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Adore: A Novella
Adore: A Novella
Adore: A Novella
Ebook129 pages1 hour

Adore: A Novella

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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“A keen sociological eye for class and ideology; an understanding of the contradictory impulses of the human heart; an ability to conjure a place, a mood and a time through seemingly matter-of-fact descriptions.”  — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Shocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, Adore reaffirms Doris Lessing’s unrivaled ability to capture the truth of the human condition.

Roz and Lil have been best friends since childhood. But their bond stretches beyond familiar bounds when these middle-aged mothers fall in love with each other's teenage sons—taboo-shattering passions that last for years, until the women end them, vowing to have a respectable old age. 

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateSep 17, 2013
ISBN9780062318978
Adore: A Novella
Author

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. 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". She died in 2013.

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Rating: 3.3984962368421052 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

133 ratings12 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book contains four novellas that show off Doris Lessing wide-ranging ideas and her facility with plot and language. Not as wonderful as some of her works, but very enjoyable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This collection of four novellas is vintage Doris Lessing. Published in 2003, it encompasses many of her signature themes: the process of aging, class and race relationships, the bittersweet pain of love and passion, and a recognition that how a civilization cares for its environment reflects its health.The title novella, "The Grandmothers" is a wry tale of two women who grow up as best friends, are young mothers together and have tangled relationships with each other's sons."Victoria and the Staveneys" examines the intertwined relationship of Victoria, growing up in council flats, orphaned and burdened with the care of her dying aunt, with a self-absorbed theatrical family that has a socialist bent.In "The Reason for It," we have the chronicle of the decay of an ancient civilization, destroyed because its guardians could not recognize the results of their misjudgement.The final novella, "A Love Child," has the most fully developed protagonist and plot. James, drafted into the British army at the onset of WWII, is sent off to India on a hellish ship transport. While the ship docks in Cape Town to refuel and resupply, he has a passionate fling with a young matron. The rest of the war and the rest of his life are delineated by his obsession and memories of those brief days.Although the reviewers in The Guardian and The New York Times found the collection uneven -- I found it very satisfying and reflective of the varieties of Lessing's fictions.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I loved the story [The Grandmothers] but could not face completing any of the other stories in this collection. [[Doris Lessing]] is a brilliant writer, but her subjects are too harsh.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    great stories. loved "the reason for it" and "love child" the most.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I predicted a year before it happened that Doris Lessing would get the Nobel Prize. I haven't read very much of her work, maybe five of her novels and none of the rest of her works, but I just felt that the depth and breadth of her output was deserving of that acknowledgement. So I was very happy when she got the award and I was determined to read more of her work. Thanks to BookCrossing I've added one novel and one book of short stories to my list. I think my favourite of these four stories was "Victoria and the Staveneys". I found it explored a lot of the same themes that her books do but each time there is a unique perspective. I just thought Victoria's antipathy to country life was hilarious, a side of Lessing I had not seen before. I also liked "The Reason for It". At the time she got her Nobel Prize someone said (perhaps on BookCrossing) that she was the first science fiction writer to get the Nobel. And this story shows her aptitude for speculative fiction (as I think it would be called). I thought it completely conveyed the society with its history and present problems and it perhaps even acted as a lead in to "The Love Child". When I read the Kipling poem that the Colonel read out (Cities and Thrones and Powers Stand in Time's eye, Almost as long as flowers, Which daily die:) I wondered if that poem had been the inspiration for "The Reason for It". I think Lessing is a genius. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read more of her. I have katayoun's address so it will be mailed off to her asap. I hope it gets to Iran all right. Since kobie03 put a bookmark with the words to O Canada on it (where have I seen those before?)I thought I would put one of the French language bookmarks in that varykino sent to me last year.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I’m still trying to work out how long a piece of writing has to be if it’s called a novel. The Grandmothers is a set of four “short novels,” according to its cover. But how is that different from four novellas?The first, and title, story is an intriguing family tale of just 53 pages. Two fathers. Two daughters. Two grandmothers. And two mothers who enter only peripherally into visits to a seaside restaurant. The waitress envies their perfect lives, which maybe aren’t as perfect as they seem, and the reader is drawn to view images of past innocence with almost reluctant curiosity. A startling, odd, sad tale, and a fascinating read.The second story, of Victoria and the Staveneys, is an all-too-real description of a promising life turned around by circumstance, and a vivid depiction of the tolerance, love and affection that accompany expectations. I wanted more for Victoria, and in the end, I guess she got more than she was offered. In the end she wasn’t who anyone tried to make her, but maybe she wasn’t all she could have made herself either.The Reason for it is the shortest tale of the four, an odd story of how quickly a culture falls apart. It reads innocently and tragically through the eyes of an elderly man, but it’s echoes of modern life can’t be entirely accidental.And finally, A Love Child, at 117 pages, is an amazing depiction of wartime Britain and the life of a man who grows up between the wars. Introduced to communism, he finds poetry. Introduced to sickness, he finds love. Introduced to success, he keeps himself to himself and tries to analyze the reason others care for him. But through it all he misses the truth of how he should care for others. A sad story, but totally engrossing.So now I still don’t know how long a novel has to be. But perhaps if you’re a writer of Doris Lessing’s caliber it really doesn’t matter. I’d certainly recommend the book, and I enjoyed the time spent meeting her characters.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    the writing style made it very difficult to follow.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    mes ses englais. nul
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Confusing and difficult to immerse yourself in the plot
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    l
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book was only 70 pages long, and I finished it in an hour. It was good, not great. A little odd. The plot centers around two lifelong friends who, in their middle age, start affairs with each others' teenage sons. The book glosses over a lot of the more...sensitive parts of the story, so it wasn't as cringeworthy as you might think.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a standalone republication of the novella ?The Grandmothers?, originally published in the collection The grandmothers: four short novels, to tie in with the release of the French/Australian film Two Mothers (2012), which was puzzlingly retitled Adore in some countries. (There was a door in the film, but it didn't seem particularly important to the plot...)I read this shortly after seeing the film, so it was most interesting to notice the various little things that had been changed from novella to film. In this case, the story is so short that there was little need to cut material out, but the film did make one major change to the timing (Roz is separated from her husband about ten years earlier in the story than in the film) and a few more subtle changes to the background (e.g. by giving the women different jobs) all of which seemed to be designed to enhance the element of pastiche soap-opera already implicit in the bourgeois Australian beach setting. Lessing?s basic theme of a friendship between two women that creates a kind of family more important than sex, marriage, or what other people may think of them seems to carry through quite clearly from one medium to the other.As a story, it's strong and memorable, and I can easily see why it would be the title story of any collection it appeared in, but I'm not sure if it's quite strong enough to meet the reader's expectations from a solo publication. Everything depends on establishing and justifying the central conceit of the plot, but there's not really all that much beyond that. If you hadn't seen the film, you'd probably find this a bit disappointing.

