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Searching... Lyons Public Library | F LES | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Lessing, D. 2007 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From Doris Lessing, "one of the most important writers of the past hundred years" (Times of London), comes a brilliant, darkly provocative alternative history of humankind's beginnings.
In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.
In the last years of his life, a Roman senator retells the history of human creation and reveals the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child--a boy--the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.
Author Notes
Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia (later Iran) on October 22, 1919 and grew up in Rhodesia (the present-day Zimbabwe). During her two marriages, she submitted short fiction and poetry for publication. After moving to London in 1949, she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, in 1950. She is best known for her 1954 Somerset Maugham Award-winning experimental novel The Golden Notebook. Her other works include This Was the Old Chief's Country, the Children of Violence series, the Canopus in Argos - Archives series, and Alfred and Emily. She has received numerous awards for her work including the 2001 Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, the David Cohen British Literature Prize, and the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. She died on November 17, 2013 at the age of 94.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Eminent novelist Lessing offers an alternative origin story for the human race, indirectly recalling the alternate world speculations of her Canopus in Argos SF novels. 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-the first of a new race, with a nature derived from both sexes-that are the result. Humor, which may or may not be intentional, is introduced into a generally lethargic text when women and men discover they can't live with or without each other, and the battle of the sexes commences. The novel has elements of a feminist tract, but the story it tells doesn't present a significant challenge to that of Adam and Eve. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
One of postcolonial fiction's brightest lights makes mythic the battle of the sexes. It's men vs. women. Or, less subtly, "Monsters" vs. "Clefts." Lessing (The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, 2005, etc.), manufacturing a legend out of prose somewhere between grunting and incantation, imagines pre-history. As if commenting on ancient lore, a Roman senator tells of "the Cleft where the red flowers grow," a Shangri-La soon to turn oppressive that's peopled only by moon-worshipping women bearing the name of their land. One day, on this isle of Fish Skin Curers, Seaweed Collectors and Old Shes, a virgin birth produces a Monster, complete with a "tube" below his navel and nipples that "aren't good for anything." As in old Greece, unwanted babies are exposed to the elements on the Cleft, and even while the Clefts insist that "there is no record of any of us doing cruel things--not until the Monsters were born," they leave most of the Monsters out to die or castrate them. Except Maire, who instinctively mates with one of the surviving Monsters grown to adulthood (they're then dubbed "Squirts"). In time, more Cleft-Squirt copulation ensues (they do it fast, Lessing says, like birds). The Squirt offspring are pretty much dunderheads who "did not understand that if they did this, then that would follow," but they're resourceful, making fire and suckling female deer when their Cleft mothers abandon them. After a while, in this anti-Genesis, an alternative Adam and Eve rise up: Horsa and Maronna. Like all Clefts, who "always talked down to the men, chiding and scolding," Maronna rules the roost; Horsa explores. But just as he seems about to venture toward some new wonderland and Clefts and Monsters achieve some kind of acceptance, the Cleft, like Vesuvius, explodes. A dark parable, powerful yet baffling. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
"Outspoken, prolific, and influential, Lessing has cycled through an array of literary genres in her quest to tell stories that protest prejudice, fathom consciousness, and chart the entrenched battle between the sexes. In her newest audacious, ludicrously titled novel--yes, The Cleft does refer to the aspect of the female anatomy you suspect it might--Lessing employs a classic framing device. During Nero's rule, a Roman senator with a much younger and more sexually adventurous wife is working through a mass of material accumulated over ages, pertaining to a prehistoric all-woman tribe. The Clefts loll about in the surf and are mysteriously impregnated by the sea, until nature plays one of its tricks, and they suddenly give birth to what they call Monsters, but which we recognize as males. After the females' attempts to kill off the baby boys fail, thanks to the intervention of giant eagles, the two adversarial groups gradually discover that they need each other to reproduce, and that just as their bodies are different yet complementary, so, too, are their temperaments. As the good Roman chronicles, to the best of his ability, the way these early, contentious humans formed families and opened themselves to love, he marvels over the processes by which memories morph into myth, and history is assembled. As for Lessing, she overcomes initial narrative awkwardness to forge a mordantly entertaining fable rich in incident, discernment, and reflection."