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The Good Terrorist
The Good Terrorist follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpected challenges in their quest to incite social change against complacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of the intersections between the personal and the political, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing creates in The Good Terrorist a compelling portrait of domesticity and rebellion.
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
About the author
Doris Lessing
480 books2,810 followersBoth of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and later had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.
In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.
In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.
She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
(Extracted from the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995. Full text available on www.dorislessing.org).
In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and later had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.
During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.
In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.
In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.
She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
(Extracted from the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995. Full text available on www.dorislessing.org).
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February 19, 2017
My admiration for Nobel laureate Doris Lessing continues to grow with this novel about a naïve group of revolutionaries living in a squat in mid-1980s London.
Lessing’s triumph is getting deep inside the complex mind of Alice Mellings, a spoilt, entitled and very clever upper-middle-class woman in her 30s who acts like the squat’s den mother and is filled with contradictions.
Alice detests the striving, materialistic middle classes, and yet she enjoys – really thrives on – fixing up her squat and feeding her lazy comrades. She hates that her parents have split up, and yet she’s enmeshed in a doomed relationship with a man named Jasper who’s clearly closeted and is repulsed by her physically. And she loathes capitalism, although she’s all too ready to steal cash and valuables from her parents and their friends.
What’s remarkable is that Lessing lets us see things through Alice’s perspective, but also shows us how appalling her behaviour is on a human level. Alice is such a good judge of human behaviour, but lacks the ability to understand her own failings. I imagine Lessing drew on her observations and experiences – and eventual disillusionment – with the Communist party decades earlier.
It’s never really clear what the revolutionaries in this book want to do or achieve. At first they want to join the I.R.A. Then there’s talk about Russia. Some of them affect working class accents to seem legitimate, even while ignoring actual working class people in their midst. No one discusses politics, but they go to the odd demonstration, occasionally quote Lenin and call anyone they disagree with “fascists.”
While the book ticks away quietly for 300 pages, taken up with all manner of domestic and bureaucratic matters, Lessing sets the stage for a truly explosive finale. The casual way the climax is handled will make you think about the randomness and sheer banality of some terrorist acts and organizations.
Besides Alice, and perhaps Alice’s mom, Dorothy, who’s also disillusioned (is it a coincidence that Lessing’s given them both names that evoke fictional girls who find themselves in fantastic, often scary worlds?), the characters aren’t all that well-rounded. But that’s intentional. One of the most disturbing things about the book is how the revolutionaries don’t care about human life, only their own needs. When someone leaves, or attempts suicide, or even dies? Meh. They barely care. (Comrades, indeed.) Alice does, but is it because she’s “well brought up,” earning that adjective in the book’s title?
This book is proof that you don’t necessarily have to like a book’s characters to be engrossed by them. Alice’s insights and frustrating contradictions will haunt me, as will Lessing’s brilliant, disturbing image of burying shit – literally, buckets of human waste – in one’s back yard.
Sooner or later, that buried crap will come back. And Christ almighty will it be messy.
Lessing’s triumph is getting deep inside the complex mind of Alice Mellings, a spoilt, entitled and very clever upper-middle-class woman in her 30s who acts like the squat’s den mother and is filled with contradictions.
Alice detests the striving, materialistic middle classes, and yet she enjoys – really thrives on – fixing up her squat and feeding her lazy comrades. She hates that her parents have split up, and yet she’s enmeshed in a doomed relationship with a man named Jasper who’s clearly closeted and is repulsed by her physically. And she loathes capitalism, although she’s all too ready to steal cash and valuables from her parents and their friends.
What’s remarkable is that Lessing lets us see things through Alice’s perspective, but also shows us how appalling her behaviour is on a human level. Alice is such a good judge of human behaviour, but lacks the ability to understand her own failings. I imagine Lessing drew on her observations and experiences – and eventual disillusionment – with the Communist party decades earlier.
It’s never really clear what the revolutionaries in this book want to do or achieve. At first they want to join the I.R.A. Then there’s talk about Russia. Some of them affect working class accents to seem legitimate, even while ignoring actual working class people in their midst. No one discusses politics, but they go to the odd demonstration, occasionally quote Lenin and call anyone they disagree with “fascists.”
While the book ticks away quietly for 300 pages, taken up with all manner of domestic and bureaucratic matters, Lessing sets the stage for a truly explosive finale. The casual way the climax is handled will make you think about the randomness and sheer banality of some terrorist acts and organizations.
Besides Alice, and perhaps Alice’s mom, Dorothy, who’s also disillusioned (is it a coincidence that Lessing’s given them both names that evoke fictional girls who find themselves in fantastic, often scary worlds?), the characters aren’t all that well-rounded. But that’s intentional. One of the most disturbing things about the book is how the revolutionaries don’t care about human life, only their own needs. When someone leaves, or attempts suicide, or even dies? Meh. They barely care. (Comrades, indeed.) Alice does, but is it because she’s “well brought up,” earning that adjective in the book’s title?
This book is proof that you don’t necessarily have to like a book’s characters to be engrossed by them. Alice’s insights and frustrating contradictions will haunt me, as will Lessing’s brilliant, disturbing image of burying shit – literally, buckets of human waste – in one’s back yard.
Sooner or later, that buried crap will come back. And Christ almighty will it be messy.
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June 5, 2021
LA VOCE DEL DETONATORE
Maggio 1983: l’attentato ai magazzini Harrods rivendicato dall’IRA che ha ispirato questo romanzo.
Può una terrorista essere brava?
Facile credere che si tratti di un ossimoro, di un modo di dire umoristico, o se si preferisce satirico: Doris Lessing è stata comunista, ma come tanti ha abbandonato il partito a causa dei fatti d’Ungheria del 1956, e non è facile credere che avesse simpatia per terrorismo e terroristi.
Tanto più che in quel periodo, gli anni della Thatcher, all’inizio del decennio Ottanta, il terrorismo era qualcosa su cui si scherzava poco in Inghilterra (e ancor meno in Irlanda): fu proprio un attentato rivendicato dall’IRA che ferì tre persone nei grandi magazzini Harrods nel 1983 a spingere la Lessing a scrivere questo suo romanzo.
Squatter londinese di quegli anni.
Alice ha trentasei anni, è giovane, ma non è più una ragazza, però tende a comportarsi proprio come una ragazza, senza prendere decisioni sul suo futuro, vivendo alla giornata, limitando impegno e responsabilità.
È una drifter, non solo perché vive come una vagabonda da una casa occupata all’altra: ma anche perché va alla deriva, si lascia trasportare come un peso morto.
Non si può dire che Alice sia bella, è di corporatura robusta, a volte sembra avere più della sua età, forse dipende dalla pelle fragile e le lentiggini.
È innamorata di Jasper che però non vuole fare sesso con lei e probabilmente è omosessuale: e quindi, più che vivere l’amore, Alice, come una mamma, o una sorella maggiore, si prende cura di Jasper.
Abitazione occupata a Londra in quegli anni.
Viene da famiglia borghese, ma rifiuta quell’educazione: ai genitori ruba soldi, ma li disprezza e rispetta per modo di dire.
Ha vissuto in diverse comuni finché arriva al 43 di Old Mill Road in una casa occupata (squatter) e abbandonata allo squallore, alla sporcizia, agli escrementi.
Gli occupanti, ai quali Jasper si aggrega con l’entusiasmo di cui è capace (modesto, Jasper è tutto meno che una botta di vita) dicono di far parte dei Freeborn British Communists (tradotto con Unione Comunisti di Centro!), vogliono collaborare con l’IRA e con i russi (KGB), ma da entrambe le organizzazioni vengono più che altro sfanculati.
Squatter a Londra.
Pertanto decidono di passare all’azione diretta: ma da quell’incrocio di dilettantismo e cialtroneria che sono, fabbricano una bomba che non sanno piazzare, ci saranno feriti e il morto sarà proprio il terrorista che la stava sistemando.
Nel frattempo “la brava terrorista” Alice ha fatto la donna di casa, la massaia: ha ripulito l’abitazione, messo a posto, cucinato, accudito i rivoluzionari. Non è una terrorista attiva, ma lo è perché vive con loro, li aiuta e protegge, è una fiancheggiatrice.
La storia finisce con Alice sola in quella casa: che senso ha ormai la sua vita se non può prendersi cura di nessuno?
Squatter londinese dell’epoca.
Avrebbe potuto essere una specie di farsa à la Waugh: invece Lessing rimane più ironica che sarcastica, e sparge altri elementi come quello della maternità (il rapporto di Alice con la madre Dorothy, e la stessa Alice ‘madre’ per Jasper).
Non altrettanto bello de Il quinto figlio, l’unico altro romanzo di Doris Lessing che ho letto, ma sempre parto di scrittrice di razza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCmbm...
24 aprile 1993, Bishopsgate, Londra: attentato rivendicato dall’IRA (1 morto e 44 feriti).
Maggio 1983: l’attentato ai magazzini Harrods rivendicato dall’IRA che ha ispirato questo romanzo.
Può una terrorista essere brava?
Facile credere che si tratti di un ossimoro, di un modo di dire umoristico, o se si preferisce satirico: Doris Lessing è stata comunista, ma come tanti ha abbandonato il partito a causa dei fatti d’Ungheria del 1956, e non è facile credere che avesse simpatia per terrorismo e terroristi.
Tanto più che in quel periodo, gli anni della Thatcher, all’inizio del decennio Ottanta, il terrorismo era qualcosa su cui si scherzava poco in Inghilterra (e ancor meno in Irlanda): fu proprio un attentato rivendicato dall’IRA che ferì tre persone nei grandi magazzini Harrods nel 1983 a spingere la Lessing a scrivere questo suo romanzo.
Squatter londinese di quegli anni.
Alice ha trentasei anni, è giovane, ma non è più una ragazza, però tende a comportarsi proprio come una ragazza, senza prendere decisioni sul suo futuro, vivendo alla giornata, limitando impegno e responsabilità.
È una drifter, non solo perché vive come una vagabonda da una casa occupata all’altra: ma anche perché va alla deriva, si lascia trasportare come un peso morto.
Non si può dire che Alice sia bella, è di corporatura robusta, a volte sembra avere più della sua età, forse dipende dalla pelle fragile e le lentiggini.
È innamorata di Jasper che però non vuole fare sesso con lei e probabilmente è omosessuale: e quindi, più che vivere l’amore, Alice, come una mamma, o una sorella maggiore, si prende cura di Jasper.
Abitazione occupata a Londra in quegli anni.
Viene da famiglia borghese, ma rifiuta quell’educazione: ai genitori ruba soldi, ma li disprezza e rispetta per modo di dire.
Ha vissuto in diverse comuni finché arriva al 43 di Old Mill Road in una casa occupata (squatter) e abbandonata allo squallore, alla sporcizia, agli escrementi.
Gli occupanti, ai quali Jasper si aggrega con l’entusiasmo di cui è capace (modesto, Jasper è tutto meno che una botta di vita) dicono di far parte dei Freeborn British Communists (tradotto con Unione Comunisti di Centro!), vogliono collaborare con l’IRA e con i russi (KGB), ma da entrambe le organizzazioni vengono più che altro sfanculati.
Squatter a Londra.
Pertanto decidono di passare all’azione diretta: ma da quell’incrocio di dilettantismo e cialtroneria che sono, fabbricano una bomba che non sanno piazzare, ci saranno feriti e il morto sarà proprio il terrorista che la stava sistemando.
Nel frattempo “la brava terrorista” Alice ha fatto la donna di casa, la massaia: ha ripulito l’abitazione, messo a posto, cucinato, accudito i rivoluzionari. Non è una terrorista attiva, ma lo è perché vive con loro, li aiuta e protegge, è una fiancheggiatrice.
La storia finisce con Alice sola in quella casa: che senso ha ormai la sua vita se non può prendersi cura di nessuno?
Squatter londinese dell’epoca.
Avrebbe potuto essere una specie di farsa à la Waugh: invece Lessing rimane più ironica che sarcastica, e sparge altri elementi come quello della maternità (il rapporto di Alice con la madre Dorothy, e la stessa Alice ‘madre’ per Jasper).
Non altrettanto bello de Il quinto figlio, l’unico altro romanzo di Doris Lessing che ho letto, ma sempre parto di scrittrice di razza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCmbm...
24 aprile 1993, Bishopsgate, Londra: attentato rivendicato dall’IRA (1 morto e 44 feriti).
Read
February 3, 2019My one line review in the interests of brevity would be: an 80s tragicomedy which is sadly less dated that one might like.
Early in the novel so early that it can't be regarded as a spoiler, unless you are an extremely slow reader, the hapless, hopeless bunch of want-to-be radicals take a vote and decide to affiliate with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a well known and long running paramilitary organisation then engaged in fighting the UK government and Loyalist paramilitaries and nationalists (ie supporters of a united Ireland ) who stepped out of line.
