I found Rabia al-Adawiyya to be the best advise I have ever heard about how to love God--not for hope for reward or fear of punishment--but because our Friend is lovable. Easy to say but hard to live to. But like Jesus much is attributed to her that is questionable. It is a shame they weren't recorded at the times that they lived. Anyway this is an excellant book that I would recommend to anyone that wishes to approach God throught the heart and not the brain.

Unfortunatly, much is lost, forgotten, or unknown about this (words can not describe her!) angelic woman. She is the woman who men make dua' to marry, the presence women would pray to be surrounded by, and the ruh (soul) many of us beg Allah to have.

She is by her name Rabia'. This book gives insight to the much forgotten and unknown woman. Her childhood, her travels, and her spiritual accent. She to me is the ibn alArabi of female devotees.

The book gives us a biography of her life and her experiences, but it is difficult to know if it is correct or not, considering the author admits to the false claims of her life that have been recorded. Perhaps she is better to be in the hearts of those who actually knew her, or who make dua' for her. It would be a pitty to know so much about her, and yet not follow her example. She was never satisfied with her worship, or tauba, and this book explains storys that carry on the tales of Rabia. May Allah bless her, and be pleased with her!

Only non-travel guide about Africa in my local library branch when I got back, so I picked it up. Certainly a very interesting picture of the slow death of British colonialism, despite Zimbabwean independence in 1980. And the successive trips provide a living view of changing attitudes and opinions, both of European expatriates and Nationals. Her inner dialogue of changes, good and bad (both very grey categories), is very informative as well.

That said, there is only a loose thread of continuing story that flows through the entire text. Granted, she's documenting her travels, but it seems a bit more perspective (or a more involved editor) could have helped give the book a bit more flow. I'd recommend it quickly to those interested in an authentic look at Africa, but probably not for those looking for a quick read during lunches.

Planet 8, a promising outpost of the Empire of Canopus, undergoes a catastrophic climate change. Canopus had planned to move the people to a similar planet, Rohanda; but the wrecking of these plans, as detailed in Lessing's Shikasta and The Sirian Experiments, means that a more arduous course must be taken. As their home freezes with appalling rapidity, the people of Planet 8 must first adapt to the new conditions and then transcend them by forging a group identity which will preserve their society's heritage. They already possess the germ of this collective mind - most obviously in their custom of changing the names of individuals according to the social function they happen to be performing at the time - but there is still a long, hard way to go. Despite its science-fictional plot, The Making of the Representative is closer in style to the social/psychological myth-making of The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five; certainly the prose is equally lyrical, and although the characters are (perhaps inevitably, given the theme) less well drawn as individuals, it's still a vivid, poignant, sometimes visionary piece. Appropriately, given its choral potentialities, the book was the basis of an opera by Philip Glass.

I love this book. Doris Lessing described every true feeling of women's innermost heart, happiness, anger and sorrow. Every short story presents different feeling of different events and ages. Women are so sentimental, so easy to be touched and have so much affection. Doris didn't leave words for ending in each story; however, she left the room for our imagination and we all know what is going to happen next.

Lessing presents us here to a third (or forth) phase in the life of Martha Quest, a white woman in "Zambezia", a colonialist state in Africa. "children of violence" which consists the present book is a highly recommended series as a whole, but the whole is to be differentiated as the fifth book belongs to a different genre if to any existing one. the former books, this one included, on the other hand, make an important contribution to female bildungsroman, as Lessing tells us with what i heard to be a tone of apology, in the end of the fifth book. "a ripple in the storm", specifically, suggest some more categories. it faces us with a small comunist group in "Zambezia" through world war 2 which implies all the domain of questions from justice to power in its external and internal spheres, to the state of an individual inside a storm. the story is rich, clever, subtle. it leads us to the continuance of changing and growing of Martha (the author seems to hold a certain popular enough judgement of comunism as something to grow of personally and historically, though not without retaining something of it). it leads us there as if by ourselves. it's not that you want to be or feel yourself to be Martha, actually Martha is half hidden - to herself too - in the turbulence of activity, this is part of the story. it is that you can imagine your shade appearing there in the little rooms. another point,one gets a sad description of the status of women in an example of an ideologically egalitarian organization. this fact is made clear thoroghly by description. one might believe the author doesn't even know this fact (but of course, one shouldn't).

