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...12th century Prime Minister who "sought to conspire with foreign countries and push our whole nation into an abyss." The author concluded by asking, "Is there not another man who has already attained a very high position and yet still wants to be Chairman of the country?" Lest the reader miss the point, the article added that the unnamed culprit "will not allow any dazzling light into the room." Chou is known to be bothered by bright lights...
...this is done with such compression and compassion that the reader continues to identify with Richard even after ambiguous clues bring his reliability as a witness into doubt. When life with Meg drifts too much toward surrealism and subjectivity, Richard's vignettes of life in the library help reassert his point of view. He composes provocative first sentences to imaginary short stories ("On the night of the blackout, Liz and Mike made love but not to each other"). He does a fine interior monologue about the psychiatrist as fortune cookie ("Be cautious yet confidently aggressive...
Richard, in fact, is well past jagged recollections of Meg's ominous girlhood and into an account of her relapse-which brings a return to the asylum-before the reader, by now totally in the grip of the author, really admits that Richard the good may in fact be Richard the bad, a brother whose sexual advances perhaps drove Sister Meg insane in the first place. Thereafter, as Meg is re-examined and taken away in a straitjacket, the book erupts with dramatic clues that flare backward and forward through the narrative like thin, ignited trains of gunpowder, creating...
Scarcely seven pages into this autobiography, a reader wonders briefly why William Orville Douglas cannot leave well enough alone. He has just related his Republican mother's belief that "if the rich are disenchanted, then we are all unemployed." Immediately the distinguished jurist adds, "Even at the age of 14, I did not buy that theory." He seems compelled to explain that he leaped practically from the womb as a full-blown liberal and has never since been sullied by the errors of complacent conservatism. And as he inveighs his way along the road of life-chumming up with...
...less doomed to love. But cheer up -a little. Love, like the blight in A Mild Attack of Locusts, can be endured. The sturdy wind up saying "It could have been worse." Mrs. Lessing has always been a slow, deliberate writer who seems unable to spare herself or her reader the slightest wince of pain. She is strong as perhaps no male writer of love stories is strong. Yet the stark honesty, the masterly bleakness of these stories are not finally depressing. It may even be praise to say that after a Lessing story-as after a painful episode...