A review by bufally47
The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing

3.0

After discovering the movie Adore was based on a short story by Doris Lessing, I went in search of another of her works grappling with the idea of taboo love. Somehow I’d decided this was it – and I could not have been more wrong. This misconception prevented me from really sinking my teeth in, unfortunately, and I’m kicking myself for that, because this was an intense, almost gothic inspection of isolation, landscape, and race tension in mid-century Southern Rhodesia. You could practically taste the dust in your mouth and feel the sun beating down on you. Honestly I prefer my (literary) psychological disintegrations to take place in cities; rural settings sort of bore-stress me. The last ten pages of the novel are so fraught and breathtaking, though, they made the whole novel worthwhile. At the time of publication, Lessing’s raison dêtre was probably to undermine the racist infrastructure, but even as an apolitical story it was interesting, if not exactly my cup of tea.