Having just finished The Fifth Child, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the sequel and at first it seemed that Doris Lessing was going to give us another fascinating look at Ben and those who meet him. Unfortunately, two-thirds of the way into the book it lost its flow and ended with what seemed like Lessing's need to fill the pages with words, any words. Readers easily understood what atrocities were commited in the Cages. Offensive, gratuitous details of horrors committed against animals served no purpose in enriching the story, only in filling the pages. I thought the ending was appropriate, but wished for something better leading up to it.

Ben, in the World is a stunning sequel--a sophisticated study of the "monster" in The Fifth Child whose abnormal behavior disrupts an ordinary English family. In this novel we see the world from Ben's point of view, and come to understand the unbearable loneliness born of difference.

This novel works on several levels: as a novel of ideas; as a parable; as a psychological/social exploration of differences; as an indictment of cruel scientists; as science fiction; as a modern-day Frankenstein. I recognized this as a book I'd enjoy teaching in a frosh comp course, but I also fell into it with such absorbtion that I didn't analyze it at all while reading it.

I didn't like the ending--though I won't give it away. Having met people like Ben, I don't believe he would have taken the action condoned by some of the characters at the end of the novel. People love their lives--and Ben was strong.

But I've been reading Doris Lessing for 30 years, since I devoured The Golden Notebook at age 15, and I revere her work. I always intended to write Lessing a fan letter, but this dashed-off post will have to be it! Though not her greatest book, Ben, in the World is remarkable--worth buying in hardcover. Lessing is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--still an independent thinker and rebel in the twenty-first.

The Fifth Child was a terrific book. It brought up such concepts as separateness, lack of conscience, prejudice, etc. Ben, in the World is a worthy Sequel. In this book we get a more rounded Ben; it would have been so easy for Doris Lessing to write a book about a terrible throwback who didn't fit in anywhere. That is not what she did. Ben is very, very different, but he is human, he has feelings and, most of all, he wants to know where he "fits in" and why is everyone so different from him. Lessing took a good plot, that many pedestrian authors could handle, and made it into a great book by understanding the CHARACTER.

I bought this book 2 years ago - almost to the day...I have the receipt stuck in the book...I can only seem to force myself to get to page 50 and then I just can't stomach anymore and I put it down for 2 more years. Maybe this is a piece of art. Something to be treasured and something that should change your life. But pleasure reading shouldn't be this painful. I wish the store would take it back - but I think I've probably had it for too long.

The Golden Notebook is Lessing's most well known of her works and with good reason. It is an incredibly complex and layered work that addresses such ideas as authorship of one's life, the political climate of the 60s and the power relation between the sexes. It would be naïve to consider this novel as just a feminist polemic. I know many people have read it only this way or not read it because they assume it is only this. Lessing articulates this point well in her introduction. The novel inhabits many worlds of thought. It just so happens that at the time of its publication it was a very poignant work for feminism. More than any book I know it has the deepest and longest meditation on what it means to split your identity into categories because you can not conceive of yourself as whole in the present climate of society and in viewing your own interactions with people. This obsession with constructing a comprehensive sense of identity leads to an infinite fictionalisation of the protagonist's life. Consider the following passage "I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: 'Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a 'young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph." She can't attach her own vision of herself to the reality of her life. The two are separated by the ideologies of society which influence her own vision of who she should be.

This novel also captures the political climate of the era, a state of post-war disillusionment with the available models political ideology. They recognise the need for some kind of change, but are unable to envision a model that will work. Opinion is split into infinite personal categories of what government should become. Unfortunately, for all these good things which this novel intelligently discusses, it also has its own shortcomings that the reader should be aware of. Its representation of homosexuality is very limited. It has the unfortunate tendency to envision homosexuality as an idea of being rather than an actual state of being. No doubt, this was influenced at the time it was written by the meaning of being 'a gay' as being strongly attached to one's political position. The state of being a homosexual is inextricably attached to the misogynist vision of what femininity should be when it is actually something a bit more complex than that. Though Lessing is able to see through many misconceptions of her era such as the hypocritical actions of people who claimed to be fighting against racism while reinforcing racial divisions, the novel falls a bit short in other areas. Nevertheless, this doesn't prevent it from being a very powerful and enjoyable novel to read.

