SOURCE: "Reality's Chaos, Translated Into Art," in The New York Times, November 1, 1994, p. C17.

In the following review, Kakutani praises Lessing's evocation of Africa and colonial life but laments that the author's self-portrait is "an incomplete one, filled with rationalizations and evasions."

A third of the way through this intriguing memoir [Under My Skin], Doris Lessing describes herself as a young girl, watching her parents sitting side by side in front of their house in the Rhodesian countryside, their faces anxious, tense and full of worry: "There they are, together, stuck together, held there by poverty and—much worse—secret and inadmissible needs that come from deep in their two so different histories. They seem to me intolerable, pathetic, unbearable, it is their helplessness that I can't bear."

Young Doris tells herself to remember this moment always: "Don't let yourself forget it. Don't be like them."

"Meaning," she...