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Adore - Doris Lessing

Contents

Adore

Books By Doris Lessing

P.S.

About the author

About the book

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Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Adore

On either side of a little promontory loaded with cafés and restaurants was a frisky but decorous sea, nothing like the real ocean that roared and rumbled outside the gape of the enclosing bay and barrier rocks known by everyone – and it was even on the charts – as Baxter’s Teeth. Who was Baxter? A good question, often asked, and answered by a framed sheet of skilfully antiqued paper on the wall of the restaurant at the end of the promontory, the one in the best, highest and most prestigious position. Baxter’s, it was called, claiming that the inner room of thin brick and reed had been Bill Baxter’s shack, built by his own hands. He had been a restless voyager, a seaman who had chanced on this paradise of a bay with its little tongue of rocky land. Earlier versions of the tale hinted at pacific and welcoming natives. Where did the Teeth come into it? Baxter remained an inveterate explorer of nearby shores and islands, and then, having entrusted himself to a little leaf of a boat built out of driftwood and expertise, he was wrecked one moony night on those seven black rocks, well within the sight of his little house where a storm lantern, as reliable as a lighthouse, welcomed in ships small enough to get into the bay, having negotiated the reef.

Baxter’s was now well planted with big trees that sheltered tables and attendant chairs, and on three sides below was the friendly sea.

A path wandered up through shrubs, coming to a stop in Baxter’s Gardens, and one afternoon six people were making the gentle ascent, four adults and two little girls, whose shrieks of pleasure echoed the noises of the gulls.

Two handsome men came first, not young, but only malice could call them middle-aged. One limped. Then two as handsome women of about sixty – but no one would dream of calling them elderly. At a table evidently well-known to them, they deposited bags and wraps and toys, sleek and shining people, as they are who know how to use the sun. They arranged themselves, the women’s brown and silky legs ending in negligent sandals, their competent hands temporarily at rest. Women on one side, men on the other, the little girls fidgeting: six fair heads? Surely they were related? Those had to be the mothers of the men; they had to be their sons. The little girls, clamouring for the beach, which was down a rocky path, were told by their grandmothers, and then their fathers, to behave and play nicely. They squatted and made patterns with fingers and little sticks in the dust. Pretty little girls: so they should be with such good-looking progenitors.

