The Grass Is Singing: A Novel

This novel can really rattle you. You know pretty much from the beginning that Mary Turner, the novel's heroine, who has been found dead at the opening of the story, was doomed. Then you gradually collect understanding of why and how she was doomed when you start reading about her frivolous party years in a town somewhere in South Africa. Mary is quite content partying with and befriending men but not marrying them. She slowly turns into a figure of ridicule when he friends marry and she turns into an old maid. Finally a suitor presents himself: a farmer who is not well-off but who is in awe of her even though her looks begin to fade and she still reads the same sentimental novellas as when she was a young girl.When she follows him to his farm somewhere deep in Rhodesia their marriage is a disaster from the very beginning. How could it be otherwise: she, a conventional, prejudiced, colonial woman of average intelligence who is not used to working with her hands (she used to have a well-paid job as an office clerk). And her husband the farmer has some kind of ADHD or bipolar problem which causes him to start growing new crops and developing new experimental projects that he abandons before they can reap the results.The story relentlessly follows the steep slope downwards, and everything is described with depressing, yet gorgeous precision. If you'd like to experience what Africa is like, the sounds, the sights, the smells of the bush, the animals and the people, you will feel them right here in the poetic, highly knowledgeable and emotional descriptions. There are several opportunities for things to develop and for Mary and Dick Turner to make a change in their pitiful lives, but due to the roles in which they themselves and their upbringing have cast them, they never succeed. Things get even worse when Mary is forced to keep a black male servant who frightens her. She has fired too many servants so her husband threatens her that she cannot get rid of this one. This guy however, Moses, is the victim of some slight of Mary's and he will be her eventual murderer. Moses completes the list of characters who are predictable in the way they act because they are locked in their historical (colonialist) and cultural framework. We are not surprised when Mary slowly becomes mad: Moses abuses and seduces her in a way that she can't resist although she wants and needs to. Our suspicion that Mary is the victim of childhood sexual abuse (by her father) is confirmed.One word about the title of the novel: if you think the title is highly evocative, you will not be disappointed by many other descriptions, for instance of the dark threat of the bush or the mind-numbing, all-pervasive heat. Some passages are hard to read, yet they are profoundly moving and/or thought-provoking: such as why Dick and Mary don't have children, their sexual dysfunctionality, the relationship with Moses, and the shame of the shoddiness and dirt in Mary and Dick's household.*** I had read this book as a 16-year-old, but didn't remember the story that well. But I did remember that I had gone to pieces reading it that time too.

Doris Lessing's debut novel "The Grass is Singing" is a raw, mesmerizing, and powerful indictment of racism in South Africa.In England, everything is understood in terms of class. In South Africa, everything is understood in terms of race.Mary, the protagonist, is a poor white, and that affords her the same luxury as a rich white in South Africa. Throughout her twenties, the color of her skin buys her a happy and careless existence, of easy friends who room with her and polite acquaintances who dine her. But it is also her skin -- and the power that comes with it -- that oppresses her as she turns into her thirties. Society demands she must marry, and so she marries a luckless farmer named Dick Turner, who is luckless because he is wedded to romantic notions that are out of step with the power dynamic of the society he lives in. He cares for the soil when his neighbors are so ready to burn it, and he seeks peace with the native laborers who toil on his farm when his neighbors only know how to shout and scream at them.Into this fraught power dynamic Mary is suddenly thrown in. She is a bit romantic, and she wants badly to love the husband she hardly knows. But she is also a racist, and in the end it is the racism that defines her, and structures and drives her. Her husband lacks her fierce racism, and so Mary can only pity his weakness. Mary knows that his sentimentality -- his connection to the land and to the natives -- is what makes him hopeless. Mary's struggle to impose her racist worldview on her husband is futile, and it damages both irrevocably. Her husband adopts Mary's racist overtones as a compromise, and the webbing that holds together Mary's racism weakens, and begins to disintegrate.Into the household steps Moses, a semi-literate native. Mary and Moses soon develop a violent repulsion towards each other that becomes a suffocating attraction. Both oppressed by the overriding power dynamic that rules their souls, both becomes slaves to each other. They cannot express their attraction through love, so they must invariably turn to destruction."The Grass is Singing" is so lusciously written that it sings. It sings of a majestic music to the land, and a redeeming spirit to the people. But power suffocates and destroys all. The financiers control everything, and the farmers must destroy the land and exploit the natives to feed their addiction to money. Racism is the religion that animates everything, and in so doing corrupts everyone.

