Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, née Doris May Tayler (Kermanshah, October 22, 1919-London, November 17, 2013), who also published under the pseudonym Jane Somers, was a British writer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

Biography

His father, Alfred, was a former British Army officer who served in World War I, in which he suffered a leg amputation. He married one of the nurses who cared for him, Emily. Relocated to Persia, now the Islamic Republic of Iran, for work reasons, Doris was born there and when she was six years old her family, attracted by promises of making their fortune as farmers in British colonial Africa growing corn, tobacco and cereals, moved to Southern Rhodesia, today called Zimbabwe, and there he spent his childhood and youth until he was 30 years old. Her memories of that time, according to her autobiography, are ambivalent: on the one hand, the strict and severe upbringing of her mother; on the other, those moments in which she, in the company of her brother Harry, she enjoyed and discovered nature; she also became sensitized against racial discrimination.

In constant struggle with her mother, who wanted to be an Edwardian lady without being able to sustain that lifestyle on a dilapidated farm, and wanting to escape her authoritarianism, Doris abandoned her studies at a Catholic convent school, at the age of fourteen., and when she was fifteen she left home and worked as a nanny. She continued to train as an autodidact, reading mostly nineteenth-century novelists and works on politics and sociology, and began to cultivate literature; She worked at various jobs and at the age of eighteen moved to Salisbury (present-day Harare) with a job as a telephone operator; a year later she married the civil servant Frank Charles Wisdom (1939) and had two children, John and Jean; she divorced in 1943 and joined a communist-minded group.

In 1944, she married Gottfried Lessing, a German Jewish exile she had met in a Marxist literary group, and had their third child, Peter. She started working as a clinic assistant. Overwhelmed by her intellectual and literary concerns and by the work of being a wife and mother, she divorced again, although she kept her husband's surname to publish, and in 1949, at the age of thirty-six, she moved to the United Kingdom with her son. leaving the elderly in South Africa with his father, because, as he indicated years later, he did not want to waste himself being only a mother. She settled in London, she resumed her writing career by publishing The Grass Sings (1950) and she was a member of the British Communist Party between 1952 and 1956; she participated in campaigns against nuclear weapons and was a harsh critic of the South African apartheid regime. But the revelation of the crimes of Stalinism at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union made her lose all her ideological illusions definitively and she left the party in 1954; indeed, watching Soviet tanks put down the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Budapest she exposed her political disenchantment in her book Retreat to Innocence (1956). In 1956, known for her constant and relentless criticism, she was banned from staying in all of South Africa and especially in Rhodesia. After her great success, the feminist novel The Golden Notebook, from 1962, whose structure is also presented as innovative, she continued writing narrative and filled the void left in her existence by historical materialism with great interest. for Sufism, which he met through his teacher and friend Idries Shah, who, in addition to being a decisive influence on his literature from the 1970s, offered him a foreword to his book Learning to Learn. George Gurdjieff's book, Of Everything and Everything was also particularly influential on her science fiction work Canopus at Argos . Her health deteriorated after suffering several strokes so that she was no longer able to travel, and she passed away in London on November 17, 2013 at the age of 94.

Literary work

Doris Lessing's work is much of an autobiography and is often inspired by her African experience, her childhood and her life, social and political disappointments, which made her a feminist, communist, pacifist and anti-colonialist. The themes embodied in her novels focus on cultural conflicts, the flagrant injustices of racial inequality, the contradiction between individual conscience and the common good. She primarily covers fifty novels and a large number of short stories, although she also occasionally cultivated other genres (theatre, poetry, essays, biography and opera script).

In 1962, she published her best-known novel, The Golden Notebook, which catapulted her to fame, making her an icon of feminist demands. Apart from the social criticism of her first texts ( Canta la hierba , 1950, or the pentalogy Children of violence , 1952-1969), she also investigated the psychological and existential novel. In the aforementioned pentalogy, Children of Violence, perhaps her most ambitious work, narrates the search for identity of the author's literary double, Martha Quest, who from Africa to England observes the collapse of the colonial system and its sequels on relations between blacks and whites. On the other hand, these narratives deal with the awakening of a disappointed conscience, the situation of women and the condition of the artist in the XX century. with reference to the great authors of the realistic novel of the XIX century, whom he knew well and whose depth of study Psychological and social observation density faithfully reproduces.

Notable among his other books are The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Son (1988) or those written under the pseudonym Jane Somers, such as Diario de una buena vecina (1983), with which he wanted to demonstrate the difficulties young writers with no known names face in publishing. Between 1979 and 1983 he dedicated himself to a genre considered minor, science fiction, with the series Canopus en Argos, inspired by Sufism, which earned him the misunderstanding of academic critics, but also the sympathy of the writers dedicated to the genre.

At the age of 76, he returned to South Africa in 1995 to visit his daughter and grandchildren, and to publicize the first part of his autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). Ironies of history: she was welcomed with open arms, when the themes she had dealt with in her works had been the cause of her expulsion from the country forty years before.

Author of more than forty works, and famous since the appearance, in 1950, of her first book Canta la hierba, she is considered a writer committed to liberal ideas, despite the fact that she never wanted to give no political message in his work, and was the icon of Marxist, anti-colonialist, anti-segregationist and feminist causes.

In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her "ability to convey the epic of the female experience and narrate the divide of civilization with skepticism, passion and visionary strength".

Awards

Doris Lessing has been one of the few authors to have won every major literary prize in Europe, and declared in 2007 that she loved this fact. For example:

• Somerset Maugham Award - 1954
• Finalist at the Booker Prize - 1971
• Prix Médicis de France - 1976
• Austrian European Literature Award - 1982
• Shakespeare Prize of the German Federal Republic - 1982
• Finalist at the Booker Prize - 1985
• WH Smith Literary Award - 1986
• Premio Internazionalle Mondello de Italia - 1986
• Palmero Award - 1987
• Grinzane Cavour Prize (Premio Grinzane Cavour) from Italy - 1988
• James Tait Black Prize for English Literature - 1995
• XI International Prize for Catalonia - 1999
• Prince of Asturias Award for Letters - 2001
• David Cohen British Literature Prize (British Literature Prize David Cohen) - 2001
• Dupont Gold Pen Award - 2002
• Nobel Prize in Literature - 2007

Criticism of winning the Nobel Prize

Literary critics in general took the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Doris Lessing with surprise and skepticism, because she did not count in the pools for the 2007 award, despite being an "eternal candidate". Authors such as Ana María Moix, Germán Gullón, José María Guelbenzu or Mario Vargas Llosa praised her literary merits after being awarded the award, as did two of her translators, Carlos Mayor and Dolors Gallart.

American critic Christopher Hitchens refers to Lessing's Nobel by saying: "One is astonished to see that, at least once, the Nobel committee has actually done something honorable and meritorious... "

However, some critical voices have been raised against this decision:

• American literary critic Harold Bloom called the decision of the Swedish Academy "politically correct". "Although Mrs. Lessing at the beginning of her career had some admirable qualities, I find that her work in the last 15 years is a brick... science fiction of fourth category."
• The German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki from the Frankfurt Book Fair considered the Nobel as a "disappointing decision". "The English language has more important and more significant writers like John Updike or Philip Roth."
• Also Umberto Eco, in the same forum, despite considering that the author deserved the award, admitted her surprise for the decision stating: "It is strange that the prize will be won again by an English-language author so soon after Harold Pinter."