoric of all kinds - verbal, musical, emotional, physical. Cold turkey in our own case is undoubtedly a very bad idea, but we can at least recognise our condition and try to discipline it into working for us rather than against. The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire shows the kind of perspective we need if we're going to manage that before it's too late. ... Read more

Product Description
Here Doris Lessing recounts the cats that have moved and amused her, from her childhood home overrun with kittens, to the wrenching decline of "El Magnifico," whose story unfolds in a new essay, appearing here for the first time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

The Ultimate Cat Lady
While reading this book I became so involved having raised so many cats over the years. Her writing takes you away..Out of all of the "Cat Books" I have ever read, her book stands alone for the pure and simple way it is written...One of the best of our times...Kudos go to Doris Lessing.

a wonderful, unflinching and honestly loving book
as one who can't bear the often/usual cutesy "kitty" tales i expected and was duly rewarded as doris lessing came through with an elegant tale of her life with cats.her clear-eyed unflinching and therefore loving recitation of life both in the bush and in town with cats is a book i re-read at least once a year.lessing's cats are dignified and she does not fail them by falsely sentimentalizing their lives.she looks at and into these animals as they coexist and achieves a truth and charm which would be lost were she to diminish them with saccharine phrases, denying their deaths and lives the nobility they have and exude.edith ann esbensen.

Warning:This book is disturbing!!!
I feel compelled to write a review to warn people that this is a pretty disturbing book.I thought the back cover was completely misleading.The book is about cat death - tons and tons of cats die in horrible ways.The descriptions are graphic.There is not a normal relationship between a woman and her cat wherein the woman loves and grieves the cat - it is written with complete emotional distance.If the author wasn't famous for other work I can't imagine any publisher publishing this book.Awful doesn't do it justice.If you want to read about cats dying, written in a completely dispassionate, matter-of-fact, "oh-well" way go for it.Otherwise, SKIP THIS BOOK!

A treasure: both Lessing and this book
Only Doris Lessing could have written this book. She's so brilliant, so insightful, and cats have played a big part in her life, so of course she eventually chooses to write about this.
This slim little volume is packes with hilarity, pathos, saddness, insight, stories, and philosophy.
And there are cat characters and one liners that will stay with you always.
Top billing.

Very moving, sad and joyful all at once
A very emotional book.The addition of the new chapter about Butchkin, who now is old but appears earlier in the book in his youth, is worth the whole book.A sensitive and powerful description of the emotions of thecat and his owner's reactions to his aging, illness and recovery.

Owningcats is often a painful experience, when they get old and sick.It's partof owning a cat.This book is a wonderful journey through many cats livesand Doris' profound love of them. ... Read more

Product Description
'During that first year in England, I had a vision ofLondon I cannot recall now...it was a nightmare city that I lived infor a year. Then, one evening, walking across the park, the lightwelded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar andbeautiful, and I knew myself to be at home.'

Doris Lessing wrote those words in 1957, and since then she hascontinued to observe both London and its inhabitants with the shrewd,sensitive eye of an artist. Representing over three decades of finewriting, London Observed. Stories and Sketches contains eighteenperfect pen-portraits of Londoners and their city. ... Read more

Product Description
This reader has been assembled by Doris Lessing herself, and it provides a representative introduction to both her fiction and non-fiction. The book enables the reader to see her ideas evolve over the years as they recur and develop throughout her work. The extracts are taken from her previous books "The Grass is Singing", "Children of Violence", "Canopus in Argus", "The Golden Notebook", "Briefing for a Descent into Hell", "The Summer Before the Dark" and "The Good Terrorist" as well as her non fiction books "Going Home" and "A Small Personal Voice". ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of ten short stories, covering a range of subjects and genres. ... Read more

Product Description
Born in Basra in the 8th century of an impoverished family, orphaned and sold into slavery, Rabia al-Adawiyya, rose to become one of the greatest Sufi teachers. An extraordinary kaleidoscope of myth and reality, of imagination and fact... is it not of importance that a woman of such stature and independence of mind existed so early in the story of Islam, to show what women could be, and how they could be regarded?

