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Alfred and Emily Hardcover – August 5, 2008
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I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.
In this extraordinary book, the 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother, Emily, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel.
In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war; a story that begins with their meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, of the family's move to Africa, and of the impact of her parents' marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land.
"Here I still am," says Doris Lessing, "trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Triumphantly, with the publication of Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateAugust 5, 2008
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100060834889
- ISBN-13978-0060834883
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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“An intriguing work . . . [that] shimmers with precisely remembered details.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Alfred and Emily explores the boundary where reality and imagination meet, through the use of a formally innovative structure. . . . Wonderfully evocative. . . . Glimpses into the creative process of one of the world’s most gifted and socially engaged writers make Alfred and Emily a valuable addition to the Lessing oeuvre.” — Boston Globe
“An odd and powerful excursion into lost time. . . . a powerful reminder not only of Lessing’s past but also of how each of us can return to our own and come back with something precious.” — San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“Alfred and Emily reveals why Lessing deserved literature’s highest honor. There is a remarkable level of courage, honesty, and wisdom in Alfred and Emily. . . . Lessing, nearing 90, continues to surprise.” — USA Today
“Lessing has pushed the boundaries of the memoir form . . . fluidly conversational prose . . . thought-provoking.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review
“In its generosity of spirit, its shaped and contanied fury, Alfred & Emily is also an extraordinary, unconventional addition to Lessing’s autobiography . . . but there isn’t the slightest tone of valediction or summing up here. That’s why she remains so vital: even in old age, she sounds as fierce and passionate as a girl.” — New York Times Book Review
“Laced with the subtlest of observations and the wryest of wit, it’s a charming yet cutting story of rapid social change, the resiliency of women, class conflicts, the call to do good, and the confounding dynamics of marriage and parenthood. . . . This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir (and family photographs) results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“A stirring exploration . . . gently yet deeply moving.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“She has never displayed her potent imagination to better effect, or her gift for probing realism . . . a profoundly moving memoir and portrait of a marriage.” — Wall Street Journal
“A clever, moving coupling of fiction and nonfiction. Alfred & Emily is a culmination of Lessing’s ongoing interest in formal experimentation and the relationship between reality and imagination. It’s also a testament to her ongoing literary vitality. . . . By allowing her readers this insight into the connection between autobiography and fiction, between form and content, she reaffirms fiction’s powers and possibilities.” — Washington Post Book World
“An intriguing work...Writing with the incandescent clarity of her 88 years, Ms. Lessing...conveys the appreciation she now feels for the hardship of her parents’ lives, and the anger she often felt as a young girl in rebellion against her mother...shimmers with precisely remembered details.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“A clever, moving coupling of fiction and nonfiction. ALFRED & EMILY is...a testament to [Lessing’s] ongoing literary vitality.” — Washington Post Book World
“She has never displayed her potent imagination to better effect, or her gift for probing realism. The author’s capacity to summon up her feelings so vividly is as effective as it is chilling...a profoundly moving memoir and portrait of a marriage.” — Wall Street Journal
“Lessing’s taste for discomfiting truths is as evident as ever…as bracing and engaging as anything she has written.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Laced with the subtlest of observations and the wryest of wit...This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir (and family photographs) results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic.” — Booklist (starred review)
“The novella is written in an unhurried, old-fashioned manner, and is filled with tender, accurate family scenes... the characters and settings are rich, and the story is touching...Lessing’s memoir of her childhood is insightful and evocative...ALFRED & EMILY is eloquent and incisive on the subject of war.” — Rocky Mountain News
“...the voices, both Lessing’s and her parents’, are alive, fluid, anxious, believeable.” — Seattle Times
“A truly intriguing piece of work...the book is also an interesting glimpse of an empire and an era: of how the hazy, golden afternoon of the Edwardian Age faded into the dark of World War I and of the way that disappointed British citizens fueled their postwar dreams by leaving their country.” — Christian Science Monitor
“In its intimacy, incisiveness and literary construct, [Alfred and Emily] is her most powerful book: a bold exorcism of her parents’ traumas in the first world war, and a thorough examination of her relationship with them...a poignant tribute...a final act of compassion.” — Newsweek (International Edition)
“Vivid, turbulent, fresh with raw emotion…Clarity and darkness, honesty and obscurity are tumbled together: the work of a writer who knows that the truths of the heart are hideously complicated” — Sunday Telegraph
“One of the most remarkable books she has ever written.” — The Independent
About the Author
Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing was one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards. She wrote more than thirty books—among them the novels Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, and The Fifth Child. She died in 2013.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper; First Edition (August 5, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060834889
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060834883
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,185,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #22,583 in Author Biographies
- #44,290 in Women's Biographies
- #136,500 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Elke Wetzig (elya) (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Alfred and Emily is part novel and part memoir. In the memoir she recounts personal details of Rhodesian life of long ago, and her ongoing challenges with her parents and later, unhappy times in her own life. Her chapter on her brother (“My Brother Harry Tayler”) is heartrending, pathetic in its ability to render such sorrow and pity.