From a window of Baxter’s a girl called to them, ‘The usual? Shall I bring your usual?’ One of the women waved to her, meaning yes. Soon appeared a tray where fresh fruit juices and wholemeal sandwiches asserted that these were people careful of their health.

Theresa, who had just taken her school-leaving exams, was on her year away from England, where she would be returning to university. This information had been offered months ago, and in return she was kept up to date with the progress of the little girls at their first school. Now she enquired how school was going along, and first one child and then the other piped up to say their school was cool. The pretty waitress ran back to her station inside Baxter’s with a smile at the two men which made the women smile at each other and then at their sons, one of whom, Tom, remarked, ‘But she’ll never make it back to Britain, all the boys are after her to stay.’

‘More fool her if she marries and throws all that away,’ said one of the women, Roz – in fact Rozeanne, the mother of Tom. But the other woman, Lil (or Liliane), the mother of Ian, said, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and she was smiling at Tom. This concession, or compliment, to their, after all, claim to existence, made the men nod to each other, lips compressed, humorously, as at an often-heard exchange, or one like it.

‘Well,’ said Roz, ‘I don’t care, nineteen is too young.’

‘But who knows how it might turn out?’ enquired Lil, and blushed. Feeling her face hot she made a little grimace, which had the effect of making her seem naughty, or daring, and this was so far from her character that the others exchanged looks not to be explained so easily.

They all sighed, heard each other and now laughed, a full frank laugh that seemed to acknowledge things unsaid. One little girl, Shirley, said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ and the other, Alice, ‘What’s so funny? I don’t see anything funny,’ and copied her grandmother’s look of conscious naughtiness, which in fact had not been intended. Lil was uncomfortable and blushed again.

Shirley persisted, wanting attention, ‘What’s the joke, Daddy?’ and at this both daddies began a tussling and buffeting of their daughters, while the girls protested, and ducked, but came back for more, and then fled to their grandmothers’ arms and laps for protection. There they stayed, thumbs in their mouths, eyes drooping, yawning. It was a hot afternoon.

A scene of somnolence and satisfaction. At tables all around under the great trees similarly blessed people lazed. The seas all around them, only a few feet below, sighed and hissed and lapped, and the voices were low and lazy.

From the window of Baxter’s Theresa stood with a tray of cool drinks momentarily suspended and looked out at the family. Tears slid down her cheeks. She had been in love with Tom and then Ian, and then Tom again, for their looks and their ease, and something, an air of repletion, as if they had been soaking in pleasure all their lives and now gave it out in the form of invisible waves of contentment.

And then the way they handled the little girls, the ease and competence of that. And the way the grandmothers were always available, making the four the six . . . but where were the mothers, children had mothers, and these two little girls had Hannah and Mary, both startlingly unlike the blonde family they had married into, being small and dark, and, while pretty enough, Theresa knew neither of them was good enough for the men. They worked. They owned a business. That is why the grandmothers were so often here. Didn’t the grandmothers work, then? Yes, they did but were free to say, ‘Let’s go to Baxter’s’ – and up here to Baxter’s they came. The mothers too, sometimes, and there were eight.

Theresa was in love with them all. She had at last understood it. The men, yes, her heart ached for them, but not too severely. What made the tears come was seeing them all there, watching them, as she did now. Behind her, at a table near the bar, was Derek, a young farmer who had wished to marry her. She didn’t mind him, rather fancied him, but she knew that this, the family, was the real passion.

Over deep layers of tree shadow lanced with sunlight, sun enclosed the tree, the hot blue air, interfused with bliss, happiness, seemed about to exude great drops of something like a golden dew, which only she could see. It was at that moment she decided she would marry her farmer and stay here, on this continent. She could not leave it for the fitful charms of England, of Bradford, though the moors did well enough, when the sun did decide to shine. No, she would stay here, she had to. ‘I want it, I want it,’ she told herself, allowing the tears at last to run freely. She wanted this physical ease, the calm of it, expressing itself in lazy movements, in long brown legs and arms, and the glint of gold on fair heads where the sun had been.

Just as she claimed her future, she

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