Introduction by Doris Lessing ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A brief introduction
It is a thin book with a brief introduction on the life of Rabia of Basra. If you don't know anything about this mystic of islam then you may want to read this short introduction, otherwise the book is not for you. It also covers the major aspects of her life, and famous sayings.

A way to relate to God
I found Rabia al-Adawiyya to be the best advise I have ever heard about how to love God--not for hope for reward or fear of punishment--but because our Friend is lovable.Easy to say but hard to live to.But like Jesus much is attributed to her that is questionable.It is a shame they weren't recorded at the times that they lived.Anyway this is an excellant book that I would recommend to anyone that wishes to approach God throught the heart and not the brain.

Anything about her-tell me!
Unfortunatly, much is lost, forgotten, or unknown about this (words cannot describe her!) angelic woman.She is the woman who men make dua' tomarry, the presence women would pray to be surrounded by, and the ruh(soul) many of us beg Allah to have.

She is by her name Rabia'.Thisbook gives insight to the much forgotten and unknown woman.Her childhood,her travels, andher spiritual accent.She to me is the ibn alArabi offemale devotees.

The book gives us a biography of her life and herexperiences, but it is difficult to know if it is correct or not,considering the author admits to the false claims of her life that havebeen recorded.Perhaps she is better to be in the hearts ofthose whoactually knew her, or who make dua' for her. It wouldbe a pitty to knowso much about her, and yet not follow her example.She was never satisfiedwith her worship, or tauba, and this book explains storys that carry on thetales of Rabia.May Allah bless her, and be pleased with her! ... Read more

Product Description
Though Doris Lessing never explicitly refers to spirituality in her works, she nonetheless explores spiritual issues throughout her texts. This book examines the prominence of spirituality in her writings. The volume provides both close readings of individual works and sweeping surveys of her nearly fifty year career. The contributors employ a variety of theoretical perspectives such as systems theory, feminist studies of the body and of androgyny, postcolonial theories, mythic prophecy, and intersubjective psychology. The contributors reveal that Lessing's presentation of spirituality is neither rigid nor orthodox either the product of the split between the body and the soul nor anchored in formal systems of the past or present. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Getting into the Spirit with Doris Lessing
Professor Perrakis brings together almost a dozen writers onspiritual issues in the writing of one of the great British writers ofthe century--Doris Lessing.The authors of these essays write across the range of Lessing's later fiction and offer useful insights into her work. ... Read more

Product Description
Memoirs of an Egotist, Stendhal’s fragmentary autobiographical work, is alert, wry, and perpetually self–questioning. Through a series of apparently random impressions of the political, social, and artistic movements of the world around him, he imbues a range of human experience, from the mundane to the extraordinary, with the significance it deserves. Foreword by Doris Lessing.

Containing everything from delightful thumbnail sketches of his friends and colleagues, to lyrical remembrances of gardens and operas and tenderly amused descriptions of tea with London prostitutes, Memoirs of an Egotist is as startling as it is revealing. French writer Stendhal (1783–1842) is most famous for his two realist masterpieces, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Refusal of Boredom
"Memoirs of an Egotist" (along with "The Life of Henry Brulard") is probably Stendhal's most modern work. Of course that is not to say that "The Red and the Black" or "The Charterhouse of Parma" or even "Lamiel" cannot be read today. They can, and they should be read, and anyway they have influenced every major (and not so major) writer that came afterward, so we are rereading them permanently. But their characters are filled with a passion that is like an exotic brush-stroke for readers today.

"Memoirs..." could have been written this morning. Being an autobiographical sketch, and striving for sincerity (as he says himself several times), it is a different kind of book. Stendhal doesn't attach himself to any literary convention and lets the pen run free. In the beginning he tells how he wanted to write a work of fiction but since he was being constantly interrupted by the routine duties of his job (he was a great slacker, anyway), he decided to write about things that happened to him instead of inventing.

