In theory, the works of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in any given year should represent the epitome of storytelling -- in essence, writing containing in depth thought and analysis of the human condition, addressing societal issues and the essence of human experience in a lasting way. But the reality is that in many cases, Nobel Prize authors are so highbrow, so advanced and complicated in their use of language and manner of storytelling, that for the average reader the story is lost and the work loses all value.In 2007, the literary recipient of the Nobel Prize was a woman named Doris Lessing, who the Nobel committee describes as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." Lessing is an old, old woman, turning ninety this year. She is so old, in fact, that she was born in "Persia," which can't be located on the globe today as it's now Iran. Many of the works which made her famous were published in the 1950s. So what value can she have to today's readers? If we accept the Nobel committee's advice and try to slog through one of her works, will we find ourselves drowning in a swamp of incomprehensibility? And if we can understand her story, will we be able to relate it to our lives at all?
Take the unfortunately titled Martha Quest, randomly. First published in 1952, it is a novel centered around a young girl named, predictably, Martha Quest, and set in "1939, in the capital of a British colony in the centre of the great African continent;" for some reason, Lessing chooses not to inform us which particular country, although we can guess that it may be Rhodesia, based on a reference to Cecil Rhodes buried deep within the novel.
What makes Martha Quest endearing is its readability: the language is straightforward and direct, allowing us to lose ourselves in the setting. Lessing quickly establishes Martha as a teenager growing up in the countryside, and makes it plain that whether her character is in the heart of African or on the prairie in Saskatchewan, she is bored, tired of her parents, tired of her supposed friends, and tired of studying for exams that she sees as pointless. This familiarity unites us the story despite the foreign setting, and we're willing to give Martha a chance. She rewards us by leaving the farm and taking a job "in town," which she discovers she is terribly unqualified for, and yet manages to stick with.
The novel transforms itself as a reflection of her life. Where there were long, descriptive passages of the country, where it seemed nothing had moved for a hundred years, now there is fast-paced dialogue, split-second decisions, and new characters every few pages. It seems the youth of town are frantic in their absorption of life, working through the day in their civil servant or secretarial positions (depending, of course, on their respective genders), to then obessively fill their evenings with trips to the movies, the local hotel restaurant and bar, the sports club and finally the bar, where they urge each other to remain dancing and drinking until the sun comes up, so they can finally go home, bathe, and return to work. They never sleep. With the ripples of war encircling the globe, there seems to be some unconscious knowledge among the young that they must live their lives now.
Martha, though, the voice of Lessing, finds it all "disgusting." She cannot ignore the ill treatment of the natives, the anti-Semitism, the nonchalant attitude toward the approaching war. And what particularly disgusts her is marriage, and that marriage always leads to children, these tiny demanding creatures who destroy the lives of women. And so she goes through the motions with all the other youth, despising most of them, sometimes out loud, dates a Jewish man only to find that it ostracizes her completely, and decides she does not care, even though she does not care for the man either, and breaks up with him. She joins a leftist book club and is warned that she will be arrested, but quits it only because she finds the people pretentious and pathetic. She argues with people based on facts, and becomes enraged because they are "not only inconsistent, but don't mind being inconsistent."
But then, as is inevitable, Martha marries: like all the other woman she despises, she meets someone and marries him within ten days; she does not even love him, or like him consistently, and it seems she only marries him because he is different from the other "boys" of the sports club scene. And here the book ends: it is part of a series which is based on Lessing's own life, so we can assume in the following books Martha will be divorced and remarried, have some number of children, and move to England as was always her dream, just as Lessing did. But the point remains: Martha Quest is not only readable, comprehensible, and at points even enjoyable, it is a story which bridges generations and continents, which could be retold almost word for word in the context of this year, this city. Much like Pearl Buck, Doris Lessing is a excellent starting point for readers wishing to explore the heights of the Nobel Prize laureates.
The story is very disjointed and is tough to follow but is not impossible. Following several characters, the tale leads us from early in the 1960s to the later turbulent times of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. At heart the film is a love story, from beginning to end, but it strays because of the abundance of characters. As the story shifts to each character it loses some of its perspective, almost being forced in another direction just to use a specific song in the vast library of The Beatles. Jude (Jim Sturgess) the love torn artist, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) the budding revolutionist, Max (Joe Anderson) the one being drafted for war, not to mention the musicians Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and Jojo (Martin Luther McCoy) (who resemble Janis Joplin and Jimmi Hendrix), each are uniquely interesting. All their sagas are intertwined but if Taymor had trimmed down some of the side plots the story could have flowed more fluently. Making us focus more on the romance budding between Jude and Lucy which is the main story being told in the film. Sturgess even opens the film singing “Girl”, describing a girl (who turns out is Lucy) which he loves, but he has many uncertainties about her.+Days+of+Summer+Couple.jpg)
