6 replies to this topic

[Pamela Moberg]

It has just been announced that the South African born writer Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Just checked the better English papers but they didnt have the news yet, so you are the first to know! Well, that was good news and I think well deserved.     

[Pamela Moberg]

Sorry about that - just took it from the top of my head in the excitement.
Doris Lessing was actually born in the then Persia, but moved as a small child to Rhodesia -she now lives in London.
Anyway, a very astute lady, she is now 88. Hope that she will feel up to attending the ceremony and banquet.
My apologies once more

[Helene]

Many thanks for the news!   to Ms. Lessing for this well-deserved honor.

[dirac]

Thanks for posting, Pamela.  Well deserved (and about time!) and I don't think there will be any whingeing about this one.

[Helene]

The story has made it to The Washington Post:

http://www.washingto...ml?hpid=artslot

(There's a video that is not working for me right now; the link is on the page from the article.)

and The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.c...amp;oref=slogin

The Times story has a wild photo of her sitting on her back steps with the media all around her.

[Ed Waffle]

dirac, on Oct 11 2007, 01:51 PM, said:

Thanks for posting, Pamela.  Well deserved (and about time!) and I don't think there will be any whingeing about this one.

Other than Harold Bloom who was very widely quoted as saying her selection was “pure political correctness.”  

I first read "The Golden Notebook" when I was about twenty years old in the days when I virtually devoured books. I picked it up again a couple of days ago and, two hundred pages in, find that it is much more enthralling than I recalled. Anna's life is an epic. Lessing uses these sudden but so subtle as to be almost unnoticable shifts in the point of view of the narrator to tell Anna's story in great and greatly readable detail.

The sins of the Nobel committee for the literature prize are and must be of omission--while a case can always be for chosing any year's winner over the rest of the field there have been some inexplicable exclusions. There was a window of about thirty years in which Graham Greene could have won, to cite one of the (for me) most egregiously unexplainable examples.

But Lessing is wonderful. My reading and re-reading of her will probably start and stop with "The Golden Notebook" and I am very happy to have rediscovered her.

[dirac]

Quote

There was a window of about thirty years in which Graham Greene could have won, to cite one of the (for me) most egregiously unexplainable examples.

Greene probably made them too nervous – who knew what he’d say? It’s a pity, too, because usually a writer gets the Nobel when he’s older and past his peak, and Greene improved with the years.

Audio links to Lessing reading from her works, below:

http://www.dorislessing.org/audio.html