Chris has been hinting that he might revive the quarterly fiction reading. If that happens, I suggest that we consider the work of Doris Lessing, who was recently announced as the recipient of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. (Hey, covering the newest Nobel Prize winner has gotta be good for traffic, right?)

Here are links to a handful of her novels; let's use this thread to talk about which, if any, interest us, and why.

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing's novel deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, a sometime-Communist and a deeply leftist writer living in postwar London with her small daughter. Anna is battling writer's block, and, it often seems, the damaging chaos of life itself. The elements that made the book remarkable when it first appeared--extremely candid sexual and psychological descriptions of its characters and a fractured, postmodern structure--are no longer shocking. Nevertheless, The Golden Notebook has retained a great deal of power, chiefly due to its often brutal honesty and the sheer variation and sweep of its prose.

(This is probably her best known work, and was specifically mentioned by the Nobel committee announcement. It's also 700 pages long, so despite the aura surrounding it, we may be better off not trying to build a group reading around the book.)

The Cleft

Positing that the primal human stock was female rather than male, Lessing invents a cult of ancient women called the Clefts, a name derived, in part, from that essential part of female anatomy. The story of the Clefts is bookended by the journal of a Roman historian, who interprets ancient documents stating that females were originally impregnated by a fertilizing wind or a wave, to give birth to female children. But one day a deformed baby is born, with a lumpy swelling never seen before. The first rape and the first murder follow soon enough, as do the first instances of consensual intercourse and the babies