So from the start we have a comic dichotomy between the serious (terrorism/warfare) and the ridiculous (angry, alienated, youngsters taking a vote to affiliate with dangerous people 'please sir, can we have some bombs?).
The central drama though is mostly hidden in the book, it is between daughter Alice, the good terrorist of the title, and mother Dorothy.
Towards the end of reading I thought: mother, Dorothy, father Cedric, daughter Alice, hmm, I'm missing something - then the brother's name was revealed as Humphrey, bugger, so much for that working theory. Then I thought, maybe I don't need anything in bold, Alice, here is an earnest young woman who always seeks to be a good girl, look at her clothes when she wants to make a 'good' impression, the emphasis on pinks, and skirts, but she's accepting of a good degree of craziness , doesn't all this remind me of Alice in Wonderland? And the mother, Dorothy...maybe The Wizard of Oz, or Dorothy Causabon?
Alice and her mates squatting in a North London house scheduled for demolition talk of overthrowing 'the system', meaning something along the lines of Patriarchal, fascist, racist, sexist, capitalism , but actions speak louder than words and what their actions show us is that they wish to overthrow the fathers in order to take their places. So Alice plays mother with impressive determination, turning a house almost into a home, while most of her squat mates play at being sulky children with an impressive degree of skill. Alice thinks she has improved on her Mother by loving a gay man , this is plainly a safe relationship, it has clear boundaries - he sleeps on his side of the room and she on hers, if he brushes past her she can interpret this as a sign of love, he takes as much money as she can beg, borrow and steal, while she accepts this as normal and appropriate, and she doesn't run the risks of a sexual relationship and break up as her parents did. Control is a big theme in the book. However she is giddy and weak at the knees when brought into contact with any man who presents himself as firm and authorative and Leninist . So.
Dorothy Causabon we recall, is the woman who could have been a contender, she could have been somebody in her own right but in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the best she can be is a wife to a not very well read scholar who we see is decades behind the European scholastic mainstream, she can loyally support his learning but he's stuck and limited by his beliefs in how far he could go.
Our Dorothy sees that education is the key, she laments what she could have been, without education she is unemployable and dependant. Her daughter has an education, but ignores it choosing to place herself into dependant relationships and to enable further dependency for others, she claims to want to overthrow the system but busily recreates the cosy home of her childhood. Safety. But we see this is a form of insanity, she has done this repeatedly following her 'boyfriend' about and becoming a squat mother - expecting a different outcome from the same repeated actions as though one might reasonably expect that one day you will switch on the kettle and it will become a friendly elephant instead of just boiling some water.
Alice, and the narration is from her point of view, we are shown values the genuine, the authentic - she dissects the accents of others seeing her squat mates as trying to disguise their upper or middle class backgrounds but combines this sweetly with a blindness to truth, talking of her own one working class grandma, the unspoken mathematics of that are pretty clear.
There was a film, Four Lions, a few years ago that tackled the political extremism and terrorism from a similar viewpoint, there one sees that an equally ridiculous group have committed themselves to extremism but with no clear direct motivation , here in the same way one senses the anger of the politicised squatters and can acknowledge there is some justice in what they say, but one looks and asks what is the root of the anger? Lessing is a rather brutal writer when she chooses to be and undercuts her little Alice completely because the seed of her fury is the memory of sharing a bedroom with her parents as a child when the parents had a party and some guests slept over. The memory of the consciousness of her parents breathing and sweating within the same four walls brings Alice, that poor little lamb, to the boil.
A surprising overlap here with The Fifth Child a sense that children, real or ersatz, are monsters who dominate and can terrorise their parents. Famously Philip Larkin commented on what parents do to children. To that Doris Lessing laughs drily - you try being a parent, she says, see what your children put you through if they refuse to grow up. And what she says is rebellion against parents and things that we stand in relation to as children to parents except a form of childishness?
Well plainly the politics and psychodynamics of extremism and terrorism remain contemporary, sadly the extreme parochialism of the characters does too, for all their vaunting about world conflict between capitalism and communism the key issue to these Londoners is that they are British, and more than that, English (therefore they take votes and are devoted to fairness (and Leninism )). Tragicomic, if only it didn't feel so true.
Early in the novel so early that it can't be regarded as a spoiler, unless you are an extremely slow reader, the hapless, hopeless bunch of want-to-be radicals take a vote and decide to affiliate with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a well known and long running paramilitary organisation then engaged in fighting the UK government and Loyalist paramilitaries and nationalists (ie supporters of a united Ireland ) who stepped out of line.
So from the start we have a comic dichotomy between the serious (terrorism/warfare) and the ridiculous (angry, alienated, youngsters taking a vote to affiliate with dangerous people 'please sir, can we have some bombs?).
The central drama though is mostly hidden in the book, it is between daughter Alice, the good terrorist of the title, and mother Dorothy.
Towards the end of reading I thought: mother, Dorothy, father Cedric, daughter Alice, hmm, I'm missing something - then the brother's name was revealed as Humphrey, bugger, so much for that working theory. Then I thought, maybe I don't need anything in bold, Alice, here is an earnest young woman who always seeks to be a good girl, look at her clothes when she wants to make a 'good' impression, the emphasis on pinks, and skirts, but she's accepting of a good degree of craziness , doesn't all this remind me of Alice in Wonderland? And the mother, Dorothy...maybe The Wizard of Oz, or Dorothy Causabon?
Alice and her mates squatting in a North London house scheduled for demolition talk of overthrowing 'the system', meaning something along the lines of Patriarchal, fascist, racist, sexist, capitalism , but actions speak louder than words and what their actions show us is that they wish to overthrow the fathers in order to take their places. So Alice plays mother with impressive determination, turning a house almost into a home, while most of her squat mates play at being sulky children with an impressive degree of skill. Alice thinks she has improved on her Mother by loving a gay man , this is plainly a safe relationship, it has clear boundaries - he sleeps on his side of the room and she on hers, if he brushes past her she can interpret this as a sign of love, he takes as much money as she can beg, borrow and steal, while she accepts this as normal and appropriate, and she doesn't run the risks of a sexual relationship and break up as her parents did. Control is a big theme in the book. However she is giddy and weak at the knees when brought into contact with any man who presents himself as firm and authorative and Leninist . So.
Dorothy Causabon we recall, is the woman who could have been a contender, she could have been somebody in her own right but in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the best she can be is a wife to a not very well read scholar who we see is decades behind the European scholastic mainstream, she can loyally support his learning but he's stuck and limited by his beliefs in how far he could go.
Our Dorothy sees that education is the key, she laments what she could have been, without education she is unemployable and dependant. Her daughter has an education, but ignores it choosing to place herself into dependant relationships and to enable further dependency for others, she claims to want to overthrow the system but busily recreates the cosy home of her childhood. Safety. But we see this is a form of insanity, she has done this repeatedly following her 'boyfriend' about and becoming a squat mother - expecting a different outcome from the same repeated actions as though one might reasonably expect that one day you will switch on the kettle and it will become a friendly elephant instead of just boiling some water.
Alice, and the narration is from her point of view, we are shown values the genuine, the authentic - she dissects the accents of others seeing her squat mates as trying to disguise their upper or middle class backgrounds but combines this sweetly with a blindness to truth, talking of her own one working class grandma, the unspoken mathematics of that are pretty clear.
There was a film, Four Lions, a few years ago that tackled the political extremism and terrorism from a similar viewpoint, there one sees that an equally ridiculous group have committed themselves to extremism but with no clear direct motivation , here in the same way one senses the anger of the politicised squatters and can acknowledge there is some justice in what they say, but one looks and asks what is the root of the anger? Lessing is a rather brutal writer when she chooses to be and undercuts her little Alice completely because the seed of her fury is the memory of sharing a bedroom with her parents as a child when the parents had a party and some guests slept over. The memory of the consciousness of her parents breathing and sweating within the same four walls brings Alice, that poor little lamb, to the boil.
A surprising overlap here with The Fifth Child a sense that children, real or ersatz, are monsters who dominate and can terrorise their parents. Famously Philip Larkin commented on what parents do to children. To that Doris Lessing laughs drily - you try being a parent, she says, see what your children put you through if they refuse to grow up. And what she says is rebellion against parents and things that we stand in relation to as children to parents except a form of childishness?
Well plainly the politics and psychodynamics of extremism and terrorism remain contemporary, sadly the extreme parochialism of the characters does too, for all their vaunting about world conflict between capitalism and communism the key issue to these Londoners is that they are British, and more than that, English (therefore they take votes and are devoted to fairness (and Leninism )). Tragicomic, if only it didn't feel so true.
January 1, 2009
I was thinking the other day about C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle, a book which I utterly loathe. As I said in my review, you can pardon the uninspired writing or the preachiness. What gets me angry is the subplot with Puzzle the donkey, who fronts the religious coup and, somehow, is whitewashed and receives eternal salvation. Apparently, because his unspeakably evil acts were performed in good faith, everything is fine. The surprising thing is that Lewis lived though WW II, and was writing not that long after the Nuremberg trials, which, I thought at least, ought to have established for that generation that it's not sufficient merely to say that one was obeying orders.
Lewis gets away with it, at least as far as some people are concerned, partly because you aren't shown any direct chain of cause and effect between Puzzle's actions and the reign of terror those actions unleash. So it seemed natural to me to think that someone ought to write a book that filled in the gaps, portraying a not overly bright but essentially kind and well-meaning person who inadvertently and largely unknowingly finds themselves serving evil. When I got this far, I realized that I had already read the book in question: it's The Good Terrorist, which presents the moral issues in a far deeper and more convincing manner than The Last Battle.If I felt like taking a cheap shot, I might add that this illustrates the difference between winning the Carnegie Medal and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I will resist the temptation to do so.
In Lessing's novel, the central character, Alice, is rather like Puzzle. She's emotionally dependent on a wicked and manipulative person, and ends up helping them in all sorts of practical ways. But the story is far more credible. In Lewis's novel, evil is at least satisfyingly grandiose; Puzzle's misguided actions trigger the Apocalypse, which eventually turns out to be a Good Thing. (I'm not even going to start on analyzing what might be wrong with that argument). In Lessing's version, evil is more like the kind that we see every day. The terrorists are not just bad, but also pretty incompetent. Compare for example with Robert Mugabe, who's currently in the news all the time. He's ruining Zimbabwe though a mixture of evil and plain stupidity; it's hard to say which one is more important.
The biggest difference, however, is that Alice, deep down, is well aware of what she is doing. She just chooses not to think about it, which is what really happens most times that people come into contact with evil. The critical principle established at Nuremberg was that people who are given orders they know are morally wrong are obliged to refuse them. Lessing understands this extremely well, and wants to help the rest of us understand it better. I still can't quite grasp what Lewis was trying to do.
Lewis gets away with it, at least as far as some people are concerned, partly because you aren't shown any direct chain of cause and effect between Puzzle's actions and the reign of terror those actions unleash. So it seemed natural to me to think that someone ought to write a book that filled in the gaps, portraying a not overly bright but essentially kind and well-meaning person who inadvertently and largely unknowingly finds themselves serving evil. When I got this far, I realized that I had already read the book in question: it's The Good Terrorist, which presents the moral issues in a far deeper and more convincing manner than The Last Battle.
In Lessing's novel, the central character, Alice, is rather like Puzzle. She's emotionally dependent on a wicked and manipulative person, and ends up helping them in all sorts of practical ways. But the story is far more credible. In Lewis's novel, evil is at least satisfyingly grandiose; Puzzle's misguided actions trigger the Apocalypse, which eventually turns out to be a Good Thing. (I'm not even going to start on analyzing what might be wrong with that argument). In Lessing's version, evil is more like the kind that we see every day. The terrorists are not just bad, but also pretty incompetent. Compare for example with Robert Mugabe, who's currently in the news all the time. He's ruining Zimbabwe though a mixture of evil and plain stupidity; it's hard to say which one is more important.
The biggest difference, however, is that Alice, deep down, is well aware of what she is doing. She just chooses not to think about it, which is what really happens most times that people come into contact with evil. The critical principle established at Nuremberg was that people who are given orders they know are morally wrong are obliged to refuse them. Lessing understands this extremely well, and wants to help the rest of us understand it better. I still can't quite grasp what Lewis was trying to do.
December 12, 2019
The Good Terrorist, Doris Lessing
The Good Terrorist is a 1985 political novel written by the British novelist Doris Lessing. The Good Terrorist is written in the subjective third person from the point of view of Alice, an unemployed politics and economics graduate in her mid-thirties who drifts from commune to commune. She is trailed by Jasper, a graduate she took in at a student commune she lived in fifteen years previously, who sponges off her. Alice fell in love with him, only to become frustrated by his aloofness and burgeoning homosexuality. She considers herself a revolutionary, fighting against "fascist imperialism", but is still dependent on her parents, whom she treats with contempt. In the early 1980's, Alice joins a squat of like-minded "comrades" in a derelict house in London. Other members of the squat include Bert, its ineffective leader, and a lesbian couple, the maternal Roberta and her unstable and fragile partner Faye. ...
