A review by sarareadseverything
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, Gunvor Hökby, Lena E. Heyman, Bertil Hökby

4.0

This book wasn't so much entertaining or pleasant to read - it's the bleak analysis of a failed marriage and the sensitive characterization of Mary Turner's progressive despair and psychological dissolution as a white woman in 1940s Southern Rhodesia. It’s a thoroughly implicitly feminist story, and an anti-colonialist expose of the system and the movement of poor people who try to escape their grinding lives by emigrating. This book is honest about the fault lines in the white psyche, tracking a farming couple and the downturn of their fortunes as a metaphor for the whole white presence in Africa. I said it was not entertaining to read, but it is interesting and enjoyable, in way... It feels like looking at human nature and the worlds we create unsparingly, which is powerful, even if it is difficult.