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The grandmothers : Victoria and the Staveneys ; The reason for it ; A love child / Doris Lessing.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: London : Flamingo, 2003.Description: 311 pages ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0007169779(tradepbk)
  • 1405620765(lg print)
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Large Print Davis (Central) Library Large Print Large Print LES 2 Available T00427304
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The grande dame of English literature returns with a stunning collection of four short, intensely observed novels.

Four short novels in one book.

7 11 37 60 89 93

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

The Grandmothers Four Short Novels Chapter One On either side of a little promontory loaded with cafés and restaurants was a frisky but decorous sea, nothing like the real ocean that roared and rumbled outside the gape of the enclosing bay and barrier rocks known by everyone -- and it was even on the charts -- as Baxter's Teeth. Who was Baxter? A good question, often asked, and answered by a framed sheet of skilfully antiqued paper on the wall of the restaurant at the end of the promontory, the one in the best, highest and most prestigious position. Baxter's, it was called, claiming that the inner room of thin brick and reed had been Bill Baxter's shack, built by his own hands. He had been a restless voyager, a seaman who had chanced on this paradise of a bay with its little tongue of rocky land. Earlier versions of the tale hinted at pacific and welcoming natives. Where did the Teeth come into it? Baxter remained an inveterate explorer of nearby shores and islands, and then, having entrusted himself to a little leaf of a boat built out of driftwood and expertise, he was wrecked one moony night on those seven black rocks, well within the sight of his little house where a storm lantern, as reliable as a lighthouse, welcomed in ships small enough to get into the bay, having negotiated the reef. Baxter's was now well planted with big trees that sheltered tables and attendant chairs, and on three sides below was the friendly sea. A path wandered up through shrubs, coming to a stop in Baxter's Gardens, and one afternoon six people were making the gentle ascent, four adults and two little girls, whose shrieks of pleasure echoed the noises of the gulls. Two handsome men came first, not young, but only malice could call them middle-aged. One limped. Then two as handsome women of about sixty -- but no one would dream of calling them elderly. At a table evidently well-known to them, they deposited bags and wraps and toys, sleek and shining people, as they are who know how to use the sun. They arranged themselves, the women's brown and silky legs ending in negligent sandals, their competent hands temporarily at rest. Women on one side, men on the other, the little girls fidgeting: six fair heads? Surely they were related? Those had to be the mothers of the men; they had to be their sons. The little girls, clamouring for the beach, which was down a rocky path, were told by their grandmothers, and then their fathers, to behave and play nicely. They squatted and made patterns with fingers and little sticks in the dust. Pretty little girls: so they should be with such good-looking progenitors. From a window of Baxter's a girl called to them, 'The usual? Shall I bring your usual?' One of the women waved to her, meaning yes. Soon appeared a tray where fresh fruit juices and wholemeal sandwiches asserted that these were people careful of their health. Theresa, who had just taken her school-leaving exams, was on her year away from England, where she would be returning to university. This information had been offered months ago, and in return she was kept up to date with the progress of the little girls at their first school. Now she enquired how school was going along, and first one child and then the other piped up to say their school was cool. The pretty waitress ran back to her station inside Baxter's with a smile at the two men which made the women smile at each other and then at their sons, one of whom, Tom, remarked, 'But she'll never make it back to Britain, all the boys are after her to stay.' 'More fool her if she marries and throws all that away,' said one of the women, Roz -- in fact Rozeanne, the mother of Tom. But the other woman, Lil (or Liliane), the mother of Ian, said, 'Oh, I don't know,' and she was smiling at Tom. This concession, or compliment, to their, after all, claim to existence, made the men nod to each other, lips compressed, humorously, as at an often-heard exchange, or one like it. 'Well,' said Roz, 'I don't care, nineteen is too young.' 'But who knows how it might turn out?' enquired Lil, and blushed. Feeling her face hot she made a little grimace, which had the effect of making her seem naughty, or daring, and this was so far from her character that the others exchanged looks not to be explained so easily. They all sighed, heard each other and now laughed, a full frank laugh that seemed to acknowledge things unsaid. One little girl, Shirley, said, 'What are you laughing at?' and the other, Alice, 'What's so funny? I don't see anything funny,' and copied her grandmother's look of conscious naughtiness, which in fact had not been intended. Lil was uncomfortable and blushed again. Shirley persisted, wanting attention, 'What's the joke, Daddy?' and at this both daddies began a tussling and buffeting of their daughters, while the girls protested, and ducked, but came back for more, and then fled to their grandmothers' arms and laps for protection. There they stayed, thumbs in their mouths, eyes drooping, yawning. It was a hot afternoon. A scene of somnolence and satisfaction. At tables all around under the great trees similarly blessed people lazed. The seas all around them, only a few feet below, sighed and hissed and lapped, and the voices were low and lazy. From the window of Baxter's Theresa stood with a tray of cool drinks momentarily suspended and looked out at the family. Tears slid down her cheeks. She had been in love with Tom and then Ian, and then Tom again, for their looks and their ease, and something, an air of repletion, as if they had been soaking in pleasure all their lives ... The Grandmothers Four Short Novels . Copyright © by Doris Lessing. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Grandmothers: Four Short Novels by Doris Lessing All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Two friends fall in love with each other's teenaged sons-and other startling tales from the masterly Lessing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The latest by the prolific Lessing is a collection of four novellas that vary considerably in quality, with the best of them, "Victoria and the Staveneys" and "A Love Child," showing her at the top of her very impressive form. They are both at once intimately detailed yet infinitely expansive in their suggestions of a lost world only recoverable by a profoundly observant writer. In "Victoria" a young London black woman of charm and great fortitude survives and transcends the hardest of all assimilations: acceptance by a free-thinking, liberal white family. The shades of racial and social subtext here are evoked with a sure hand that even a Zadie Smith could envy. "A Love Child" powerfully evokes a strange aspect of a familiar time: a terrible ocean voyage, during WWII, by a hapless British regiment sent to the Far East to help protect India against Japanese invasion. James Reid, a young conscript, puts ashore in South Africa in the course of this nightmare voyage and embarks on a liaison that transforms the rest of his life. The detail and almost hallucinatory power with which an era and an ethos are recaptured are Lessing at her best, comparable to Ian McEwan's amazing war scenes in Atonement. The other stories are on a much lower level. The title story is about an odd relationship between two older women and each other's young sons; it is an original idea, but curiously lame in the telling. And "The Reason for It" is one of those peculiar tales in the SF/fantasy genre that Lessing does well enough, but that never seem to be quite her m?tier. Still, the two prize pieces here are well worth the price. (Jan. 9) Forecast: Fans of the writer will be amply rewarded by the better half of the book, her best work in some years. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