عنوانها: تروریست خوب؛ تروریست دوست داشتنی؛ نویسنده: دوریس می لسینگ؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوازدهم ماه دسامبر سال 2010 میلادی
عنوان: تروریست خوب؛ نویسنده: دوریس لسینگ؛ مترجم: الهه مرعشی؛ ویراستار: سیامک گلشیری؛ تهران: مروارید، 1388؛ در 498 ص؛ شماره شابک: 9789641910213؛ چاپ دوم 1389؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیایی - سده 20 م
عنوان: تروریست دوست داشتنی؛ نویسنده: دوریس می لسینگ؛ مترجم: حبیب گوهری راد؛ تهران، انتشارات رادمهر، 1389؛ در 511 ص؛ شماره شابک 9789648673746؛ چاپ دوم 1391؛
رمان «تروریست خوب»، نخستین بار در ماه سپتامبر سال 1985 میلادی منتشر شد؛ داستان زنی به نام «آلیس ملینگز» و دوستش «جاسپر» است، که خانه اش مقر گروهی کمونیستهای تندرو شده است، گروهی که نقشه ی پیوستن به ارتش جمهوریخواه «ایرلند» و ... را نیز در سر میپرورانند. گروه در خانه ای متروکه پلاک چهل و سه مینشینند. این خانه آب و برق ندارد. حیاط پر از زباله است، و طبقه بالا نیز از سطلهای پر از مدفوع، پر شده است. همسایگان از ساکنان این خانه، خوششان نمیآید، و مدام با پلیس تماس میگیرند و از بو و زباله شکایت میکنند. همزمان با تلاش «آلیس»، برای حل و فصل تضاد بین ایدئولوژی، و زندگی مرفه خود، همراهانش در مسیر کوشش برای ایجاد تغییرات اجتماعی، علیه خودکامگی، و سرمایه داری، با چالشهای ناباورانه ای روبرو میشوند. «دوریس لسینگ» در این اثر، با نشان دادن نقاط برخورد مسائل شخصی و سیاسی، موفق به آفرینش تصویری هیجان انگیز از قانونمداری، و سرکشی شده است. تمرکز اصلی رمان «تروریست خوب»، بر آسیب شناسی داشتن ایمانی مطلق به یک ایدئولوژی است، اینکه چگونه شخصی مهربان، همانند «آلیس»، چشم خود را بر روی خشونتهای بیدلیل بسته، و آن را میپذیرد. کتاب تلویحا به این نکته اشاره دارد، که انتخابهای سیاسی افراد جامعه، با اراده ی خود آنها شکل نمیگیرد، بلکه کنترل شده، و تحت فرمان است. «آلیس»، شخصیت بسیار پیچیده ای داشته، و داستانش، تصویری روانشناسانه، و واقعیت گرایانه، از ذهن و اندیشه ی بشر است. رمان «تروریست خوب»، پژوهشی شاخص، در حوزه ی نگارش انگیزه های سیاسی، برای خوانشگران است. ا. شربیامی
The Good Terrorist is a 1985 political novel written by the British novelist Doris Lessing. The Good Terrorist is written in the subjective third person from the point of view of Alice, an unemployed politics and economics graduate in her mid-thirties who drifts from commune to commune. She is trailed by Jasper, a graduate she took in at a student commune she lived in fifteen years previously, who sponges off her. Alice fell in love with him, only to become frustrated by his aloofness and burgeoning homosexuality. She considers herself a revolutionary, fighting against "fascist imperialism", but is still dependent on her parents, whom she treats with contempt. In the early 1980's, Alice joins a squat of like-minded "comrades" in a derelict house in London. Other members of the squat include Bert, its ineffective leader, and a lesbian couple, the maternal Roberta and her unstable and fragile partner Faye. ...
عنوانها: تروریست خوب؛ تروریست دوست داشتنی؛ نویسنده: دوریس می لسینگ؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوازدهم ماه دسامبر سال 2010 میلادی
عنوان: تروریست خوب؛ نویسنده: دوریس لسینگ؛ مترجم: الهه مرعشی؛ ویراستار: سیامک گلشیری؛ تهران: مروارید، 1388؛ در 498 ص؛ شماره شابک: 9789641910213؛ چاپ دوم 1389؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیایی - سده 20 م
عنوان: تروریست دوست داشتنی؛ نویسنده: دوریس می لسینگ؛ مترجم: حبیب گوهری راد؛ تهران، انتشارات رادمهر، 1389؛ در 511 ص؛ شماره شابک 9789648673746؛ چاپ دوم 1391؛
رمان «تروریست خوب»، نخستین بار در ماه سپتامبر سال 1985 میلادی منتشر شد؛ داستان زنی به نام «آلیس ملینگز» و دوستش «جاسپر» است، که خانه اش مقر گروهی کمونیستهای تندرو شده است، گروهی که نقشه ی پیوستن به ارتش جمهوریخواه «ایرلند» و ... را نیز در سر میپرورانند. گروه در خانه ای متروکه پلاک چهل و سه مینشینند. این خانه آب و برق ندارد. حیاط پر از زباله است، و طبقه بالا نیز از سطلهای پر از مدفوع، پر شده است. همسایگان از ساکنان این خانه، خوششان نمیآید، و مدام با پلیس تماس میگیرند و از بو و زباله شکایت میکنند. همزمان با تلاش «آلیس»، برای حل و فصل تضاد بین ایدئولوژی، و زندگی مرفه خود، همراهانش در مسیر کوشش برای ایجاد تغییرات اجتماعی، علیه خودکامگی، و سرمایه داری، با چالشهای ناباورانه ای روبرو میشوند. «دوریس لسینگ» در این اثر، با نشان دادن نقاط برخورد مسائل شخصی و سیاسی، موفق به آفرینش تصویری هیجان انگیز از قانونمداری، و سرکشی شده است. تمرکز اصلی رمان «تروریست خوب»، بر آسیب شناسی داشتن ایمانی مطلق به یک ایدئولوژی است، اینکه چگونه شخصی مهربان، همانند «آلیس»، چشم خود را بر روی خشونتهای بیدلیل بسته، و آن را میپذیرد. کتاب تلویحا به این نکته اشاره دارد، که انتخابهای سیاسی افراد جامعه، با اراده ی خود آنها شکل نمیگیرد، بلکه کنترل شده، و تحت فرمان است. «آلیس»، شخصیت بسیار پیچیده ای داشته، و داستانش، تصویری روانشناسانه، و واقعیت گرایانه، از ذهن و اندیشه ی بشر است. رمان «تروریست خوب»، پژوهشی شاخص، در حوزه ی نگارش انگیزه های سیاسی، برای خوانشگران است. ا. شربیامی
March 30, 2017
عنوان الرواية يعبر عن شخصية بطلة الرواية أليس .
والتي هي اقرب الى دور الام للمجموعة المشاغبة والذين يتخذون من الفكر الشيوعي منهجا لهم وذلك بنبذ المجتمع الذي يعيشون فيه والسكن في بيت مهجور.
أليس تقوم بدور الراعية لهذا البيت وتقوم بتوفير النقود من اجل صيانة المنزل ليصبح صالحا للعيش فهي من طبقة برجوازية ولا نرضى الا بالأفضل فتقوم بسرقة هذه الأموال من ابيها والذي تحقد عليه بسبب هجره لامها والذي حقدت عليها أيضا بسبب رفضها بصديقها الذي تحبه رغم انه يقوم باستغلالها وأخذ النقود منها.
الشباب والشابات من برأيي الشخصي بأفكارهم تافهون وهواة ويبحثون عن ممول لأنشطتها فيسافروا الى ايرلندا والاتحاد السوفياتي ومع ذلك لا يعيروهم اَي اهتمام وتصرفاتهم الهاوية تجعلهم غير ملائمتين للتجنيد وخاصة حاسبو وبرت.
شخصيات الرواية متباينة وكل شخصية تستحق الدراسة وأسباب هذا السلوك المنحرف عن المجتمع .
تستحق الرواية الثلاث نجمات وذلك لانها رواية بطيئة جدا واحداثها أيضا ليست مثيرة.
مع ذلك تعرفت على نوع جدية من الروايات بافكار جديدة.
والتي هي اقرب الى دور الام للمجموعة المشاغبة والذين يتخذون من الفكر الشيوعي منهجا لهم وذلك بنبذ المجتمع الذي يعيشون فيه والسكن في بيت مهجور.
أليس تقوم بدور الراعية لهذا البيت وتقوم بتوفير النقود من اجل صيانة المنزل ليصبح صالحا للعيش فهي من طبقة برجوازية ولا نرضى الا بالأفضل فتقوم بسرقة هذه الأموال من ابيها والذي تحقد عليه بسبب هجره لامها والذي حقدت عليها أيضا بسبب رفضها بصديقها الذي تحبه رغم انه يقوم باستغلالها وأخذ النقود منها.
الشباب والشابات من برأيي الشخصي بأفكارهم تافهون وهواة ويبحثون عن ممول لأنشطتها فيسافروا الى ايرلندا والاتحاد السوفياتي ومع ذلك لا يعيروهم اَي اهتمام وتصرفاتهم الهاوية تجعلهم غير ملائمتين للتجنيد وخاصة حاسبو وبرت.
شخصيات الرواية متباينة وكل شخصية تستحق الدراسة وأسباب هذا السلوك المنحرف عن المجتمع .
تستحق الرواية الثلاث نجمات وذلك لانها رواية بطيئة جدا واحداثها أيضا ليست مثيرة.
مع ذلك تعرفت على نوع جدية من الروايات بافكار جديدة.
November 10, 2014
After the Boston Marathon bombing, I had to reread this book. Everything I could say about it within that context -- that it shows the danger of "the cause" trumping morality; that terrorists are frightening not because they're monsters but because they aren't -- sounds trite and obvious. So I won't focus on those points, other than to say that yes, Doris Lessing does them full justice without being the least bit hamhanded.
Many of the Goodreads reviews of this book have mentioned how difficult it is to enjoy a book whose characters are so unlikable. Lessing reminds me in that respect of Shirley Jackson's early novel The Road Through The Wall. The difference is that Jackson's work is peopled with dozens of characters, every one of whom is at least off-putting and many of whom are positively repulsive. By the end of the book, the reader is forced to wonder what the point was either of reading or writing that book.
The Good Terrorist, on the other hand, is populated by weak and often annoying characters; but many are sympathetic in spite of their flaws, and seem bewildered to find themselves in this story.
We readers share their bafflement. What could Alice Mellings' parents have done that could possibly be seen as turning their daughter into the title character? Her father and mother are ordinary in many ways, interesting in others.
Her mother, Dorothy, is to me the most compelling character. She alone is utterly clear-eyed. Like many women of her generation, she realizes too late that the ordinary choices she made -- not going on to university, marrying very young -- doomed her to a life she's determined her own daughter won't repeat.
But Alice refuses to learn the lessons her mother struggles to teach her. She goes to university but refuses to look for work. Choosing instead to be a perpetual child, she lives a mangled copy of her mother's life.
Some of Dorothy's insights are disturbingly appropriate to current American political discourse. In a quarrel with a lifelong friend, she says:
"Do you realize I have to think twice before I invite you here? You can't be invited with anyone who has a different political opinion on anything, because you start calling them fascists! You won't meet anyone, even, who reads a right-wing newspaper. You've become a dreary bigot, Zoe, do you know that?"
And later in that conversation come this observation, which I'm terrified may be true:
"People go on [demonstrations] because they get a kick out of it. Like picnics. ...No one bothers to ask any longer if it achieves anything, going on marches or demos. They talk about how they feel. That's what they care about. It's for kicks. It's for fun. ...All you people, marching up and down and waving banners and singing pathetic little songs -- 'All You Need Is Love' -- you are just a joke. To the people who really run this world, you are a joke. They watch you at it and think: Good, that's keeping them busy."
Her friend accuses her of wanting to "smash things up." She means that Dorothy wants "to break with all your friends;" but I think Alice, who overheard this entire conversation, takes this idea quite literally. Dorothy has recently told Alice that Dorothy wasted her life cooking for people (family, friends) and is glad she doesn't have to anymore. Alice, who has spent most of the book making "wholesome" food for her "comrades," never makes another pot of soup. She refuses to stay at home preparing food for the returning hungry warriors, and instead insists on accompanying her friends to a bombing that is as senseless as it is destructive.
This brilliant book is a difficult read. Many other reviewers have pointed out that for a story about terrorism, it's surprisingly slow-moving and low on action. Which is true until the very end. Nothing happens and nothing happens and then everything happens.