There are too many interesting things in this thin volume to enumerate them all. Here we find the statement that could be put at the front of his complete works: "I don't think men are wicked; I regard them as machines impelled, In France, by vanity; elsewhere, by all the passions, vanity included".

Humor, or rather "wit" (as he would prefer), permeates everything, even the narration of his darkest moments: "I left Milan for Paris on the ** June 1821, with a sum of 3,500, I think, and convinced that my sole happiness lay in blowing my brains out when I'd run through this sum". Of course he didn't. Because of sheer curiosity, on one hand, and on the other because he was "also afraid of hurting myself".

He describes in detail his failure in bed with a young woman, a failure that earned him the reputation of being "impotent" all around Paris. He has the gift of making you understand situations with an amazing economy of words. Same thing when he describes certain characters of the time, like the Commander in Chief of the French Army who, "while waiting for great actions, which do not present themselves every day, and for the opportunity to squeeze the skirts of young women, which only ever really comes along at half-past midnight, as they are leaving, M. de La Fayette would explain rather inelegantly the commonplace philosophy of the National Guard".

There are many comic and adventurous interludes, like his dangerous expedition into London's poorest suburbs in search of a certain house of "dates", or when he tells how at Calais he talked cheerfully ("and almost drunk on English beer") with a British sailor who made a few objections to his stories. A couple of days later one of his traveling companions told him "in measured tones" that the sailor had, in reality, skillfully insulted him and France, without his noticing. "For two days we looked for the English captain in all the filthy taverns that those sort of people frequent" to challenge him to a duel. They never found him.

Overlooking the book is the shadow of Métilde, the woman who rejected Stendhal's advances. In a way, he writes to keep her memory at bay. But her name crawls up here and there.

Although the work was left unfinished (in respect to what the author declared he set out to do) it doesn't feel that way because it follows the crisscross patterns of memory (prefiguring Proust, who was an attentive reader of Stendhal). It is as if a friendly stranger popped in at a party, sat down by your side, told you a few stories and left after murmuring, like Stendhal: "The heat is stopping me having ideas at half-past one". ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

its preety good
i thought it was grea ... Read more

Product Description
Situated at the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, the modern and the postmodern, the novelists Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer all bear witness to this century's global transformations. From the Margins of Empire looks at how the question of national identity is constructed in their writings. These authors--white women who were born or grew up in British colonies or former colonies--reflect the subject of national identity in vastly different ways in both their lives and their work. Stead, who resided outside of her native Australia, has an unsettled identity. Lessing, who grew up in southern Rhodesia and migrated to England, is or has become English. Gordimer, who was born in South Africa and remains there, considers herself South African.

Louise Yelin shows how the three writers' different national identities are inscribed in their fiction. The invented, hybrid character of nationality is, she maintains, a constant throughout. Locating the writings of Stead, Lessing, and Gordimer in the national cultures that produced and read them, she considers the questions they raise about the roles that whites, especially white women, can play in the new political and cultural order. ... Read more

Product Description
An original and compelling appraisal of this important international literary figure.
... Read more

Product Description
The novels of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and V.S.Naipaul are studied in the light of statements they have made inessays and interviews regarding the ethical implications ofwriting fiction. The purpose of this research is to examine the nature ofthe problems they have identified in the creative process ofwriting and the strategies each has used to address the ethicalproblems they perceive, and to assess the relative success of theirchosen methods. It can be seen that, although for each of them thequest for truth is their highest concern, they have each developed verydifferent ways of dealing with the problems they believe areconnected with writing truthfully, and in addition, they have defined theparticulars of these problems in different ways. It is concluded that themore carefully examined and individually defined these problems are,the greater the internal consistency and credibility which isachieved by the strategies they have developed to address theproblems, and the more their work has developed in the course of theircareers. ... Read more