Reviews

The Cleft by Doris Lessing

brisingr's review against another edition

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1.0

I have like..... ten thousand questions on why exactly have I read this book in its entirety, I hate myself for being a goody two shoes. I can totally see why we'd be discussing it in our gender class, but I have so many personal problems with the way in which this idea was handled, I don't even know where to start. At the end of the novel, I'm left with: WHAT THE FUCK and SO WHAT? I couldn't have cared less about anything here if I wished, and for being a supposedly "alternate reality fiction", it changed... absolutely nothing in the working of the world.

"In Rome now, a sect – the Christians – insist that the first female was brought forth from the body of a male. Very suspect stuff, I think. Some male invented that – the exact opposite of the truth."

‘I don’t want to be like them’ . . . the idea that had made revolutions,
wars, split families, or driven the bearer of the idea mad or into new active life . . . ‘I won’t be like them, I won’t.’ Maire and Astre were shuddering at the horror of what they might become.

"The women standing here, beside Maronna, were all mothers, and every male there had been dandled, fussed over, fed, cleaned, slapped, kissed, taught by a female... and this is such a heavy and persuasive history that I am amazed we don’t remember it more often."

westcoastpete's review against another edition

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Not enough story arc for me

joelanichols's review against another edition

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1.0

totally heteronormative crap. but lessing's sf books are totally homophobic and love their rigid gender roles.

emmaj_xo's review

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challenging reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This is my third Lessing (first in over 10 years) but it feels like a departure from her earlier work. This works more than a book light in both plot and character should, but it doesn’t quite deliver on its interesting premise. 

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alfsan's review against another edition

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4.0

works to fully understand from an historic pictional perspective, the difference between women and man, from the origins of time. what makes us different from the beginning, how it all started and where do we split appart and reunite

pogseu's review

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4.0

how about an alternative creation myth: women came first, and used to procreate without the help of men. They would be fertilised by the sea or the moon. But they started giving birth to deformed babies, which they called Monsters and which they left to die on the Killing Rock. Unfortunately the Monsters (or Squirts) were rescued by Eagles. A shame really, because once they started mating with women, the moon and the sea weren't sufficient anymore, and women needed the men's seeds.

the story is told by a Roman historian (a man) who inserts little remarks here and there on maternal love, how men and women interact or how boys and girls are made aware of their sexual differences.

only four stars because the book is so repetitive.

kinklekota's review against another edition

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there were moments when I truly enjoyed this book. It grabbed my attention and made me think a lot. Mostly about its flaws.
The book seems to be written by an amatheur. It is fragmented and poorly composed, the tale seems to have no credibility at all, and the narrator constantly repeats himself (which has been driving me mad). On top of that, the author seems to be strongly influenced by stereotypical thinking.
However, I cannot believe she would write something this bad if it weren't on purpose. A hundred of possible explanations for her terrible plot managing comes to my mind. Maybe she tried to mimic a poor storyteller, who doesn't remember the order of events well and omits some parts of the tale because he finds them irrelevant or refers to the events he hasn't told about yet, etc. Maybe she wants us to experience the feeling of a scholar faced with repetitive and yet meagre material and hardships of reconstructing the story from bits we are provided with. And the stereotypes are in fact somehow twisted, because I have always thought that ancient people did not respect women at all, just grabbed them by hair and haul them into a cave, and it's totally different here (still, I would prefer it to be less modern).
I would have given it even four stars if it were more serious. Or if I KNEW that she is just mocking the reader with her style. Unfortunately, I only SURMISE it is so, and that's not enough to convince me that it is a good book.

dudiiribeiro's review against another edition

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challenging sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

mrswythe89's review against another edition

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1.0

Good God, this was a dumb book.

coleperry's review against another edition

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2.0

Cool novel, treatment of gender manages to be both novel and tired.

I loved the historiographical commentary from the Roman telling the story of studying an origin myth. The postmodern structuring of the novel was fun and thought-provoking. I was also really excited for the potential for disrupting traditional gender narratives, especially with the telling of a female origin myth. The treatment of gender and gender differences/relations, though, was disappointing on the whole. To reinvent the species' origins, but then reinscribe tired, contemporary gender stereotypes was pretty unimaginative. A woman walks into a man's dirty hut for the first time and invents a broom on the spot to clean up after him? Really?

Men are portrayed as naturally callous risk-takers who let children die and don't even see why this is a bad thing. Men lack compassion and women do all the care work. Women are cleanly and nags (even when the men begrudge them the point); men are messy but athletic adventurers. All the mischief young boys get into is described at length, but the story hardly ever mentions what girls do. This transposition of 21st century gender stereotypes and preoccupations onto both Roman and pre-historical understandings was very distracting. I won't even go into the pervasive heteronormativity.

There's a couple of women who flee the traditional women's home society (binary gender segregation was the status quo) to live with the men, but nary a man or boy who chooses to live with women. To me this reflects a current gender narrative wherein feminism/liberation/equality means that it's okay for some women to be more like men, if they so choose, but men receive social censure for any sort of effeminacy. In the story, there's not even precedent for men displaying the characteristics associated with women.

Many aspects of this novel would qualify as some definition of feminist, but I think it's pretty unfortunate that this books seems to naturalize gendered inequality (it's a human origin myth and yet, from the start, gender inequality coincides with biological difference!). It's great that women are shown resisting the domination of the men in the story and that they have strong leaders themselves (in fact they were doing great on their own!), but that's pretty weak feminism. With a story centering gender, but focusing on the pre-historical even pre-cultural, Lessing could have done a lot of interesting things with the idea of gender. Instead, the story takes the faux-radical approach of questioning ideas about the origins of the human species and even the gendered writing of history. Yet Lessing chooses to leave in place reactionary gender ideologies that prop up contemporary gendered inequality and oppression.

For all the postmodern writing techniques that Lessing is a master of, the novel fails to take into account postmodern and poststructuralist understandings of (and insights into) gender. So, despite how it posits women as the progenitors of the human race, I see this book as reinforcing the differentiation and thus the subordination of women. Men and women are inherently unequal; men have fun, women nag; blah blah. Seems like tired reasoning to me.