But don't be misled by the stretches of seeming calm. Every word, every scene, every conversation is there for a reason. Lessing is too great a writer to waste our time with unnecessary words.
Many of the Goodreads reviews of this book have mentioned how difficult it is to enjoy a book whose characters are so unlikable. Lessing reminds me in that respect of Shirley Jackson's early novel The Road Through The Wall. The difference is that Jackson's work is peopled with dozens of characters, every one of whom is at least off-putting and many of whom are positively repulsive. By the end of the book, the reader is forced to wonder what the point was either of reading or writing that book.
The Good Terrorist, on the other hand, is populated by weak and often annoying characters; but many are sympathetic in spite of their flaws, and seem bewildered to find themselves in this story.
We readers share their bafflement. What could Alice Mellings' parents have done that could possibly be seen as turning their daughter into the title character? Her father and mother are ordinary in many ways, interesting in others.
Her mother, Dorothy, is to me the most compelling character. She alone is utterly clear-eyed. Like many women of her generation, she realizes too late that the ordinary choices she made -- not going on to university, marrying very young -- doomed her to a life she's determined her own daughter won't repeat.
But Alice refuses to learn the lessons her mother struggles to teach her. She goes to university but refuses to look for work. Choosing instead to be a perpetual child, she lives a mangled copy of her mother's life.
Some of Dorothy's insights are disturbingly appropriate to current American political discourse. In a quarrel with a lifelong friend, she says:
"Do you realize I have to think twice before I invite you here? You can't be invited with anyone who has a different political opinion on anything, because you start calling them fascists! You won't meet anyone, even, who reads a right-wing newspaper. You've become a dreary bigot, Zoe, do you know that?"
And later in that conversation come this observation, which I'm terrified may be true:
"People go on [demonstrations] because they get a kick out of it. Like picnics. ...No one bothers to ask any longer if it achieves anything, going on marches or demos. They talk about how they feel. That's what they care about. It's for kicks. It's for fun. ...All you people, marching up and down and waving banners and singing pathetic little songs -- 'All You Need Is Love' -- you are just a joke. To the people who really run this world, you are a joke. They watch you at it and think: Good, that's keeping them busy."
Her friend accuses her of wanting to "smash things up." She means that Dorothy wants "to break with all your friends;" but I think Alice, who overheard this entire conversation, takes this idea quite literally. Dorothy has recently told Alice that Dorothy wasted her life cooking for people (family, friends) and is glad she doesn't have to anymore. Alice, who has spent most of the book making "wholesome" food for her "comrades," never makes another pot of soup. She refuses to stay at home preparing food for the returning hungry warriors, and instead insists on accompanying her friends to a bombing that is as senseless as it is destructive.
This brilliant book is a difficult read. Many other reviewers have pointed out that for a story about terrorism, it's surprisingly slow-moving and low on action. Which is true until the very end. Nothing happens and nothing happens and then everything happens.
But don't be misled by the stretches of seeming calm. Every word, every scene, every conversation is there for a reason. Lessing is too great a writer to waste our time with unnecessary words.
February 16, 2009
It's been about 2 weeks now since I've finished The Good Terrorist, and so I'm in that place where I feel most compelled but least capable of writing a review. Since that's never stopped me before, here goes.
I must applaud Lessing for her skill at creating characters, Alice in particular, who are utterly annoying, petulant, stupid, dangerously immature, and appallingly destructive. These characters wrap their fundamental laziness and selfishness in a cloak of ignorant, misguided, sociopathological ideology, and revel in their victimhood while blaming everyone but themselves for their pathetic lot in life. If I met these people in real life, my inner school-marm would, I know, come blazing forth and I would give them each a right tongue-lashing, berating them for being the spoilt children they are. Okay, I would probably do that later, in the car on the way home, after I thought of something pithy and eviscerating to say without needing to fear any comeback or comeuppance at the hands of these dangerously half-witted revolutionaries.
My most damning vitriol I would reserve for Alice, who--unlike the others--does NOT lack for redeeming qualities. She will work tremendously hard to make life better for herself and others (although her efforts are not the least altruistic or selfless). Alice is clever and spooky-smart about people, capable of seeing through them to their real motivations, and then using that--without compunction--to manipulate them and steal from them. She wields her resourcefulness and acuity as tools to 'beat the system' rather than effect constructive change, and so she lost my sympathy about 35 pages in. But Lessing has painted such a remarkable portrait, that despite my distaste for each and every one of the characters, I couldn't help but to keep reading. Oh yes, she hooked me, she did.
I spent the remainder of the book searching for some way in to Alice's psyche, to understand her and to excuse her abhorrent, ultimately criminal, actions. I couldn't. Lessing provided proof points to discount every possible reason why the 36-year-old Alice, living in a squat with a closeted gay boyfriend who frequently abandons and abuses her, is everybody's doormat. Mental illness, generational poverty, lack of education, childhood abuse or neglect--none of these likely suspects bore fruit as a logical explanation for Alice's behaviour.
So by the end, when Alice's full stupidity and cowardice were revealed--with no reasonable explanation available--I felt both frustrated and horrified. But...I'm questioning myself because smart people, not the least of whom the author herself, seem to think she was "quite mad" (as Lessing says in the The Languages We Use afterword). I certainly saw emotional volatility, odd outbursts, strange behaviour (possibly even delusional), and a definite anti-social inclination without any moral centre. But hell, Alice seemed the sanest of the lot! I therefore didn't see mental illness in Alice. Faye, yes. But not Alice. And, this is Lessing's major accomplishment: as she says, "if a mad person is in a political setting, or a religious one, a lot of people won't even notice he or she is mad."
Otherwise, I'd have to question what Lessing was trying to do here--was she trying to show how banal and commonplace evil really is? How easily we can overlook or misapprehend the looming dangers all around us? Specifically, how short a distance it is from armchair Communist (or any other ideological or religious zealotry) and petty thief to cold-blooded terrorist, bomb-maker and killer? Maybe this book was a little ahead of its time, but from the vantage point of 2009, these themes almost seem... oh, I don't know...quaintly simplistic, I guess.
The greater accomplishment was the extremely compelling dynamic between the unpleasantness of the characters, the stupidity and hypocrisy of their minor acts of vandalism and thievery and their own petty conflicts with each other versus the stumbling but inexorable march, despite being barely capable of getting themselves arrested along the way, to the final, bloody conclusion.
I found the black humour throughout extremely satisfying--visible only now, with some distance and thinking back on what Lessing's true achievement was here. There is not a shred of sympathy for the plight of these characters: they are shown to be hypocritical fools and incompetents, and downright cruel--behaviour that belies the more lofty principles they spout. Lessing was, in effect, putting her own politics under the magnifying glass. A clever feat, and worthy of a solid 4-stars (I'm upping my rating) even though, by the end, I still felt a little tricked into having spent so much time with such unpleasant people.
I must applaud Lessing for her skill at creating characters, Alice in particular, who are utterly annoying, petulant, stupid, dangerously immature, and appallingly destructive. These characters wrap their fundamental laziness and selfishness in a cloak of ignorant, misguided, sociopathological ideology, and revel in their victimhood while blaming everyone but themselves for their pathetic lot in life. If I met these people in real life, my inner school-marm would, I know, come blazing forth and I would give them each a right tongue-lashing, berating them for being the spoilt children they are. Okay, I would probably do that later, in the car on the way home, after I thought of something pithy and eviscerating to say without needing to fear any comeback or comeuppance at the hands of these dangerously half-witted revolutionaries.
My most damning vitriol I would reserve for Alice, who--unlike the others--does NOT lack for redeeming qualities. She will work tremendously hard to make life better for herself and others (although her efforts are not the least altruistic or selfless). Alice is clever and spooky-smart about people, capable of seeing through them to their real motivations, and then using that--without compunction--to manipulate them and steal from them. She wields her resourcefulness and acuity as tools to 'beat the system' rather than effect constructive change, and so she lost my sympathy about 35 pages in. But Lessing has painted such a remarkable portrait, that despite my distaste for each and every one of the characters, I couldn't help but to keep reading. Oh yes, she hooked me, she did.
I spent the remainder of the book searching for some way in to Alice's psyche, to understand her and to excuse her abhorrent, ultimately criminal, actions. I couldn't. Lessing provided proof points to discount every possible reason why the 36-year-old Alice, living in a squat with a closeted gay boyfriend who frequently abandons and abuses her, is everybody's doormat. Mental illness, generational poverty, lack of education, childhood abuse or neglect--none of these likely suspects bore fruit as a logical explanation for Alice's behaviour.
So by the end, when Alice's full stupidity and cowardice were revealed--with no reasonable explanation available--I felt both frustrated and horrified. But...I'm questioning myself because smart people, not the least of whom the author herself, seem to think she was "quite mad" (as Lessing says in the The Languages We Use afterword). I certainly saw emotional volatility, odd outbursts, strange behaviour (possibly even delusional), and a definite anti-social inclination without any moral centre. But hell, Alice seemed the sanest of the lot! I therefore didn't see mental illness in Alice. Faye, yes. But not Alice. And, this is Lessing's major accomplishment: as she says, "if a mad person is in a political setting, or a religious one, a lot of people won't even notice he or she is mad."
Otherwise, I'd have to question what Lessing was trying to do here--was she trying to show how banal and commonplace evil really is? How easily we can overlook or misapprehend the looming dangers all around us? Specifically, how short a distance it is from armchair Communist (or any other ideological or religious zealotry) and petty thief to cold-blooded terrorist, bomb-maker and killer? Maybe this book was a little ahead of its time, but from the vantage point of 2009, these themes almost seem... oh, I don't know...quaintly simplistic, I guess.
The greater accomplishment was the extremely compelling dynamic between the unpleasantness of the characters, the stupidity and hypocrisy of their minor acts of vandalism and thievery and their own petty conflicts with each other versus the stumbling but inexorable march, despite being barely capable of getting themselves arrested along the way, to the final, bloody conclusion.
I found the black humour throughout extremely satisfying--visible only now, with some distance and thinking back on what Lessing's true achievement was here. There is not a shred of sympathy for the plight of these characters: they are shown to be hypocritical fools and incompetents, and downright cruel--behaviour that belies the more lofty principles they spout. Lessing was, in effect, putting her own politics under the magnifying glass. A clever feat, and worthy of a solid 4-stars (I'm upping my rating) even though, by the end, I still felt a little tricked into having spent so much time with such unpleasant people.
December 30, 2015
There are a lot of defenders of the notion that satire doesn't actually have to obviously criticize whatever odious mechanisms are incorporated into its workings in order to call itself such. Those people can stay in their paradisaical lah-dee-dah-I-Live-In-A-Vacuum-Land and far far away from me. If I wanted to engage with normalizing of Everything Fucked Up In The World instead of deconstructing the lot entirely, I'd go nearly everywhere else other than the world of satire. True, not all is written in my vein of goal. True, even some of that which is in my lane does more harm than good. However, thinking's a good thing to do. I like thinking. I'm going to keep on starting there rather than within the brick wall a great deal seem to prefer.
The interesting thing about empathy is how easily it is trained. It does not communicate. It does not seek to change itself. What it does is push the empathetic individual to latch on to the most appealing targets that will be the easiest to "fix" when the more painful aspects of the biological capability arise. This compatibility between empathetic and empathized depends on a variety of factors: aesthetic appeal, ideological structure, proneness to violence, etc, etc. In main concerned character Alice's case, we have some special characteristics: civilized hospitality is All, violation of civilized hospitality (spanning from personal to governmental to international depending on Alice's pertaining awareness) is Evil Incarnate, and blind (and memory troubled) adherence to the former will Always End Well. When the successful track record runs long enough, it is hard to remember the holes and the luck.
In terms of not being like myself, an armchair critic who continues to reside in a well off suburban area, Alice gets full marks. In terms of her shitting on with one hand and entitling herself with the other to the fruits of capitalism, colonialism, feminism, and any other isms she cannot cure with a batch of soup, Alice is nothing more than a maternal figure with a need for a peculiar breed of urban warfare thrills. Armchair critic I may be, but as a member of a settler state, I am aware of how easily my death (among many) could appear in a chapter that touched upon "The Driving out of the Invaders of the North Americas" in the longer history of things, if the continent would even still be termed said Eurocentric such. Unlike Alice, I do not pretend to be entitled to any more death and destruction for "the greater good."
There are huge numbers of protests going around my country right now, and there will continue to be so while politics commits certain groups to the sector of Open Season. Those who see politics as useless, solely the fault of the populace, a mass hallucination of the young, a laughable thought of community in the state of supreme individualism, or solely the act of voting, walk away. Walk away, and only come back when you can tell me why this book is a tragedy, and how it came to be that some forms of slaughtering human beings for nothing are acceptable, and some are not.
The interesting thing about empathy is how easily it is trained. It does not communicate. It does not seek to change itself. What it does is push the empathetic individual to latch on to the most appealing targets that will be the easiest to "fix" when the more painful aspects of the biological capability arise. This compatibility between empathetic and empathized depends on a variety of factors: aesthetic appeal, ideological structure, proneness to violence, etc, etc. In main concerned character Alice's case, we have some special characteristics: civilized hospitality is All, violation of civilized hospitality (spanning from personal to governmental to international depending on Alice's pertaining awareness) is Evil Incarnate, and blind (and memory troubled) adherence to the former will Always End Well. When the successful track record runs long enough, it is hard to remember the holes and the luck.
In terms of not being like myself, an armchair critic who continues to reside in a well off suburban area, Alice gets full marks. In terms of her shitting on with one hand and entitling herself with the other to the fruits of capitalism, colonialism, feminism, and any other isms she cannot cure with a batch of soup, Alice is nothing more than a maternal figure with a need for a peculiar breed of urban warfare thrills. Armchair critic I may be, but as a member of a settler state, I am aware of how easily my death (among many) could appear in a chapter that touched upon "The Driving out of the Invaders of the North Americas" in the longer history of things, if the continent would even still be termed said Eurocentric such. Unlike Alice, I do not pretend to be entitled to any more death and destruction for "the greater good."
There are huge numbers of protests going around my country right now, and there will continue to be so while politics commits certain groups to the sector of Open Season. Those who see politics as useless, solely the fault of the populace, a mass hallucination of the young, a laughable thought of community in the state of supreme individualism, or solely the act of voting, walk away. Walk away, and only come back when you can tell me why this book is a tragedy, and how it came to be that some forms of slaughtering human beings for nothing are acceptable, and some are not.
April 28, 2012
The story moves very slowly, and things really only start to happen in the final act, yet I was never bored by this book. Doris Lessing's writing is like one of the finer social satirists of the 19th or early 20th century, writing about contemporary events, or at least contemporary for the 1980s, when this book was written. The Good Terrorist is about Alice Mellings, who is, with great and lasting irony, exactly the sort of comfy-making, boo-boo kissing motherly type as her own mother was, even though Alice is now a "revolutionary" who spits on everything her horrible, awful, no-good shitty bourgeois parents stand for, when she isn't begging them for money (and stealing from them when they won't give it).
The grown woman of solidly middle-class Brits, Alice was given everything by her parents, including a good university education. But we learn that her fractured relationship with both mother and father (who are themselves divorced) is at the root of all Alice's discontents. Now her father is remarried and running a business and trying to wash his hands of his problem child of a grown daughter, and her mother has turned into an impoverished alcoholic. Alice's interactions with her parents are painful because it's one of those situations where an outside observer can easily see that if just one of them would bend, just a little bit, they could make peace, but they always manage to say exactly the wrong things to each other, and neither Alice nor her parents ever have the emotional maturity to talk like grown-ups without verbal knives drawn.
When not being reduced to an eternally rebellious teenager in the presence of her parents, Alice is a whirlwind of industriousness and hard work ethic, even though it's all applied to keeping an "approved tenancy" in which she and her fellow communist "revolutionaries" are squatting from being demolished by the council. Her co-revolutionaries are all freeloading under-achievers like Alice, the difference being that she could easily make something of her life, while most of her "comrades" are just plain losers.
But amidst all their "organizing" and "protesting" and "sticking it to the fat capitalist pigs," a plan gradually emerges to work with either the IRA or with their revolutionary Russian comrades. At first this seems like as much a joke as any of their other plans, since Alice is the only one who ever actually does anything, and she's mostly doing housework and den-mothering all these wanker wannabes. What would the IRA or the Soviets want with a bunch of idiots like these? But if you insist on being a useful idiot long enough, someone will use you, and like shadows at the edges of a campfire, the real actors out there begin to come circling.
The Good Terrorist isn't a suspense novel or a spy thriller or a crime caper. It's a character drama, with a bunch of interesting characters who are all much alike except in that they are each individuals with their own problems and quirks, and they're all kind of unlikable idiots, even before they start getting in over their heads with real bad guys. Only Alice is sympathetic, and she's still as much of a fool and a naif as the rest of them, it's just that in her case, we can see all the wasted energy and potential. Her entire life has been spent in a kind of dreamworld, living for other people, being shaped by other people's opinions of her, and deliberately looking away from ugly reality. She's too good for the people around her, but she also pretty much deserves what she gets.
I might have wished there was a bit more action, maybe a twist or two, but The Good Terrorist held my attention and Doris Lessing's writing had no real weakness other than a leisurely in-no-hurry-to-get-anywhere pace. This wasn't an exciting book and the plot is only there to make the characters do things while we get to know them, but the day-to-day mundanity of the story is deceptive, and if that's all you see, you're missing the point, which is the banality of evil and the obligation of anyone who wants to consider themselves a "good" person to not do nothing when other people are doing things you know are wrong. I'll definitely read more by Lessing; she delivers wonderful characterization with sharp, straight-faced black humor. This book is like a verbal confection of delicate (and indelicate) interpersonal dialog and nuanced character studies. With a bomb at the center.
The grown woman of solidly middle-class Brits, Alice was given everything by her parents, including a good university education. But we learn that her fractured relationship with both mother and father (who are themselves divorced) is at the root of all Alice's discontents. Now her father is remarried and running a business and trying to wash his hands of his problem child of a grown daughter, and her mother has turned into an impoverished alcoholic. Alice's interactions with her parents are painful because it's one of those situations where an outside observer can easily see that if just one of them would bend, just a little bit, they could make peace, but they always manage to say exactly the wrong things to each other, and neither Alice nor her parents ever have the emotional maturity to talk like grown-ups without verbal knives drawn.
When not being reduced to an eternally rebellious teenager in the presence of her parents, Alice is a whirlwind of industriousness and hard work ethic, even though it's all applied to keeping an "approved tenancy" in which she and her fellow communist "revolutionaries" are squatting from being demolished by the council. Her co-revolutionaries are all freeloading under-achievers like Alice, the difference being that she could easily make something of her life, while most of her "comrades" are just plain losers.
But amidst all their "organizing" and "protesting" and "sticking it to the fat capitalist pigs," a plan gradually emerges to work with either the IRA or with their revolutionary Russian comrades. At first this seems like as much a joke as any of their other plans, since Alice is the only one who ever actually does anything, and she's mostly doing housework and den-mothering all these wanker wannabes. What would the IRA or the Soviets want with a bunch of idiots like these? But if you insist on being a useful idiot long enough, someone will use you, and like shadows at the edges of a campfire, the real actors out there begin to come circling.
The Good Terrorist isn't a suspense novel or a spy thriller or a crime caper. It's a character drama, with a bunch of interesting characters who are all much alike except in that they are each individuals with their own problems and quirks, and they're all kind of unlikable idiots, even before they start getting in over their heads with real bad guys. Only Alice is sympathetic, and she's still as much of a fool and a naif as the rest of them, it's just that in her case, we can see all the wasted energy and potential. Her entire life has been spent in a kind of dreamworld, living for other people, being shaped by other people's opinions of her, and deliberately looking away from ugly reality. She's too good for the people around her, but she also pretty much deserves what she gets.
I might have wished there was a bit more action, maybe a twist or two, but The Good Terrorist held my attention and Doris Lessing's writing had no real weakness other than a leisurely in-no-hurry-to-get-anywhere pace. This wasn't an exciting book and the plot is only there to make the characters do things while we get to know them, but the day-to-day mundanity of the story is deceptive, and if that's all you see, you're missing the point, which is the banality of evil and the obligation of anyone who wants to consider themselves a "good" person to not do nothing when other people are doing things you know are wrong. I'll definitely read more by Lessing; she delivers wonderful characterization with sharp, straight-faced black humor. This book is like a verbal confection of delicate (and indelicate) interpersonal dialog and nuanced character studies. With a bomb at the center.
December 23, 2017
Meh! und Wäh!
Was hat die Kritikerin der WELT über dieses Buch geschrieben? "Die gute Terroristin ist eine dramatische und literarisch aufregende Mischung aus Thriller, Gesellschaftsroman, Zeitgemälde und einem glühenden Plädoyer, dem Terror endlich eine endgültige Absage zu erteilen."
Meine Meinung: Ein sprödes langweiliges nichtssagendes Werk in dem gehirntote gelangweilte Kinder der Oberschicht mit einem ausreichenden sozialen Netz a bissi rebellieren, Kommunismus und Arbeiterklasse spielen, alle verachten (auch jene Arbeiter, für die sie zu kämpfen vorgeben), blöde Parolen von Faschisten und Klassenkampf klopfen, die Eltern beklauen, demonstrieren, a bissi dilletantisch Bombenattentate ausführen... usw. usf. Die paar authentischen wirklichen arbeitslosen Hausbesetzer aus der Unterschicht werden eh an den Rand gedrängt, ausgenutzt und wenn sie abkratzen, zuckt man noch kurz mit den Schultern, schüttelt sich ab und macht mir der gaar so wichtigen Revolution weiter. Die meisten Figuren sind völlig ambivalent wie die Protagonistin Alice. Die Gute Terroristin ist kein Oxymoron, sondern die Hausbesetzerin ist wirklich so. Einerseits organisiert repariert kocht & putzt sie im besetzten Haus, um es für die sehr peinliche Revolutionsnachhilfegruppe zu Muttis Wohlfühlhöhle zu machen, andererseits verabscheut sie Spießertum und badet in langweiligen revolutionären Parolen.
Dabei muss ich bezüglich meiner Bewertung sagen, unsymphatische Figuren machen mir gar nichts aus, aber wenn sie derart gähnend langweilig beschrieben sind, dann muss ich die Autorin abstrafen. Da wird doch tatsächlich raumgreifend ständig thematisiert ob man nun Kummerl nach UDSSR Ausrichtung, Trotzkist, IRA oder sonstwas ist und das nicht so kurz, knackig und witzig wie bei Monty Phytons konspirativen Treffen nach dem Circus im Rom mit der judäischen Volksfront bzw. der Volksfront von Judäa, sondern den ganzen Roman immer wieder und wieder. Und was soll das mit dem Upperclass Sprachduktus, den jeder einzelne der Hausbesetzergruppe durch irgendeinen anderen Unterschicht-Dialekt zu kaschieren versucht? Ausgewalzt nicht nur auf mehreren Seiten, nein es wird immer wieder als Thema im Roman aus der Mottenkiste des bourgeoisen Grauens hervorgekramt für jeden einzelnen der Gruppe aber auch jeder Fremde wird aufgrund des Sprachduktus detailliert analysiert und taxiert. Ich weiß von der Manie der Briten mit Sprache, aber muss ich das verstehen und auch noch raumgreifend lesen. Zudem werden gefühlte 1000 Suppen gekocht und die Hausrenovierung in einem Detaillierungsgrad geschildert, der dem Film Hinterholz 8 seine Ehre gemacht hätte.
Ab der Mitte des Werkes, immer wenn mir die Autorin irgendwas politisches mitteilen will, bin ich beinahe in Narkolepsie gefallen, weil es so platt und schnarchnasig vermittelt wird. Gleich einem Leierkasten oder einer hängengebliebenen Schallplatte ewig dieselben polititschen Parolen, so kann die Revolution einfach nicht funktionieren, genausowenig wie dieser Roman, wenn sie beide so scheinheilig und total einschläfernd daherkommen. Das ist wirklich soooo *gähn*, wo die Thrillerelemente bei all dem Gekoche, Geputze, den Reparaturen dem peinlichen Spiel auf Eratzfamilie und wo das glühende Plädoyer gegen Terrorismus in diesem Buch abgeblieben sein soll, ist mir schleierhaft, ich habs mit der Lupe gesucht, und nicht gefunden.
Und dann auch noch Literaturnobelpreis? Echt jetzt? Da müssen die anderen Romane der Autorin aber wirklich um Klassen besser sein.
Fazit: 2,3 Sterne diesmal abgerundet auf 2 denn der Roman hat meine erste und ultimative Todsünde begangen, und mich gelangweilt. Geärgert hat er mich auch, aber das ist nicht so schlimm.
Was hat die Kritikerin der WELT über dieses Buch geschrieben? "Die gute Terroristin ist eine dramatische und literarisch aufregende Mischung aus Thriller, Gesellschaftsroman, Zeitgemälde und einem glühenden Plädoyer, dem Terror endlich eine endgültige Absage zu erteilen."