This book has to be read to be understood. I can say that this is the best book I have ever read. It is a book on the twists of human soul, communism, being a single mother, being a woman in 1960s, being a sensitive human, friendship, love, resentment, breakdown, breakthrough...It changed me forever.

I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as Volume I, UNDER MY SKIN. But it's a fascinating book for 2 reasons.

1. The light it sheds on the relationship between fiction & autobiography, & the glimpse it gives of the novelist's mind, how experience is tranformed into descriptions of people, places, events which are placed in the kaleidoscope of a particular work of fiction, shaken up, & emerge forming a different pattern. I probably would have said the same about UNDER MY SKIN, except I haven't read the CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE series yet, which corresponds with the period covered by Volume I of the autobiography. In Volume II, one sees many ingedients that went into THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK.

2. Lessing's observations of the period 1949-1962 in London, & comments on "the States" as she calls us.

It is funny in places, too. I think there's more humor in both volumes of Lessing's autobiography than in anything else I've read by her, and I wonder why this is.

I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as Volume I, UNDER MY SKIN. But it's a fascinating book for 2 reasons.

1. The light it sheds on the relationship between fiction & autobiography, & the glimpse it gives of the novelist's mind, how experience is tranformed into descriptions of people, places, events which are placed in the kaleidoscope of a particular work of fiction, shaken up, & emerge forming a different pattern. I probably would have said the same about UNDER MY SKIN, except I haven't read the CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE series yet, which corresponds with the period covered by Volume I of the autobiography. In Volume II, one sees many ingedients that went into THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK.

2. Lessing's observations of the period 1949-1962 in London, & comments on "the States" as she calls us.

It is funny in places, too. I think there's more humor in both volumes of Lessing's autobiography than in anything else I've read by her, and I wonder why this is.

This second part of Doris Lessing's candid biography, which depicts her difficult beginnings in London, is a more bitter report than the first one. It is full of personal and ideological disappointments.

Like so many young intellectuals in Europe, she finds shelter in the leftist Church (with capitalism as hell, Lenin, Stalin or Mao as Christ the Saviour, and Utopia as heaven) and becomes a believer in heart and soul. She still has difficulties to believe why she was so blind (even after a trip to Russia) and stayed like many others so long with the communist movement.
The agonizing psychological struggle to become an apostate is very emotionally told.

What saved her was art, in which she has a limitless belief: it can overthrow world powers.

This is a moving, uninhibited and realistic work, exemplary for many idealistic but wilfully deceived young people in the ninteen fifties and sixties. Outsiders willing to write her biography will not have many more 'secrets' to reveal.
Not to be missed.

Despite the author's accomplished prose style and vivid imagination, this is, in the end, a very boring book about a setting and a theme which should be fascinating: surviving the--or at least an--apocalypse. The problem is that the author remains at such an abstract and intellectual level throughout most of the book. As a result, you don't fully enter into the narrator's world, and you don't really get to know the characters. There is a scene about 30 pages from the end, when some peddlers come selling water in buckets, and there's a fight over the water, when I found myself saying, "Yes--this is exactly the kind of engaging detail that has been missing from most of this story!" The ambiguities of the cat-dog character and the wall-as-conduit-to-alternate-reality do not make up for this fundamental shortcoming.

There are several levels to this book, and many obscure threads which are woven together to make a very satisfying, yet provocative and obtuse novel of survival in times of chaos as society falls apart. Some of the mysteries which are present in the story ( who really is Emily, who and/or what is the dog, what is the alternate reality behind the wall, and what are all the charactors doing at the end when the iron egg crumbles) are woven into other novels by Lessing, such as the "Four Gated City." "Memoirs of a Survivor" is reported to be partly autobiographical.