--"Seaman, Donna" Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ADAM'S rib, my foot. The premise of Doris Lessing's new novel-as-creation-myth, sparked by "a recent scientific article," is that "the basic and primal human stock was probably female, and that males came along later, as a kind of cosmic afterthought." The tale that Lessing spins from this reversal of biblical myth is narrated by an aging, nameless Roman senator in the time of Nero. This pagan scholar has scant use for the upstart Christians, who "insist that the first female was brought forth from the body of a male." He knows better, for he is writing a history based on an ancient "strictly secret" document called "The Cleft." The female authors of this "inflammatory" text reveal that the first humans in the Garden - actually a beach community - were a parthenogenetic race of proto-female sea creatures who spent their days lolling, like so many seals at the wharf in San Francisco, half in and half out of the water from which they came. These were the Clefts, and they raised their baby Clefts in caves high above the shore. They took their name from a towering cloven rock used for primitive religious rites: "The Cleft is us. ... It is a clean cut down through the rock and under it is a deep hole. ... We are the same." Every once in a while, however, a "deformed baby" is born with a "clutch of protruding flesh there in front," at the place where the Clefts have "smooth flesh, a neat slit, fringed with soft hair." At first, the appearance of such "Monsters," sporting a "thing like a pipe which is sometimes like a sea squirt," leaves the Clefts unruffled. They simply abandon each Monster on the Killing Rock, whence he is carried off to be eaten by eagles. What is Doris Lessing up to here? Is she sticking a finger in Freud's eye? Turning the tables on the misogynist patriarchy? Or is she ridiculing those feminists who persist in claiming her for their own? Can she be serious? Whatever the answer, we might well wonder how she will get her Shes from penis revulsion to heterosexual longing. Which she does. It turns out that the baby Monsters, also known as "Squirts," whom the Clefts have left for dead, are in fact alive and well, having been rescued by their brother eagles and delivered intact to a neighboring valley on a great river. There they are breastfed by does, sheltered in huts and fattened on fish to become strapping lads who "were always tormented by the demands of their maleness, but did not know what it was they yearned for." Ultimately, they and the young Shes, who are equally bothered and bewildered (parthenogenesis is on its way out), find one another. The future of the human race is assured, if threatened by male wander-lust and female clinging, violent intergenerational conflict (watch out for those old Shes!) and a series of natural catastrophes of biblical proportions. The male-female split in the narrative voice(s) of "The Cleft" echoes and emphasizes the other splits that pervade it - and the rest of Lessing's work. But in her celebrated novel "The Golden Notebook," for example, these divisions were embodied in human characters who yearned for wholeness - and there are no such characters in "The Cleft." There are Shes and Hes, but they are symbols, not people. And, as such, not very interesting. Nancy Kline's most recent book is a translation, with Mary Ann Caws and Patricia Terry, of Paul Eluard's "Capital of Pain."
Library Journal Review
In this thought-provoking and compelling novel, an elderly Roman scholar retells the story of how human beings originated. But in his version, people were at first female only-he portrays a community called the Clefts who give birth to girls in conjunction with the cycles of the moon. Understandably, the Clefts are shocked and confused when the first male is born. What develops is much like an original battle of the sexes; the men are cast out and form their own community, but eventually the curiosity of both groups gets the better of them. Images of the scholar's own life emerge as he attempts to piece together this story from fragments of manuscripts and the oral traditions of both the women and the men of that time. The award-winning author of The Golden Notebook and the "Children of Violence" series, Lessing does not present an idealized view of women; far from being loving and peaceful, they actually treat the men quite cruelly. This multifaceted account of life, love, gender, history, and the power of story is engrossing if not easy reading. Highly recommended for literary collections.-Alicia Korenman, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.