From swinging-'60s London to liberated sub-Saharan Africa, the author depicts the human faces of a broad canvas of issues in this polemical piece. The novel ranges from anorexia to AIDS to casting a questioning eye at the morality of the travelers on the World Bank gravy train. Moving from London to the tragic landscape of post-independence "Zimlia" a thinly veiled Zimbabwe , Lessing documents the social movement and lost dreams of a post-war generation, for whom "it is always The Dream that counts.
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In lieu of writing volume three of her autobiography "because of possible hurt to vulnerable people" , the grand dame of English letters delves into the s and beyond, where she left off in her second volume of memoirs, Walking in the Shade. The result is a shimmering, solidly wrought, deeply felt portrait of a divorced "earth" mother and her passel of teenage live-ins. Frances Lennox and her two adolescent sons, Andrew and Colin, and their motley friends have taken over the bottom floors of a rambling house in Hampstead, London.
The house is owned by Frances's well-heeled German-born ex-mother-in-law, Julia, who tolerates Frances's slovenly presence out of guilt for past neglect and a shared aversion for Julia's son, Johnny Lennox, deadbeat dad and flamboyant, unregenerate Communist. Frances's first love is the theater, but she must support "the kids," and so she works as a journalist for a left-wing newspaper. Over the roiling years that begin with news of President Kennedy's assassination, a mutable assortment of young habituEs gather around Frances's kitchen table, and Comrade Johnny makes cameo appearances, ever espousing Marxist propaganda to the rapt young dropouts.
Johnny is a brilliantly galling character, who pushes both Julia and Frances to the brink of despair and true affection for each other. Lessing clearly relishes the recalcitrant '60s, yet she follows her characters through the women's movement of the '70s and a lengthy final digression in '90s Africa.
Lessing's sage, level gaze is everywhere brought to bear, though she occasionally falls into clucking, I-told-you-so hindsight, especially on the subject of the failed Communist dream. While the last section lacks the intimate presence of long-suffering Frances, the novel is weightily molded by Lessing's rich life experience and comes to a momentous conclusion. A must for Lessing fans, this book carries echoes of much of her previous work, both novels and memoirs.
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New readers may well be attracted by her brisk, discerning view of the '60s and '70s. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Read more Read less. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Grass Is Singing: The Memoirs of a Survivor.
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. Copyright Cahners Business Information, Inc. Harper; 1st edition February 5, Language: Start reading The Sweetest Dream: A Novel on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention sweetest dream doris lessing frances lennox young people time to time london political africa sylvia african julia communism mother sons women aids become country whose corrupt.
Showing of 23 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. The Sweetest Dream begins as the story of Francis Lennox, and the group of disparate youths who come in and out of her life and her London home.
The era is evoked by Lessing in her typically intelligent prose, with characters who are well-defined and a plot that, although very loose, is always interesting. Halfway through the book, however, the young Sylvia leaves to become a doctor in ravaged Africa, and when she arrives there the book loses all its focus. It's a steep decline from the book's enjoyable first part, and is emblematic of Lessing's tendency to in her later works go off the deep end and never really find her way back.
Lessing is interesting throughout the book for her powers of observation, as well as how she defines the character's desires and the way they intersect, but the book nevertheless quickly becomes a tedious chore to finish as the plot offers a dwindling amount of storytelling for the reader to hold onto or even be interested in. The end result is a mess, a beautiful one that is written in earnest with genuine compassion at its center, but a mess nonetheless. Tepidly recommended for Lessing completists only.
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One person found this helpful. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. This novel spans multiple generations covering approximately the s to the s, flashing back through World War I, and ranging over two continents , reminiscent of a less mythic East of Eden, all while retaining Lessing's always-impressive attention to the details of human thought and behavior, whether those characters are at a kitchen table, attending a Marxist rally, or in a dirt-floored schoolroom.
The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing
Fans of Lessing's The Golden Notebook will find this work similar in many ways but more accessible. A compelling read from start to finish. The main character is basically Mother London who spends her time cooking for a group of feckless and purposeless waifs who, miraculously turn into to highly successful world players in a conclusion that stretches the reader's ability to suspend disbelief to the limit. Structurally, the book follows the central Mother London character in almost linear fashion until, a quarter of the way from the end, the book takes a right angle turn to follow one of the redeemed waifs through an African odyssey.
I don't know a single other author who could get away with this kind of shift without bringing down the critical roof on her head. The title of the book refers to the dream world that will come after the "glorious revolution. The plot is rather weak and several of the characters are extreme stereotypes but they and the story serve as a vehicle to chronicle the social evolutions of the last 40 years and it is there where Lessing is at her best giving wonderful snapshots of the times while providing her sharp social commentary.
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- Review: The Sweetest Dream by Doris Lessing | Books | The Guardian.
The story takes place in London and a fictional African country that seems to stand for Zimbabwe. There are strong sketches of the suffering of the African people, emphasizing the role of the local corrupt despots in contributing to their misery. This, however, is really a novel about women - heroic, striving, suffering, getting on with life and on in years, put upon, self-realising, getting there. There's noble German Julia, mother to ingrate Johnny, reading verses of scant consolation by Hopkins on the top floor of her Hampstead house. Downstairs in the kitchen is Frances, Johnny's abandoned wife, an earth-mother with a collection of waifs and strays attracted by self-abnegating benevolence and Elizabeth David recipes.
There's practical Sylvia, who has the heart of the matter as well as Catholic faith. Being a bit of a lost cause at sex, she works in an African mission and then dies on the sitting room sofa. And then there's Rose, graduate of that kitchen-table school of bleeding hearts, who turns out to be a nasty combination of lefty rancour and tabloid values.
This, then, is a woman thing - but emphatically not a feminist thing. The best of the writing is reserved for Africa, where the Lessing genius for invocation of mood and place bounces off the page. But even here the anti-ideological ideology is well to the fore.
Where international development is concerned, good intent's sweetest dream breeds a corruption of heart and mind that is recorded with a soi-disant Daily Mail abandon. Frances hears the rants of her understandably disturbed son, fresh from the psychiatrist's chair, subjecting her to "what no human being should ever have to hear - another person's uncensored thoughts". And the characters go in for a lot of such expression. There are echoes here of Iris Murdoch's later novels - an unhappy epoch when a vast array of indistinguishable characters filled the Dame's unedited pages with their hellishly inconsequential philosophising.
This is a truly reactionary work in the limited sense that the author still stands at too close a remove to the object of abomination. In the full force of her reaction, she parodies and stereotypes.