This was my first book by the famed Lessing. It focuses on the relationship of a poor couple eeking out a living on a farm in South Africa. When I first started out on this book I was convinced that the story would focus on Apartheid in South Africa. There are different elements of these aspects in the book, but I did not find that race was the main topic. To my surprise the core of the book is about something completely different (from my perspective) in terms of life paths, dreams and expectations versus the brute force of reality. There is also a perception of the power of the past and the present reflected in the characters of Moses and Mary. It seems to me that the novel is a study of sanity in the face of those forces. The true main character is the landscape, the unrelenting flow of time and seasons in the African grasslands under which both human structures and minds crumble. I found myself quite a bit fascinated by the unfolding of the story. The part I am particularly drawn to is when Lessing muses about the South African landscape, the colors of the sky and light, as she embraces the reader with the sounds of insects and scents of dust and flowers. The heat of the world is apparently relentless warping the perception of goals and dreams. Mary's crumbling existence and psyche are depicted in a way that makes me feel uneasy, but allows us to connect to reality. A great read making me interested in other works by Lessing.

A brilliant storyteller!

An intriguing story about two ordinary people who try to make sense of their lives. One is a bit of a dreamer who constantly fails, and the other tries to find a role managing the 'blacks' while supporting the husband. They are two very poor white farmers - [white trash??] despised by other whites and blacks alike. I really sympathised with the characters and desperately hoped that things would work out for them.

処女作は無意識のうちにその後のすべてを暗示しているといいますが、この作品もそうなのかもしれません。といっても私は著者の作品はこれが最初なのですので、しょせんは受け売りの解説に終わってしまいそうですが。paul scottのstaying onと同じように、結末自体は、最初に明らかにされています。ということで結末へいたるいくつものモティーフの展開とその発展が着目されます。ひとつはいうまでもなく支配者たる白人とnatives (黒人）との関係です。ここには、paul scottのraj quartetと違い、両者の間には、論理や理性の対話は存在しません。ここに存在するのは、物理的な存在感に由来する恐怖感とそれを支える社会的な偏見、そしてそれに促される本能的な暴力が前面に出てきます。１３４ページから１３６ページまでに描かれる主人公の女性とnativeの男性の対決のシーンはその迫力と必然性とそしてそのやるせなさにおいて、ほかでは見られないものです。最後のシーンは、いまひとつ理解しにくいのですが、著者が自叙伝で述べているように、あまりに深読みして直接的な性的な意味合いを探す必要はないのかもしれません。そこまで行かずとも十分にショッキングな性の寓意を持つのかもしれません。ここには”アーロン収容所”の女性将校の意識が背後に共有されているのでしょう。そして著者は３０歳を前にしてもうこれに気がついていいます。もうひとつは女性の本質的な運命です。この部分は南アフリカの小農場での農夫の妻という役割付けがその袋小路の運命を浮き彫りにしていきます。この作品は必読の作品です。どうして翻訳されることがなかったのでしょうか？

short stories: open endingswell written

This story is set in a semi-autobiographical time and place experienced by the author, Doris Lessing, whose British parents took her to live in Southern Rhodesia at an early age. Her father was a maize farmer. The central character in the story is Mary Turner; a white girl, still single at 30. The opening chapter deals with the circumstances surrounding her death.Thereafter we travel through the 1930's with Mary, living in a town and working as a secretary. She is happy with her life until she meets and marries Richard Turner, a poor maize farmer.Thereafter life becomes a downward spiral as she fights her own prejudices against her black house-boys; and her husband's incompetence as a farmer. The terrible journey down the first years of her marriage inevitably lead her to a major nervous breakdown, betokened one imagines by the arrival of the new house-boy named Moses.As a part of my family belonged to the Rhodesian landscape of those far-off days, the memories came rushing back with a vividness that brought tears to my eyes.'The Grass is Singing' is without doubt, a major literary contribution to our colonial past.