AP News, October 11th, 2007
Excerpts from the Swedish Academy's citation awarding the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature to Doris Lessing:
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The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007 is awarded to the British writer Doris Lessing "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."
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"Doris Lessing made her debut as a novelist with 'The Grass is Singing' (1950), which examines the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. The book is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts.
"Even the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, usually called the Martha Quest series for its main character, is largely set in Africa. The series comprises 'Martha Quest' (1952), 'A Proper Marriage' (1954), 'A Ripple from the Storm' (1958), 'Landlocked' (1965) and 'The Four-Gated City' (1969).
"It describes Martha Quest's awakening to greater awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman. With these books Lessing created a modern equivalent of the Bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century."
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"'The Golden Notebook' (1962) was Doris Lessing's real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined.
"The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed form reflects that of the main character's mind. There is no single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience."
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"The autobiographical 'Under My Skin' (1994) and 'Walking in the Shade' (1997) represented a new peak in her writing. Lessing recalls not only her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the empire. Her novel 'The Sweetest Dream' (2001) is a stand-alone sequel in fictive form. Perhaps her unsparing view of the political antics of friends and lovers necessitated such discretion."
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"Her other important novels are 'The Summer Before the Dark' (1973) and 'The Fifth Child' (1988). In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a woman finally about to fulfill her gift and sexual desires. After a first reading, the contours of the real novel take shape: a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. 'The Fifth Child' is a masterfully realized psychological thriller, where a woman's repressed or denied aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child."
