The 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature did not go immediately to Doris Lessing's head. Perhaps it never got past her spiked tongue. "Oh, Christ," she said upon hearing the news from a reporter who ambushed her curbside in London. She's shown laboriously disembarking a taxi, days from turning 89 years old. "Well, it's been going on now for 30 years," she said, waving her hands. "One can get more excited."
"The literary establishment is very, very narrow-minded. It's the worst in the world," she explained later in a spontaneous interview outside her North London home. "They told me I wouldn't win," she noted, because she'd written sci-fi novels.
One of these is The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), a grimly beautiful tale set in a dystopian near-future where something else besides Nobel committee work, something very sinister, has been "going on" for some time. This novel was my first of Lessing's and, at 213 pages, a more inviting entry-point than her monster masterworks The Golden Notebook (1962 ) or The Four-Gated City (1969), each 600-700 pages long.
The Memoirs of a Survivor gripped me from the get-go. In the narrative, the awful, whatever its full scope is, has already become commonplace. Lessing kept me reading despite having very little idea what terrible cataclysm (or, as it turns out, insidious outgrowth) had mired the world in such a state of denied downfall. “There is nothing that people won’t try to accommodate into ‘ordinary life,’" Lessing writes. This abiding unknown—and people's success at accommodating it—keeps the novel truly hairy to read. It makes the horrific very proximal: We could catch the inklings of such doom on the news at any moment.
At base, it's a story of a middle-aged woman who is tasked—all of a sudden, one day—with the care of a young girl. It adds to the book's surrealism that our unnamed main character, far from objecting to this event, rather takes the girl and her strange dog-cat pet into her city-borough life as seamlessly as possible.
Neighboring this main plotline is a continuing, whimsical dreamscape of rooms in disarray, a scenery the main character reaches by gazing through a wall of her apartment. In typical form, Lessing reveals only enough to make us suspect and confabulate. In this case, the disordered rooms and the main character's dogged attempts to tidy them seem a metaphor for her subconscious, or perhaps a collective unconscious.
It fits. The idea of looming but elusive social forces anchors the novel. Something has shaken humankind to its roots and there might be no coming back from it. “We had returned to an earlier time of man’s condition,” the main character notes. Outdated status symbols of "respectability and gain could no longer measure the worth of a person,” Lessing writes, but she's not on about any kind of shipwreck utopia, here. The action on the streets, which our main character observes through her windows with unnerving aplomb, operates on tribal rhythms of hard ritual and death.
Now, you'd be right to accuse me of enjoying rainy days, so to speak. Recently, I bought a novel for my father that turned out to be, in his words, "very dark." Dutifully, he read it, but admitted it wasn't easy, facing concurrently the late dawns and early dusks of January. The Memoirs of a Survivor is no peach cart, but if you enjoy a delicious scare once in a while, this is your next read. And the ending, which I found fittingly ambiguous but surpassingly lovely, left me feeling adored. There's no other term I can find: Lessing adores her readers, honors our intelligence and imagination, our contribution to the story, our need for lamplight in the dark. Never has "waiting to understand," as Lessing herself puts it, felt so fulfilling.
Kate Oden is a freelance writer, editor, and translator living in Hanover. She publishes more brief book reviews on Substack.