Meine Meinung: Ein sprödes langweiliges nichtssagendes Werk in dem gehirntote gelangweilte Kinder der Oberschicht mit einem ausreichenden sozialen Netz a bissi rebellieren, Kommunismus und Arbeiterklasse spielen, alle verachten (auch jene Arbeiter, für die sie zu kämpfen vorgeben), blöde Parolen von Faschisten und Klassenkampf klopfen, die Eltern beklauen, demonstrieren, a bissi dilletantisch Bombenattentate ausführen... usw. usf. Die paar authentischen wirklichen arbeitslosen Hausbesetzer aus der Unterschicht werden eh an den Rand gedrängt, ausgenutzt und wenn sie abkratzen, zuckt man noch kurz mit den Schultern, schüttelt sich ab und macht mir der gaar so wichtigen Revolution weiter. Die meisten Figuren sind völlig ambivalent wie die Protagonistin Alice. Die Gute Terroristin ist kein Oxymoron, sondern die Hausbesetzerin ist wirklich so. Einerseits organisiert repariert kocht & putzt sie im besetzten Haus, um es für die sehr peinliche Revolutionsnachhilfegruppe zu Muttis Wohlfühlhöhle zu machen, andererseits verabscheut sie Spießertum und badet in langweiligen revolutionären Parolen.
Dabei muss ich bezüglich meiner Bewertung sagen, unsymphatische Figuren machen mir gar nichts aus, aber wenn sie derart gähnend langweilig beschrieben sind, dann muss ich die Autorin abstrafen. Da wird doch tatsächlich raumgreifend ständig thematisiert ob man nun Kummerl nach UDSSR Ausrichtung, Trotzkist, IRA oder sonstwas ist und das nicht so kurz, knackig und witzig wie bei Monty Phytons konspirativen Treffen nach dem Circus im Rom mit der judäischen Volksfront bzw. der Volksfront von Judäa, sondern den ganzen Roman immer wieder und wieder. Und was soll das mit dem Upperclass Sprachduktus, den jeder einzelne der Hausbesetzergruppe durch irgendeinen anderen Unterschicht-Dialekt zu kaschieren versucht? Ausgewalzt nicht nur auf mehreren Seiten, nein es wird immer wieder als Thema im Roman aus der Mottenkiste des bourgeoisen Grauens hervorgekramt für jeden einzelnen der Gruppe aber auch jeder Fremde wird aufgrund des Sprachduktus detailliert analysiert und taxiert. Ich weiß von der Manie der Briten mit Sprache, aber muss ich das verstehen und auch noch raumgreifend lesen. Zudem werden gefühlte 1000 Suppen gekocht und die Hausrenovierung in einem Detaillierungsgrad geschildert, der dem Film Hinterholz 8 seine Ehre gemacht hätte.
Ab der Mitte des Werkes, immer wenn mir die Autorin irgendwas politisches mitteilen will, bin ich beinahe in Narkolepsie gefallen, weil es so platt und schnarchnasig vermittelt wird. Gleich einem Leierkasten oder einer hängengebliebenen Schallplatte ewig dieselben polititschen Parolen, so kann die Revolution einfach nicht funktionieren, genausowenig wie dieser Roman, wenn sie beide so scheinheilig und total einschläfernd daherkommen. Das ist wirklich soooo *gähn*, wo die Thrillerelemente bei all dem Gekoche, Geputze, den Reparaturen dem peinlichen Spiel auf Eratzfamilie und wo das glühende Plädoyer gegen Terrorismus in diesem Buch abgeblieben sein soll, ist mir schleierhaft, ich habs mit der Lupe gesucht, und nicht gefunden.
Und dann auch noch Literaturnobelpreis? Echt jetzt? Da müssen die anderen Romane der Autorin aber wirklich um Klassen besser sein.
Fazit: 2,3 Sterne diesmal abgerundet auf 2 denn der Roman hat meine erste und ultimative Todsünde begangen, und mich gelangweilt. Geärgert hat er mich auch, aber das ist nicht so schlimm.
May 7, 2023
classic tale of human folly. you start with the best of intentions (wanting to traffic arms to the IRA) but end up carrying buckets of human fecal matter from the attic to a pit in the backyard of your squat. ain't that a kick in the nuts.
March 30, 2017
"آليس" فتاة تجاوزت منتصف الثلاثينات ، ذات هشاشةٍ تدفعها لإرضاء الجميع و إطعامهم و إراحتِهم ، تقوم بإحياء بيتٍ مهجور مع عامل هشٍّ أيضًا ، تدفعه هشاشته - في نهاية الأمر - إلى إلقاء نفسه أمام سيارة ، و تدفعتها هشاشتها لتوافق - دون اقتناع حقيقي - على أعمال المجموعة التفجيرية في وضح النهار ، قام بها رفقاؤها في الحزب الناشئ ، و الذي عانى أفراده من ماضٍ أليم ؛ و كان لافتقارهم إلى الثقافة و لانعدام الإرشاد السياسي أكبر أثرٍ في جعلهم هواةً ساذجين أكثر مِن كونهم ناشطين أو ثوريّين ، أدّى ذلك إلى قيامهم بالتفجيرات تحت شعلة الحماس.
الرواية موغلة في التفاصيل اليوميّة التي تجعل القارئ يعيشها لحظةً بلحظة ، كذلك التفاصيل النفسية و الأحاسيس الجَليّة - لكل أشخاص الرواية حتى الهامشيّة منها - أكبرَتْ مِن قَدْرِ هذه الرواية عندي.
غير أنَّ الترجمةَ جاءت سيئةً و مشوبةً بأخطاءٍ في الصياغة و في تعريب عددٍ مِن المسمَّيات (و في أحيانٍ نادرة وردَتْ أخطاء نحويّة) ، بالإضافة إلى المزج بألفاظٍ من العاميّة المصرية ، و أتمنى أن يتم تحسين ذلك مستقبلًا.
الرواية موغلة في التفاصيل اليوميّة التي تجعل القارئ يعيشها لحظةً بلحظة ، كذلك التفاصيل النفسية و الأحاسيس الجَليّة - لكل أشخاص الرواية حتى الهامشيّة منها - أكبرَتْ مِن قَدْرِ هذه الرواية عندي.
غير أنَّ الترجمةَ جاءت سيئةً و مشوبةً بأخطاءٍ في الصياغة و في تعريب عددٍ مِن المسمَّيات (و في أحيانٍ نادرة وردَتْ أخطاء نحويّة) ، بالإضافة إلى المزج بألفاظٍ من العاميّة المصرية ، و أتمنى أن يتم تحسين ذلك مستقبلًا.
January 15, 2016
It was around March 5th that I discovered it was Women's History Month. I was reading a book back then - a leftover of Black History Month - that I wasn't much enjoying. I quickly set it aside. There is a lot of literature I want to read that is written by women. But I could tell that no fiction was going to lift me out of whatever reading malaise it was that I acquired after finishing James Baldwin's lovely "Go Tell It On The Mountain". I picked up Naomi Klein's latest book and read two hundred pages. I wasn't impressed just yet, but I can see it is building towards something. At least, I think I can see that. Anyways, this is a review of the book that I picked up after those two hundred, unsatisfying pages, suddenly feeling like I needed to really let my mind settle into fiction again.
The book was The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing.
There is much to be said about this book and its exploration of terrorism in the late twentieth century. It is a satire, perhaps. Or, perhaps it is more specifically an insulting depiction of radicalism, its disorganization, its dependence upon incomplete, broken humans who desire so much but are convinced that they desire nothing. Does this make any sense yet? I'm not sure. Doris does it so well though that, all of a sudden, somehow, it does. And it is beautiful.
As many reviews have shown, though, the real triumph in this book lies in the characters rather than the plot. It centres around a commune/squat in London and its rotating membership. And these characters are interesting, tragic figures. Spurned by life. Seeking success. Fomenting hatred. Getting along and refusing to get along. Lessing clearly recognized that they needed to be well-developed because, in the end, not much really happens in this book. Lots of small events, sure, but things only really pick up in the last hundred pages.
That doesn't mean the first 250 are bad pages. In fact, I think they are my favourite pages - the last few, while still very good, clearly moved the book in a different direction and, to my mind, the book was weakened somewhat as a result. That said, if the book started in satire, it also ended in satire. The middle was devoted to the characters.
And one character in particular. Alice Mellings, the narrator and protagonist. And the reader vacillates in their judgement of her. Sometimes she is the calm, precise, intelligent, thoughtful figure. The maternal character in the home who is caring for everybody when they need caring and preventing catastrophes when they need to be prevented. Also the figure who is most frequently overlooked, despite her incredible contributions to the community. Alice is also the character with whom you grow most impatient. She makes silly choices, and abuses the wrong people in her life. She is terribly weak in all the wrong ways. And when she falters she seems to falter in all the wrong moments. And, in the end, you decide she is an unreliable narrator, and you have to wonder if what she has told you is true or just some falsified memory. The thing is, Lessing builds her up to have these flaws right from the get go, but they are dominated, rather than balanced, by the many great things that Alice does for her community. So you are a bit disappointed in your own judgement of her character when you reach the end.
The frustrating thing was that I understood Alice so well. I related to her perfectly. I saw myself in her, and then momentarily recognized myself in her band of friends. But Alice, above all others in this novel, may be one of the great characters of all the novels I have read.
This is my second Lessing novel, but I'll definitely be reading more. A Briefing for a Descent into Hell or Shikasta will be next, and hopefully before the end of the calendar year. I was impressed by what I saw - a controlled, brilliant mind was at work here. One whose opinions are clear and precise, and whose understanding of humanity is equally refined but entirely conflicted.
The book was The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing.
There is much to be said about this book and its exploration of terrorism in the late twentieth century. It is a satire, perhaps. Or, perhaps it is more specifically an insulting depiction of radicalism, its disorganization, its dependence upon incomplete, broken humans who desire so much but are convinced that they desire nothing. Does this make any sense yet? I'm not sure. Doris does it so well though that, all of a sudden, somehow, it does. And it is beautiful.
As many reviews have shown, though, the real triumph in this book lies in the characters rather than the plot. It centres around a commune/squat in London and its rotating membership. And these characters are interesting, tragic figures. Spurned by life. Seeking success. Fomenting hatred. Getting along and refusing to get along. Lessing clearly recognized that they needed to be well-developed because, in the end, not much really happens in this book. Lots of small events, sure, but things only really pick up in the last hundred pages.
That doesn't mean the first 250 are bad pages. In fact, I think they are my favourite pages - the last few, while still very good, clearly moved the book in a different direction and, to my mind, the book was weakened somewhat as a result. That said, if the book started in satire, it also ended in satire. The middle was devoted to the characters.
And one character in particular. Alice Mellings, the narrator and protagonist. And the reader vacillates in their judgement of her. Sometimes she is the calm, precise, intelligent, thoughtful figure. The maternal character in the home who is caring for everybody when they need caring and preventing catastrophes when they need to be prevented. Also the figure who is most frequently overlooked, despite her incredible contributions to the community. Alice is also the character with whom you grow most impatient. She makes silly choices, and abuses the wrong people in her life. She is terribly weak in all the wrong ways. And when she falters she seems to falter in all the wrong moments. And, in the end, you decide she is an unreliable narrator, and you have to wonder if what she has told you is true or just some falsified memory. The thing is, Lessing builds her up to have these flaws right from the get go, but they are dominated, rather than balanced, by the many great things that Alice does for her community. So you are a bit disappointed in your own judgement of her character when you reach the end.
The frustrating thing was that I understood Alice so well. I related to her perfectly. I saw myself in her, and then momentarily recognized myself in her band of friends. But Alice, above all others in this novel, may be one of the great characters of all the novels I have read.
This is my second Lessing novel, but I'll definitely be reading more. A Briefing for a Descent into Hell or Shikasta will be next, and hopefully before the end of the calendar year. I was impressed by what I saw - a controlled, brilliant mind was at work here. One whose opinions are clear and precise, and whose understanding of humanity is equally refined but entirely conflicted.
August 15, 2021
A very readable book although over descriptive and a bit tedious in parts. Alice the main character is a bit like Alice in Wonderland who is a marxist who wants to change the world. I could not really buy into her hatred of the middle classes. She is an energetic woman who is a doer not a dreamer. However, her boyfriend Jasper is a gay layabout using her. She sorts out an abandoned house in London through her hard work makes it habitable. The other commune members do nothing except Philip and Jack who are unemployed and living there. The guy who does all the repair work who is unwell and slight of figure seems a bit unbelievable.
The dynamics of the inhabitants is fascinating. Bert and Jasper try to join the IRA and then become KGB spies. The IRA and KGB see them as time wasters but see the potential of Alice. The story culminates in a bombing which goes wrong. The commune departs leaving Alice at the kitchen table. There is a question mark over whether she will survive. Will the IRA kill her, will the KGB, will she be arrested or will she move to another squat as the mother hen
The story is set in the 1980s so dated. No more Soviet Union or squats. But there is parallels with extinction rebellion and other groups without the bombs.
