The Grass is Singing is the second book I read by Doris Lessing after the Golden Notebook, and frankly, I liked this book more than the Golden Notebook. As a matter of fact, I liked it more than the many books I read. It exquisitely describes what a terrible creature man is. You will continue to read, and you will not be able to tear yourself away from the book, regardless of the slap on your face and cramps in your stomach.
The Grass is Singing is about two lonely souls in Rhodesia and madness, racism, poverty, heat and the weight of being human. As you read the white man’s test with “others”, you will not be able to understand how and why and you will be amazed how racism can still continue without losing anything of its violence.
You will read why a woman is in a hurry to give up her life and get married, and what she has to give up when she gets married. You’ll struggle to understand. Then everything will become a little clearer as you consider the people around you, the lives that are far from you. As human beings, you will think that we are always wrong, and you will lose your mind like Mary. You will be amazed by Doris Lessing, who lived in Rhodesia for many years, explaining Africa and you will want the book not to end. It will be a novel that will not go out of your mind for a long time. Enjoy!
The Grass is Singing
Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing’s first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration. And a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison. And Mary’s despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses–master and slave–are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.
The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing’s imaginative vision with her own so vividly remembered early childhood. To recreate the quiet horror of a woman’s struggle against a ruthless fate.
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH OMG was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia, where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
