Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.68 AVERAGE
3.68 AVERAGE
dark
informative
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
It's a difficult book to review. Whilst it is very well written it evokes disgust against white supremacy. The novel portrays the desparate life of one of the many white colonialists settlers who relied on their white supremacist convictions to raise their pathetic lives above everyone else's, exploiting land and local indigineus peoples for their benefit and profit only.
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Mary is a town girl, content with being single until she hears people speaking disparagingly of her. Then she feels she should marry, so when Dick, a hard working but unsuccessful farmer, proposes to her, she jumps at the chance. But the isolation, the heat, the poverty, the loveless marriage, and a revengeful relationship take their toll.
This book is not a happy one. I feel sorry for Dick. He tries so hard in his marriage and his farming. The book also shows the ways in which the whites of Rhodesia kept power and how Mary lost that power, of the evils of apartheid. The descriptions of Africa are beautiful.... The heat, the rain in its season, the sound of the cicadas.... Then there is the psychological undercurrent of trying to understand what made each person like they are.
The book is dark, but never graphically horrible. I could not put it down.
This book is not a happy one. I feel sorry for Dick. He tries so hard in his marriage and his farming. The book also shows the ways in which the whites of Rhodesia kept power and how Mary lost that power, of the evils of apartheid. The descriptions of Africa are beautiful.... The heat, the rain in its season, the sound of the cicadas.... Then there is the psychological undercurrent of trying to understand what made each person like they are.
The book is dark, but never graphically horrible. I could not put it down.
This incredible book was Doris Lessing's first book, set in Southern Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe) where Doris Lessing herself lived for quite some portion of her life.
The book written in 1950 was banned in Southern Africa for years, and one can see why. Written when nearly all the countries on the African continent were still colonized, 30 years before Zimbabwe's independence and forty before South Africa's, the books honesty, especially considering the time and Lessing being a white woman in and of that time, is absolutely shocking.
Lessing's introspective style of writing highlighting a discrimination and hatred that existed against the Black native population by the white settlers is absolutely incredible, where she tells of the Turners and the destructiveness of hatred to all involved, especially to the victim, the active discriminating figures and the passive ones.
The book written in 1950 was banned in Southern Africa for years, and one can see why. Written when nearly all the countries on the African continent were still colonized, 30 years before Zimbabwe's independence and forty before South Africa's, the books honesty, especially considering the time and Lessing being a white woman in and of that time, is absolutely shocking.
Lessing's introspective style of writing highlighting a discrimination and hatred that existed against the Black native population by the white settlers is absolutely incredible, where she tells of the Turners and the destructiveness of hatred to all involved, especially to the victim, the active discriminating figures and the passive ones.
This is Lessing's first novel, drawing on her own childhood in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Beautifully written, the book paints a clear-eyed and unsentimental picture of southern Africa in mid-century, with all of its natural beauty and social nightmares. Lessing begins at the unhappy ending, then tells the story of how the participants arrived at that dramatic moment.
I found this book on a shelf at the college where we were at band camp. It was interesting because of its location (I don't think I'd ever read anything set in South Africa at the time), but I only thought it was good, not great. Only later did I actually hear about the author.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Racism, Violence, Murder, Colonisation
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Struggling to process this. A story of the unhappy wife of a struggling white farmer in early 20c Southern Rhodesia; a woman who finds her way into marriage more or less as a way to avoid embarrassment, and who descends, through deprivation and bigotry, into madness. While the specific personalities and relationships here, the husband and wife and their occasional interactions with the small local community of white farmers, form the frame for the tale, the substance of the text is the author’s representation of the deeply - incomprehensibly deeply - dysfunctional relations between the white farmers and their “native” workers. A profound racism informs every action, thought and feeling of the main characters, all of which contribute to a primeval soup of inhumanity that is catalysed, by one worker’s presence, into the personality collapse that consumes our pitiful anti-heroine. I suppose as a picture of the psychological horror-show of white settler life in Southern Africa, this is book worth reading, but I found it hard-going: the constant racist abuse, the - to the modern reader - unimaginable imbalance of power between the whites settlers and the local people, the clubbiness of the settler community that manages to be oppressively supportive, judgemental and viciously exploitative at the same time, and of course the endless grinding, hopeless failure of the principle couple. There was a distance in the telling here, a flatness of tone, which, as well as making the story harder to engage with, leaves me convinced that the author hated the story and the characters as much as I did. I’m left with a sense of respect for the authorial craftsmanship, but regret that it’s now in my brain.
This was a powerful book, but perhaps not a fair representation of the author's talents. Or, to put it more bluntly, the book was a powerful commentary on colonialism, but not the sort of book that I would have expected to be written by a Nobel Prize winner. I enjoyed the book and found it compelling, but it didn't blow me away with either the writing style or the insights into the characters. I'll look for later works by Lessing to give the author a fair shake.
Now this is a great novel. Painful, poignant, masterfully written. Especially chapters 9 & 11 are amazingly well crafted.
I saw a review here, saying that they still didn't know why Moses killed Mary. Some people are stupid as stones.
I saw a review here, saying that they still didn't know why Moses killed Mary. Some people are stupid as stones.
challenging
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes