Word: novella
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Lessing's book, an account of her childhood on the frontlines of her parents' horrific memories, is an unusual work in two parts. The first half, a novella, imagines the lives her parents could have lived in England had the war never occurred; the second half, a memoir, recounts how their lives actually unfolded in their mud-brick farmhouse in Rhodesia. Together, they form a painful meditation on family and war, one in which the distance between dreams and reality is measured with disappointment. Lessing's life, we discover, falls in the chasm between them...
...being a prostitute. On another occasion, her mother phoned Lessing's employer and outed her as a member of the Communist Party. "She was a woman who shouldn't have had children, and she didn't in the life I have given her," Lessing says of the novella. "I'm hoping the fact that women can get jobs makes it impossible for this horrible person - the woman who has to live through her children - to come into existence...
...twilight of her life, it's hard not to read Alfred and Emily as an act of atonement. Drawing on decades of hindsight, she accepts that her mother's war wounds, though less visible, ran as deep as her father's - and she endeavors to heal them. In the novella, she envisions her mother as what she could have been, a teacher and philanthropist, not the "demented" woman that war had made her. The memoir honors that potential, too. "The real Emily McVeagh was an educator, who told stories and brought me books," Lessing writes...
...there, honored her before turning to another woman.”This theme of learning to live, love and lose transnationally—introduced in the work’s opening story—crystallizes in the closing trio of linked stories, which together from a sort of experimental novella. In alternating first-person narration, we’re told a tale of reverse immigration: “Your parents had decided to leave Cambridge, not for Atlanta or Arizona, as some other Bengalis had, but to move all the way back to India, abandoning the struggle that my parents...
...demonstrates an expansion in focus from its predecessor as it denounces the general inhumanity of totalitarian governments. Set in an unidentified, fictional South American state, under a vague but ominously present dictatorship—which itself gets overthrown by an equally blurry political force—the novella revels in its vagueness, making its story a universal one of dehumanization. Framed as the memoir of torturer Antonio Rojas Martens, a member of the secret police now in prison, it tells the story of his involvement in the murder of Frederigo and Enrique Salinas.As in his earlier work, Kert?...