[.ca] Cleft, The

Sounds Like The Truth To Me:
I've been a fan of Doris Lessing for over thirty years but haven't read anything of hers in some time. I loved The Golden Notebook and The Summer Before the Dark, and found Canopus in Argos, her science fiction series, fascinating. I was delighted when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. In truth, I was surprised she was still alive. The Cleft is tale narrated by a Roman senator and scholar about pre-history. He finds his information from myths and fragments of clay tablets written long after the time of the Clefts. It is a "sounds like the truth to me" story. The Clefts were the first community--a community of women living by the sea near huge up-cropping of rocks, one of which had a large cleft, a caldera that steamed with noxious gases. This community of women gave birth only to girls until one day, a "deformed" child arrived--a boy. The first deformed children were given back to the goddess in the cleft until one woman refused. Thus came the beginning of history and the beginning of union between women and men as well as conflict between women and men. Interspersed between the telling of the tale is the senator's life story, which has many parallels with the history. The senator also speculates as he writes, "We assume that because these people had shapes like ours, were so much like us, that they felt the same. Perhaps no one had taught them loneliness? Is that such a ridiculous question?... There is not much in the records, for instance of love..." Who knows what tales will be birthed next by the remarkable Doris Lessing? She is the storyteller of the twentieth century and continues her legend into the twenty-first. Her imaginings all hold a kernel of possible truth. by Judith Helburn for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about women

Great topic, disappointing story:
This is my first novel by Doris Lessing and if I were to judge by this - I wouldn't read her again. But she did win the Nobel Prize, so I'll give it another shot with The Golden Notebook. The subject was promising and the beginning was really exciting. And then half way through I got a little impatient - there was too much repetition and I was thinking ''ok, yes, I get the point, got it 20 pages ago'' Overall - pretty disappointing!

an eden or dystopia...:
A mythical retelling of the origins of the human species, albeit with a feminist slant expected of Lessing... This strange 'new/old' society is made up entirely of women, the titular 'Clefts', whose birth cycles are entirely independent of sexual procreation... until one of them gives birth to a 'Monster' (or a 'Squirt' as his kind is called in time). The rest of the story centres round the attempted extinction of the squirts by the old shes, and how the 2 sexes eventually find a way to live interdependently. Lessing frames her story in the guise of a historical document, and arguably, the feminist slant, by giving the historian the persona of a male Roman senator, and maintains the objective tone of the records by offering competing versions by the two sides...

What can you see in this book?:
Doris Lessing isn't for beginning readers. She isn't an "easy" read. The entertainment or consumption value of her works generally isn't very great. If that is what you are looking for, you might want to stick with Harlequin romances. If, however, you are interested in learning what she has to teach, then you should tough it out and put in the effort on her books. But it's not easy. Not everyone can do it. And, unfortunately for us all, not everyone can benefit from the vast knowledge that she imparts to those who can see what is to be seen when there is a seer there to see it (to paraphrase a quote from someone famous whose name escapes me at the moment). This is one of the ways in which "secret" knowledge comes into being. It isn't really a secret, but acquiring it is so difficult for so many people because of the effort required that it might as well be hidden - guarded from the unworthy by dragons or some such monsters. The "unworthy" are deemed such only due to their laziness, habits, expectations, immaturity, etc. Those who have roundly criticized "The Cleft" have in fact - unbeknownst to themselves - only revealed their own shortcomings, prejudices, biases, and glaring blindness to those who can actually see. There are very many Lessing books that are "difficult", like "The Cleft". They all, without exception, contain extremely valuable insight into the human condition. Insight that is rare and nigh impossible to come by in other, more mundane, ways. You can't "gain" such insights in a college course, for instance. "The Memoirs of a Survivor" is one such book. It isn't an easy read. I found it to be not very much fun to read as well. But the insights that can be had from a "Benedictine" style reading of it are of such magnitude that one's life will be positively impacted in a way that can only be truly well described by turning to myth, legend, poetry, and...well it is ineffable in the end. ;-)

Interesting, but...:
Lessing provides an interesting take on creation in The Cleft, but.... I, a normally fast reader, took a week to finish this short novel. It just didn't hold my interest for longer than thirty pages, if that, at a time. While offering an unique perspective on the male-female conflict, The Cleft is just ... underwhelming. Borrow, don't buy.