After more than 50 years as a great writer, Lessing continues to break new ground with this exciting collection of four short novels about intimacy among family, friends, and lovers. In the daring title story, two close girlfriends marry good men and raise their children together; then each woman has a passionate affair with the other's son. The sons eventually get married, but what chance do their wives have? In Victoria and the Staveneys, a poor black child longs for a room of her own, and a liberal, rich white family does help her; but it's her child, Mary, who will find space in the middle class--if her mom can let her go. A Love Child tells a rare World War II story of bored troops stuck in India (they joined up to fight Hitler, why are they defending the British Empire?) and about one soldier haunted forever by his brief, secret, passionate affair. Except for The Grandmothers, the stories go on too long. You can't wait to find out what happens, and you wish Lessing would get on with it. But then beautiful individual sentences stop you with their startling insight about experience usually hidden in silence. Yes, Lessing needs editing, but that was even true of her unforgettable classic The Golden Notebook (1962). --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2003 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Four novellas demonstrating that 84-year-old author (The Sweetest Dream, 2002, etc.) still boasts a range and power few writers half her age can muster. Lessing opens with "The Grandmothers," a portrait of taboo-defying sex and a friendship beyond ordinary bounds. Roz and Lil form in girlhood a bond so close that it eventually drives away Roz's husband. The women's two young boys are best friends too, but after Lil's spouse dies in a car crash, her sensitive, "nervy" son Ian seems to pine--until, at age 17, he climbs into Roz's bed. Her son Tom spends the very next night with Lil, and for more than a decade the foursome maintain a secret idyll, its meaning and consequences addressed with penetrating psychological complexity. In "Victoria and the Staveneys," a short masterpiece of sharp social realism, a young black girl's chance connection in London with a family of wealthy white liberals changes her life. Victoria's personal struggles (poignant, but never sentimentalized) stingingly contrast with the Staveneys' comfortable journey through two decades in late-20th-century Britain. "The Reason for It," an allegory of civilization's decline in the mode of Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, will not appeal to everyone, but it's meticulously crafted with her customary serious intelligence. "A Love Child" practically flaunts the author's ability to vividly enter into and convey almost any experience: an English soldier's nightmarish ocean journey on a WWII troop ship, a Cape Town wife's vague feelings of privileged discontent, their almost hallucinatory four-day romance, and the soldier's subsequent, desperately dull administrative service in India, which leaves plenty of time for his obsessive memories of the affair that will shape his postwar life as well. Class distinctions, political unrest, emotional torment: Lessing nails them all in blunt prose that disdains elegance for the sterner pleasures of truthful observation. When you're dealing with an author whose track record spans a half-century and paradigm-altering works like The Golden Notebook, it's too easy to simply praise another excellent effort. Where is this woman's Nobel Prize? Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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