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The Grass Is Singing (Penguin Reading Lab Level 5)
 

The Grass Is Singing (Penguin Reading Lab Level 5)

by Lessing

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's... (read more)

Top tags: africa,  fiction,  racism,  south africa,  1001 books you must read before you die (all tags)

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Amazon Reviews (5)
 

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sthurner
  • Rated 5 stars

“How did I miss this book until now? Lessing's novel, written about 1950, is set in Rhodesia. The subject is the murder of a white woman by a native, and what led up to that event. But stating the subject doesn't come close to what the novel is really about. It is a prose poem describing the harsh beauty of the land, and a character study of the white and black inhabitants in the late 1940s. In some ways the book reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird, both in its flashback structure and its...”

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Community:
  • Rated 3.887324 stars
Amazon:
  • Rated 4.166667 stars
  

Newest Comments

  • Grapes

    grapes said:

    “I am still reading "The Grass Is Singing." The main character, Mary, reminds me of Madame Bovary. Both women suffer this intense unhappiness with their chosen life.
    Grapes
    ”

    posted 2 weeks ago
  • smrti

    smrti said:

    “The Grass is Singing is power-packed with emotions, psychological analysis and bleak racial truths.
    One thing I feel reading any women writer, is the psychological depths they travel and traverse. Mary’s degeneration in the novel is the degeneration of a vivacious mind - out of ennui, or failures, or anger, or helplessness. She deteriorates within and it starts flowing out - through anger and lust for the Black. She is very much agential, primarily because of her Whiteness, but she doesn’t make it enough to save the situation.
    A very powerful, disturbing novel. The most recurring theme in the novel, I feel, is the love-hate combination. Mary hates Dick, but marries him. She hates Moses for being a powerful Black, but cannot resist him. Dick knows Mary can help him succeed in life, but will not oblige him; still he is very sympathetic. Moses, though untold by the author, must be hating his mistress for lashing the whip on his face, for treating him as an inhuman, but he serves her with utmost care. He cannot leave her and when she lets another White man to ask him to leave, he realizes that as a time of reckoning.
    What killed Mary: her cruel racial prejudices or unsympathetic love for the slave? Perhaps she was dead much before Moses killed her. In that sense, the novel is the story of how she walks into her death and lives her death, minute by minute in the hot dry sun, till one (very significantly) rainy night, finally Moses relieves her– out of love or anger?
    The theme of failure is also striking. Dick is the obvious perenniel loser who loses his crops and his life in front of him. But Mary, who blames him for is failures is a failure in herself. That she realizes her failure is evident in her pining for the city life, at the same time her refusal to meet her old friends. Hers is a pre-stated tragedy with no escape.
    ”

    posted Thursday, December 27 2007 ( | view 1 reply )
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