On the "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" List.

The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa during the years of Arpartheid.

Doris Lessing brought the manuscript of ‘The Grass is Singing’ with her when she left Southern Rhodesia and came to England in 1950. When it was first published it created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth-century literature.

Set in Rhodesia, it tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush. Trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny brick and iron house, Mary, lonely and frightened, turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding.

A masterpiece of realism, ‘The Grass is Singing’ is a superb evocation of Africa’s majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a passionate exploration of the ideology of white supremacy.


Unfortunately this old Flamingo copy has numerous underlinings and margin comments.
Still very readable though.

Certainly not a happy read but an interesting one. A tragic and sad tale of Mary and Dick Turner, small time farmers in post war Rhodesia. Illustrates how people repeat the patterns of their parents, and how oppression is layered and spirals downwards to the most unfortunate ones at the bottom. Gender, class, poverty, race and colour. All under a hot tin roof.

Sending off to the lucky winner of the "Authors from unusual countries sweepstake".

My apologies regarding the underlining and margin comments, they were there when I received the book. It looks like it may have been used as a school text. However they do not affect its readability...

Doris Lessing! Wonderful. I have not read any books by her for 20 odd years! Thus I do agree with you, it's about time I read her again.
Thank you very much.

What can I say? I do love Doris Lessing and her writings. Whilst reading this novel I did realise I've actually read it before! However, it was decades ago.
This novel paints a rather harsh portrait of the struggle in Rhodesia. Mary and Dick, the most unlikely couple, and their fight against the African nature.

I'd like to write down a paragraph, a rather long one, from chapter 1, page 18:

"When old settlers say, 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.* They are saying, in effect, *Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out: we don't want you.' Most of these young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard, of course, becoming as bas oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as 'bad'. And anyway, what had one's ideas amounted to? Abstract ideas about decency and goodwill, that was all: merely abstract ideas. When it came to the point, one never had contact with natives, except in the master-servant relationship. One never knew them in their own lives, as human beings. A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sundrenched country they had come to; they had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburnt limbs and toughened bodies."

These words sums up all the idealistic people moving to Africa, and how they develop into the hard, native-hating settlers. Scary!

The March book - enjoy!

Thank you for this book.

Very well written.

Sent to Arvores as a surprise.

A total surprise, indeed :-)
It came with another RABCK and two beautiful presents for my daughters.
This has been a very tough week, and this package came in order to confirm that there's still goodness in this world. I'm really grateful for that.