Book description
This is the second volume of Doris Lessing's 'Collected African
Stories'. A classic work of 20th-century literature from teh Winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.
'As for these stories - when I write one, it is as if I open a gate
into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it.
A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I
wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the
same time, which was once the Old Chief's Country.' Doris Lessing, from
the preface.
This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the
grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as
well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks.
Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick
with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year
of hunger in a native village - all combine to present a powerful image
of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who
plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing's own
words, 'Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature,
among other creatures, in a large landscape.' 'Some stories are set in
the Twenties, others in the war, others thereafter, but all draw with
unhampered directness upon childhood sensation undiminished by distance
and memory. With a boundless fecundity and flow, these stories are
timeless, as though heat and wilderness took the place of time.' Daily Telegraph
'Doris Lessing can take what appears to be commonplace, mere passing
anecdote and turn it deftly until its inner light is released: one feels
that she has gazed upon the stories in her mind until that peculiar
angle of vision, the angle that pierces obliquely but clean to the heart
of a thing, has finally been found.' The Times Doris Lessing was the
winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one of the most
important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first
novel, 'The Grass is Singing' was published in 1950, and since then her
international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated
novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Summer Before the Dark', and
'Memoirs of a Survivor'. Her most recent works include two volumes of
autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the Shade', her most
recent novel is 'The Cleft'.