Early pictures of the war, with men on horseback carrying lances, are anachronistic; trench warfare and no-man’s land was the new “face” of the war. Now, a hundred years later the war itself is seemingly anachronistic, with old footage long overwhelmed by WWII and the atomic/nuclear age. But for Lessing the war continued to be an emotional focal point: “That war, the Great War, the war that would end all war, squatted over my childhood. The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me. And here I still am, trying to get out from under the monstrous legacy, trying to get free.”
In the first part of Alfred and Emily, her last book, she tries to do so through fictionally creating lives for her parents where they meet but don’t marry, where there is no Great War. By creating happier lives and erasing her own existence, she hoped for peace, both for them and for herself. It’s futile, of course. Even fiction from a Nobel prize winner has its limits. But Lessing shows that war’s aftermath in the lives of the innocents isn’t anachronistic, even 100 years later.
Lessing's fictional lives of her parents, her account of who they might have been and how they might have found satisfaction in life, should stimulate her readers to imagine other lives for their own parents. In these other lives, our parents might have been more loving and tolerant, less judgmental and withholding, and more satisfied and fulfilled. However, in Lessing's fictional account of her mother's life, she implies that her mother's greatest regret was that she never had a child. Thus, there is a lesson to be learned from "Alfred and Emily" that Lessing teaches us with skill and dignity.
But during and after that war, another brutal, but psychological one was fought between mother and daughter: `My battles with my mother were titanic. I hated my mother.'
After all those years, Doris Lessing is still yelling as a madwoman because her mother projected all her love on her younger brother (and left nothing for her): `I can remember (my hate) from the start ... by the birth of my brother.'
In the `if-biography' of her parents, the latter don't even marry. Doris Lessing wouldn't have been conceived. She seems to say that in an `idyllic' world there is no place for war, be it a real or a psychological one, and no place for her. She wouldn't (shouldn't) be there with the monstrous rucksack mounted on her back for the rest of her life.
In `idyllic' England all `war efforts' could have been spent on a higher living standard for everyone. Instead, in `real' England the young generation was slaughtered as cannon fodder. As her father said, `they were such good chaps, such fine men. And they all died in the mud of Passchendaele.'
What saved Doris Lessing's life was literature: `No books have ever had such an effect on me as the great Russians.' But, that `I owe to her, my mother, my introduction to books.'
There are also the feminist notes in these pages: `A fate worse than death, a woman without maternal instinct and no birth control.'
If ... this astonishing non-biography had been real, we wouldn't have known the great writer, Doris Lessing, with her titanic emotional outburst and desperate cries for love.
A must read for all fans of world literature.
Top reviews from other countries
Disappointed by the FedEx delivery, the book was left and placed in my flower planter about 10 steps to my front door. Unbelieverable.