The dynamics of the inhabitants is fascinating. Bert and Jasper try to join the IRA and then become KGB spies. The IRA and KGB see them as time wasters but see the potential of Alice. The story culminates in a bombing which goes wrong. The commune departs leaving Alice at the kitchen table. There is a question mark over whether she will survive. Will the IRA kill her, will the KGB, will she be arrested or will she move to another squat as the mother hen
The story is set in the 1980s so dated. No more Soviet Union or squats. But there is parallels with extinction rebellion and other groups without the bombs.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 27, 2010
As a lefty and former squatter this book contains dozens of painful home truths familiar to all of us involved in radical politics. The tiny left group removed from reality. The bragging about violence on protests. The lazy 'vanguard thinkers' who let everyone else do the work. All are present and correct in Lessing's unforgiving assault on a hapless bunch of middle class revolutionaries drifting from squat to squat in an attempt to escape from the real world. Alice, intelligent but consumed by her hatred of her parents, narrates this tale of pathetic naive idiocy as the band of brave class struggle warriors attempt to form dangerous alliances with the IRA and the Soviet Union. Jasper, Alice's whinging, bullying partner, is one of the most loathsome characters I have ever come across. Lessing said that if she wrote the book now it would have a religious rather than political dimension. Well, Chris Morris has dutifully produced that film already, with his Four Lions, which depicts the doomed efforts of a group of British Jihadists. My one complaint - this book is so consumed with its attack that it forgets to depict any positive aspects to progressive politics - there are no sympathetic characters, no-one working for real change, which as we know, so many genuinely want to fight for.
January 12, 2021
İlk Doris Lessing okumam. Çok akıcı bir kitap birkere, merakla okunuyor. Politik roman olarak basılmış ama kesinlikle değil. Uçuk, ütopik hayallerin nasılda hoyrat bir terörizme dönüşebildiğini bence güzel yazmış Lessing. Aslında hepimizin ideolojilerinin, ilişkilerimizin, yaşam tarzımızın nasıl da algılarımızla değiştiğini ve her kavramın nasıl da görece olduğunu çok güzel anlatıyor bence. Hepimiz burjuvayız aslında ya da hepimiz faşist, neye göre, kime göre baktığımıza göre değişiyor sadece.
Annesi yeni evine taşındıktan sonra Alice'in ilk ziyaretinde annesi ile arasında geçen diyalog kitabın en güzel bölümlerinden biri bence. Çok düşündürücü.
Neden 5 yıldız vermediğime gelince; bence Alice üniversite öğrencisi olarak hadi bilemedin yeni mezun olarak kurgulansa daha inandırıcı olurdu, 40'ına yaklaşmış bir kadın değil kesinlikle kitaptaki hiçbir kimliğinde. Bir de daha kısa bir roman olabilirdi, evin tamir-tadilat bölümlerinin bu kadar uzun olmasına gerek var mıydı?
Özetle okumuş olmaktan memnunum.
Annesi yeni evine taşındıktan sonra Alice'in ilk ziyaretinde annesi ile arasında geçen diyalog kitabın en güzel bölümlerinden biri bence. Çok düşündürücü.
Neden 5 yıldız vermediğime gelince; bence Alice üniversite öğrencisi olarak hadi bilemedin yeni mezun olarak kurgulansa daha inandırıcı olurdu, 40'ına yaklaşmış bir kadın değil kesinlikle kitaptaki hiçbir kimliğinde. Bir de daha kısa bir roman olabilirdi, evin tamir-tadilat bölümlerinin bu kadar uzun olmasına gerek var mıydı?
Özetle okumuş olmaktan memnunum.
March 8, 2017
تقول دوريس ليسنج إنها استلهمت القصة من جارة لها كانت تسكن بيتًا مهجورًا وحين وقعت تفجيرات في بعض المحلات في لندن، بدا لها أن هذه الجارة قد تكون متورطة فيها. تصور ليسنج بكثير من الرتابة لندن في الثمانينيات من القرن العشرين، عبر وصفها لمجموعة من الشباب يسمون أنفسهم "شيوعيين" ويحاولون محاربة سياسات الدولة بالمشاركة في الاحتجاجات دومًا على كل شيء! ولكن يبدو للقارئ أنهم ليسوا ثوارًا حقيقيين وأنهم ليسوا أكثر من هواة، لا يبدو أنه مؤمنون حقًا بالمبادئ التي يدعون إليها. ففي الوقت الذي يدّعون فيه استغلال الدولة للشعب، يستغلون هم بدورهم "رفيقتهم" أليس بكل شكل ممكن، آليس التي كان عليها الاعتناء بكل شيء بدءًا من تحويل المنزل المهجور من حظيرة أو مكب نفايات إلى منزل لائق، وانتهاء بتوفيرها المال دون أن يفكر أحدهم بالمساهمة بذلك، أو حتى بالعمل لتأمينه... مجموعة من الشبان الفوضويين، ولا أدري لمَ على الثورة أن ترتبط بالفوضى!
كانت أليس تعاني من متلازمة ستوكهولم فيما يبدو تجاه جاسبر، إذ لا تستطيع اتخاذ موقف واضح منه، وكانت تتعاطف معه -رغم سوء معاملته وازدرائه لها - إلى الحد الذي يجعلها تتخلى عن عائلتها في سبيل البقاء معه لمساندته. لم تفعل أليس شيئًا سوى أنها كررت أخطاء أمها التي كانت تعتني بالآخرين (حتى آليس) على حساب نفسها مما اضطرها إلى بيع بيتها لاحقًا. ظلت أليس تمارس دور الأم للجميع، دون أن يكترث بها أحد، بل تخلوا عنها كلهم حتى جاسبر!
لم تقبل أليس الطريقة التي يعالج بها رفاقها الأمور في مسألة التفجيرات ووجدت أنهم متهورون فقط لعدم تفكيرهم بالضحايا الذين قد يكونون في موقع التفجير، وبرروا ذلك بحجة أن "القضية" تتطلب ذلك!
بدت أليس -التي عبرت عن قلة قراءاتها - أكثر إيمانًا بمبادئ توجهها السياسي من رفاقها الذين قرؤوا كثيرًا، فقد أقدمت على التغيير أكثر من مرة (البيت، جيم، مونيكا، فيليب) في الوقت الذي كان فيه الآخرون يجلسون مكتوفي الأيدي بحجة انشغالهم بالقضية، غير أن ذلك ليس سوى مبرر للكسل والفشل.
الترجمة مقبولة إلى حد ما رغم إخفاقاتها الواضحة في أكثر من موضع.
كانت أليس تعاني من متلازمة ستوكهولم فيما يبدو تجاه جاسبر، إذ لا تستطيع اتخاذ موقف واضح منه، وكانت تتعاطف معه -رغم سوء معاملته وازدرائه لها - إلى الحد الذي يجعلها تتخلى عن عائلتها في سبيل البقاء معه لمساندته. لم تفعل أليس شيئًا سوى أنها كررت أخطاء أمها التي كانت تعتني بالآخرين (حتى آليس) على حساب نفسها مما اضطرها إلى بيع بيتها لاحقًا. ظلت أليس تمارس دور الأم للجميع، دون أن يكترث بها أحد، بل تخلوا عنها كلهم حتى جاسبر!
لم تقبل أليس الطريقة التي يعالج بها رفاقها الأمور في مسألة التفجيرات ووجدت أنهم متهورون فقط لعدم تفكيرهم بالضحايا الذين قد يكونون في موقع التفجير، وبرروا ذلك بحجة أن "القضية" تتطلب ذلك!
بدت أليس -التي عبرت عن قلة قراءاتها - أكثر إيمانًا بمبادئ توجهها السياسي من رفاقها الذين قرؤوا كثيرًا، فقد أقدمت على التغيير أكثر من مرة (البيت، جيم، مونيكا، فيليب) في الوقت الذي كان فيه الآخرون يجلسون مكتوفي الأيدي بحجة انشغالهم بالقضية، غير أن ذلك ليس سوى مبرر للكسل والفشل.
الترجمة مقبولة إلى حد ما رغم إخفاقاتها الواضحة في أكثر من موضع.
May 22, 2015
أنا بحب النوعية دي من الكتابات , النوعية النسوية المبهرة , اللي بتكتب عن النساء كقضية حق لابد من الانحياز لها , بلا أي تطرف أو عنصرية أو حتى نظرة دونية , الكتابات النسوية الهادفة التي تتعمق في فهم هذا الكائن المعقد الجميل , وتجعلنا نرى ذلك الكائن بكل وضوح بجماله وبريقه الأخاّذ , ودوريس لينج من أجمل الأقلام التي قرأت لها في هذا الخصوص (وعلى العموم من أجمل أقلام الإنجليز بالنسبة لي على الإطلاق )
ببساطة مطلقة , العمل مبني على شخصية حقيقة صادفتها الكاتبة مرة , فتأثرت بها وأخرجتها في ثوب روائي جميل , أعطت انطباع للقارئ أنه يعرف تلك الشخصية ويتأثر بها .
آليس : تلك الأنثى الطيبة , الرقيقة , المؤمنة بقضايا عديدة المدافعة عنها بكل ما تملك من قوة , ذلك الإيمان الذي دفعها لترك بيئتها ومنزلها لتواصل نضالها .
العمل ممتع , فعلا , عرض كيف ينجذب البشر للقضايا مؤمنين بها , وكيف يكون تأثر الشباب بالذات غاية في القوة والعنف , فيجعلهم يسيئوا لقضيتهم .
ترجمة العمل جيدة , دليل على عظمة النص الأصلي .
شخصيات الرواية : مبهجة , كائنات حية تعرفها وتصادفها , تحس بها وتتعاطف معها .
الأحداث : متسلسلة بشكل مبهج ومبهر , أحداث تدمجك في قلب الرواية وأحداثها .
في المجمل وكالعادة , دوريس ليسنج قادرة على إبهاري , لتتقدس روحها .
October 2, 2021
Dear reader of this temporary repository of amateur book reviewers, curiosity seekers and those just generally lost in our current age of 1’s and 0’s: Today my mildly abetted mind is skittering too fast on a rainy day alone in our simple house with 2 eternally hungry canine companions. I’ve got my playlist randomly playing my favorite tunes, currently Missouri Mule’s Beautifully Broken (check it). Earlier I finished on DVD the Beasts of the Southern Wild – it’s all put me in a mood.
But regardless, I did read this book and came to sit here & give a brief recap and, most importantly, my feelings about it. I’ve planned to read this author for years, like many others, and the faces on this paperback lured me in. Sometimes I place books in various places (from library to bedside table and all in between) in strategic (and competing) places. Back to the point: it caught my eye that this was a winner of the Nobel Prize, though I did not remember this being a factor when I selected and ordered (or I misremembered, that’ not unlikely). Regardless, that old Swede Alfred Nobel proclaimed this award is reserved for one human being “who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind in the field of literature”. If I were capable of publishing a novel that others were interested in reading, I would not want my creation dashed against Doctor Nobel’s altar. I lost a few minutes just now looking all this book, the Google (a search engine today for finding information digitally by searching on key words) rabbit hole again. Dangerous in my state of mind.
Back to the book: I came to it with no baggage. I knew next to nothing about the author, where and when she lived, or anything about the body of work available. My cleanliness of mind was akin to when I would pluck the least religious looking book from the stacks at the back of my old fire and brimstone church. The smells and feel of that place is still easy to conjure. On the back cover a black and white of Doris makes her out to be a rather severe looking, elderly woman with slick hair tightly drawn to skull, a most composed and contemplative posture of hand on chin and piercing eyes. I was a quite surprised to see this was published in 1985 and the prize was not awarded till 2007, not exactly “during the preceding year” ala Nobel. But I was pleased to see the year, and I came to learn the plot of the novel is the same period, set in London. This time period interests me because I first voted in 1980 – the first and only time in my life I voted for a republican. By 1984 I was attending Walter Mondale rallies (Louisville, KY) and detesting the monster that Reagan unleashed. Now, I won’t get political here, even if you post, but I felt this necessary since the misfit of characters in this book also were fiercely anti-Thacherite.
Briefly, our protagonist is the dutiful yet disturbed Alice, who’s left the relative comfort of the “dirty fascist” middle class of early 1980s London. She’s clearly has undiagnosed mental illness, and this is skillfully mastered by our author as a perfect example of the unreliable narrator. Alice is loyal everyone except her own blood, including a rather detestable, abusive, sexually confused boyfriend with whom she never copulates. But dear Alice is the glue that holds the small group together as they attempt to reclaim an old house in an area planned by the city for demolition. There are all sorts of characters with various levels of commitment to some sort of code that is characterized by a love for Marxist theory and a desire to do damage to the state. This ragtag group spends their time coordinating which rallies to attend and whether or not to get arrested (a mark of honor when they return, but dangerous). Lessing is a very skilled prose artist; her characters have a depth rarely found in literature. The theme, its “benefit on mankind” is its depiction of the psychological forces which cohere in certain settings, where labor unrest and unemployment were peaking in the UK, to create a faction of dangerous youths.