A movie was made in England of "Memoirs" staring Julie Christi around 1985 which was shown briefly in Venice, California. I have not seen it referred to anywhere since.

These "Memoirs" postulate a near future when society's framework and infrastructure are breaking down. Young people are forming gangs and moving out of the city, the trappings of civilization are no longer relevant, cannibalism is rumored. Priorities are back to food, shelter, and clothing. Personal safety and a bath cannot be taken for granted. The narrator is an older woman who lives on the ground floor of a large apartment building. A 12-year-old girl, Emily, is brought to her and she is told the girl is her responsibility. The woman does her best to protect Emily, who is growing up quickly, but the girl has a better grip on reality than her protector. Watching the action on the street from the windows, they see first the nomadic groups of young people moving through their area, then gangs forming from their own neighborhood and moving out. Emily falls in love with a young gang chieftain and joins his group, where she finds her responsibilities almost more than she can bear. Her abilities in the new order are great, but she often retreats to the older woman's apartment. As more people move out, life in the city changes. Gangs occupy and protect their territories, raise gardens and animals for food. And then a new kind of gang emerges - younger children who have no idea of organization, loyalty, or even much language. These feral children are vicious and cunning. The quandary is that they are "only children." Emily's chieftain tries to help them and comes to grief. There are many puzzling threads to the story which are never explained. Does the wall really open into another reality? Is the dog really a dog, or something more? I enjoyed that quality of ambiguity as an added dimension to the story. I recommend it highly.

Maybe I just didn't get it. Or maybe trudging through the first part of the book (50 pages or so of stream of consciousness ramblings) put a bad taste in my mouth and prevented me from enjoying the rest...regardless, I found this book to be excruciatingly boring and lacking any sort of insight. What the plot/story was missing was not made up for in Lessing's writing style.
It seems that the jury is out on this book, either the reviewer hates it or praises it as a mind-blower. I fall into the "hated it" category, as I was not interested in this one at all. Those that enjoyed it praise it as an original work of sci-fi/fantasy or as a thought-provoking exploration of insanity. I found it to be neither.

I consider this to be a very shoddy piece of literature. A trivialisation of mental illness couled with what is essentially a very boring story. No insights no vision not even well written.

This book, along with William Styron's "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" and a keen interest in Jung and his archetypal analysis of reality and myth, cemented my interests and made me feel not quite so alone in my condition when I read them in my emotionally tumultuous mid-twenties.

A creative and open mind may find themselves skirting the edge of depression and psychosis at many junctions in their life, seeing things, PERCEIVING things through the thin veil that is their surface reality--some call that poetic understanding, others, perhaps, madness. Self-aware, this sensitivity can be an enormous strength...rather than a defect. A dangerous statement, but some of you may know what I'm saying (Lessing did when she wrote the text). In short, if you're looking for a precise clinical exposition on the subject of insanity look elsewhere...but if you're looking for a thoroughly unique (and yes, challenging) study of what madness may MEAN in the context of a number of layers of existence, then this is a heck of a read.

"Briefing" does start out quite slowly. I grant it's critics that...but alas, so do many great literary experiments. It took me several times before I got past the first sixty pages, but, then, taking time with it, I found it wholly rewarding. Like the most important reads of my childhood (I mention here works of Madeliene L'Engle especially), concepts of cosmology, religion, science and humanitarianism all become interwoven. Insanity is more a plot device than the main subject of "Briefing." That symbolism observed via a surreal experience, that empathic judgements and emotional responses are not just pertinent but crucial in the very real human quest for inner meaning--this is more the core of the book. Its an analysis of that which drives a hero to break free from the mundane and strive to elevate her/hisself, a portrayal of that internal calling to"something more."

Those that dismiss "Breifing" as boring pseudo-scientific babble, another late-60s 'bad trip', critical of its lack of action-packed pacing, well, they just don't get it...you're meant to take your time with a read like this, re-read passages and FEEL it. Otherwise, the cold tragic ending won't have its punch, and you will find yourself alienated from the purpose of the book, much like the doctors of the story are clueless to the main characters true 'raison d'etre.' Read it...be patient and open and, unlike most other books, you'll not forget it!