Mostly this story is about the people & their spats, and obsessions with Alice’s riotous and tortured brain. But she has a cool competence (along with the bombmaker we meet later) that enables this group to avoid detection and have at least as temporary planning facility. Alice cooks, cleans, calms sniffing around police and authorities, stands down radical IRA members, and ministers to the physical needs of everyone. She’s the one in every group that’s doing most of the work and taking the highest ration of grief when things aren’t perfect. She’s “good” for all these reasons. But Alice is also a thief who is clearly sociopathic (later psychopathic) and has no qualms about stealing from her mother and father and selfishly (and obliviously) relegating her poor mom to a pauper’s life. She has not reason to be an anarchist, according to her mother, and sees her dalliance as “child’s play”. Mom cuts her off eventually, and is reduced to a sad alcoholic, lonely life. There’s a lot of pain here, these characters are all messed up in some capacity. Alice’s competence makes her a useful tool for the movement, but this “good” she carries alongside a big old loaf of shallow & Immoral treachery. She’ll wear the reader out.
This was an invigorating read for me (though I read it in segments at night, tired after working 12 hours and then watching baseball for 3 hours after dinner) because Lessing’s prose and interesting characters were fascinating. I got into the head of these people, wondering at the harsh divisions in the UK in the early 1980s and how this ferment could attract and alternative, violent version of home-grown terrorist. Something big happens at the end, I won’t spoil your plot, but Alice’s reaction to it explains how it could happen this way. And in the news, these things have happened throughout history, when there is no hope in the structures of society.
I can’t say this was a perfect novel, its bleakness wore me out (and I have massive tolerance for that usually) but I could not turn away because it felt so real and was so interesting. There was an aspect of Alice’s response to horror that I found inauthentic. So I’ll knock off a star for Doris not sticking the landing and not turning at least one of her characters to the light or greener fields. She needed to blend a little sucrose into the citric.
But regardless, I did read this book and came to sit here & give a brief recap and, most importantly, my feelings about it. I’ve planned to read this author for years, like many others, and the faces on this paperback lured me in. Sometimes I place books in various places (from library to bedside table and all in between) in strategic (and competing) places. Back to the point: it caught my eye that this was a winner of the Nobel Prize, though I did not remember this being a factor when I selected and ordered (or I misremembered, that’ not unlikely). Regardless, that old Swede Alfred Nobel proclaimed this award is reserved for one human being “who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind in the field of literature”. If I were capable of publishing a novel that others were interested in reading, I would not want my creation dashed against Doctor Nobel’s altar. I lost a few minutes just now looking all this book, the Google (a search engine today for finding information digitally by searching on key words) rabbit hole again. Dangerous in my state of mind.
Back to the book: I came to it with no baggage. I knew next to nothing about the author, where and when she lived, or anything about the body of work available. My cleanliness of mind was akin to when I would pluck the least religious looking book from the stacks at the back of my old fire and brimstone church. The smells and feel of that place is still easy to conjure. On the back cover a black and white of Doris makes her out to be a rather severe looking, elderly woman with slick hair tightly drawn to skull, a most composed and contemplative posture of hand on chin and piercing eyes. I was a quite surprised to see this was published in 1985 and the prize was not awarded till 2007, not exactly “during the preceding year” ala Nobel. But I was pleased to see the year, and I came to learn the plot of the novel is the same period, set in London. This time period interests me because I first voted in 1980 – the first and only time in my life I voted for a republican. By 1984 I was attending Walter Mondale rallies (Louisville, KY) and detesting the monster that Reagan unleashed. Now, I won’t get political here, even if you post, but I felt this necessary since the misfit of characters in this book also were fiercely anti-Thacherite.
Briefly, our protagonist is the dutiful yet disturbed Alice, who’s left the relative comfort of the “dirty fascist” middle class of early 1980s London. She’s clearly has undiagnosed mental illness, and this is skillfully mastered by our author as a perfect example of the unreliable narrator. Alice is loyal everyone except her own blood, including a rather detestable, abusive, sexually confused boyfriend with whom she never copulates. But dear Alice is the glue that holds the small group together as they attempt to reclaim an old house in an area planned by the city for demolition. There are all sorts of characters with various levels of commitment to some sort of code that is characterized by a love for Marxist theory and a desire to do damage to the state. This ragtag group spends their time coordinating which rallies to attend and whether or not to get arrested (a mark of honor when they return, but dangerous). Lessing is a very skilled prose artist; her characters have a depth rarely found in literature. The theme, its “benefit on mankind” is its depiction of the psychological forces which cohere in certain settings, where labor unrest and unemployment were peaking in the UK, to create a faction of dangerous youths.
Mostly this story is about the people & their spats, and obsessions with Alice’s riotous and tortured brain. But she has a cool competence (along with the bombmaker we meet later) that enables this group to avoid detection and have at least as temporary planning facility. Alice cooks, cleans, calms sniffing around police and authorities, stands down radical IRA members, and ministers to the physical needs of everyone. She’s the one in every group that’s doing most of the work and taking the highest ration of grief when things aren’t perfect. She’s “good” for all these reasons. But Alice is also a thief who is clearly sociopathic (later psychopathic) and has no qualms about stealing from her mother and father and selfishly (and obliviously) relegating her poor mom to a pauper’s life. She has not reason to be an anarchist, according to her mother, and sees her dalliance as “child’s play”. Mom cuts her off eventually, and is reduced to a sad alcoholic, lonely life. There’s a lot of pain here, these characters are all messed up in some capacity. Alice’s competence makes her a useful tool for the movement, but this “good” she carries alongside a big old loaf of shallow & Immoral treachery. She’ll wear the reader out.
This was an invigorating read for me (though I read it in segments at night, tired after working 12 hours and then watching baseball for 3 hours after dinner) because Lessing’s prose and interesting characters were fascinating. I got into the head of these people, wondering at the harsh divisions in the UK in the early 1980s and how this ferment could attract and alternative, violent version of home-grown terrorist. Something big happens at the end, I won’t spoil your plot, but Alice’s reaction to it explains how it could happen this way. And in the news, these things have happened throughout history, when there is no hope in the structures of society.
I can’t say this was a perfect novel, its bleakness wore me out (and I have massive tolerance for that usually) but I could not turn away because it felt so real and was so interesting. There was an aspect of Alice’s response to horror that I found inauthentic. So I’ll knock off a star for Doris not sticking the landing and not turning at least one of her characters to the light or greener fields. She needed to blend a little sucrose into the citric.
December 2, 2013
I found the staccato, pile-up syntax grating at first, but by the end of the book I was engrossed. That restless, angular, off-putting voice, I soon realised, not only conveys the world, ‘raw and dismal’, through Alice’s eyes, but also Alice and her world through Lessing’s. A Communist who hasn’t read Marx, a hostile daughter who steals from her own family, yet also a driven homemaker and fearless opponent of bureaucratic injustice, Alice’s triumphant judgements of others are simultaneously Lessing’s stinging condemnations of her central character’s moral blindness. The book was criticised in the NYT for not allowing Alice greater self-awareness, but the situation she creates for herself was highly unlikely to permit that – the greater the violence one indulges in, the more one needs to defend one’s behaviour. Rather, the book offers passages which peel away the abrasive layers of her personality like old wallpaper, giving us brief glimpses of Alice’s searing empathy for vulnerable others, but also of the lonely, unfulfilled woman she can never – without flaring up in angry self-pity - acknowledge. I found her emotional displacement far more tragic and realistic than any psychological breakdown or guilt-ridden revelation on her part would have been. In a sense a disquisition on social and political violence, the book prises open a jarring complex of abusive behaviours - state violence, childhood trauma, emotional blackmail, terrorist atrocity - and tracks their mutual dependence. ‘Battered babies grow up,’ Roberta insists. Sometimes into not very likable people - but that’s all the more reason to care what happens to them.
February 18, 2020
I requested my library get this book after listening to an abridgment of this story on BBC Radio 4. Wow! The story held my attention. The main character is compelling. She drives you crazy, and then you root her on.
The description of England at this time and how it made the youth quite disaffected is absorbing. I loved it!
The description of England at this time and how it made the youth quite disaffected is absorbing. I loved it!
February 24, 2021
Kitap çok güzel gidiyor. Siyaseti, siyasete çok bulaşmadan, karekterleri için anlatıyor.
Alice’e ben sinir oldum. İstiyor ki tek gerçek onunki. Dünyayı değiştirecek ama sağdan soldan toplanan parayla. Canım madem özgür biri olmak istiyorsun kendi ayaklarının üstünde dur, kimseden medet umma. Bir de çok şanslı bir kız değil mi ya? Zor çözülecek her şeyi ‘o gün yine şansı yaver gitmişti’ sayesinde çözüyor? Jasper ise tam bir asalak. Okurken ben sinir oldum. Mansplainingin vücut bulmuş hali. Ama sıkıntı işte, kendinle barışık olamaman. Yani kabul etse ne olduğunu belki de yol alacak. Alice ve Jasper ilişkisinde de ben alice’i haksız buluyorum canım, kimse kusura bakmasın.
Ev sorunlarına gelince, neden her yük Alice’te, ne kadar utanmazlar. Gerçi kimse bir değişiklik bir yardım da istemedi aslında ama. Faye’nin işine gelince deli olma durumu peki? Faye’nin sonu beni baya mutlu etti.
Kitap kulubümüzün ilk kitabıydı bu ve ben baya sevdim. 👏
Alice’e ben sinir oldum. İstiyor ki tek gerçek onunki. Dünyayı değiştirecek ama sağdan soldan toplanan parayla. Canım madem özgür biri olmak istiyorsun kendi ayaklarının üstünde dur, kimseden medet umma. Bir de çok şanslı bir kız değil mi ya? Zor çözülecek her şeyi ‘o gün yine şansı yaver gitmişti’ sayesinde çözüyor? Jasper ise tam bir asalak. Okurken ben sinir oldum. Mansplainingin vücut bulmuş hali. Ama sıkıntı işte, kendinle barışık olamaman. Yani kabul etse ne olduğunu belki de yol alacak. Alice ve Jasper ilişkisinde de ben alice’i haksız buluyorum canım, kimse kusura bakmasın.
Ev sorunlarına gelince, neden her yük Alice’te, ne kadar utanmazlar. Gerçi kimse bir değişiklik bir yardım da istemedi aslında ama. Faye’nin işine gelince deli olma durumu peki? Faye’nin sonu beni baya mutlu etti.
Kitap kulubümüzün ilk kitabıydı bu ve ben baya sevdim. 👏
March 27, 2017
الإرهابية الطيبة / دوريس ليسنغ
نشرت عام 1985 تدور أحداثها في ضواحي لندن ، تتضمن أحداث ثمانينات القرن العشرين من تفجيرات و أعمال تخريبية في بعض المحلات و الشوارع في لندن .. و نُسبت هذه الأحداث إلى مجموعة من الهواة و المشاغبين ، هذه الرواية تعالج بيئة هؤلاء الهواة ، و ما ترمي إليه حياتهم التي دفعتهم للقيام بهذه الحماقات ..
" آليس " هي بطلة الرواية .. فتاة بعمر السادسة و الثلاثين ، لا تجد ما تفعله سوى ترميم المنازل المهجورة و التسكع مع فتيان أعمارهم لا تتجاوز الثلاثين ، من الجدير بالذكر ، أن كل شخصية عرضتها الكاتبة كانت تحمل في طياتها الكثير .. آليس علاقتها المتزعّزعة مع والديّها ، لا تجد ما تفعله سوى البحث عن ملجأ ، لذلك نجدها تتصرف في كل موقف و هي بالفعل كانت قادرة على حل كل المشكلات و التصرف بشكل لائق ، كالأم الحنون ، تقول دوريس ليسنغ عن بطلتها : " هذا التخطيط المفصل و الترتيب كان يجعلها تشعر بأنها أفضل حالا . كان هذا هو ما تبرع فيه ، كانت تشعر بأنها تسيطر على كل شيء مرة واحدة . " ، حسنا ، آليس تدبرت كل أمور منزل رقم 43 و كانت هي المكترثة الوحيدة في التفاصيل الصغيرة المهمة ، و على الرغم من أنها كانت تدرك بأنهم سيغادرون المنزل في وقت ما ، كانت آليس تتشبث به و ترفض أن تتخلى عن مساعيها في تصليحات و ترميمات البيت ، يا للبؤس ! لا شيء مفيد ، أو فكرة ناضجة تتمسك بها ، فتتخبط في تفاصيل غير مهمة ، و في السعي لإرضاء أُناس لا تملك أدنى صلة بهم ، في حين من كانوا بحاجة إليها كوالدتها ، تركتهم و تخبطت في ضلال البحث عن الإستقلالية و الشعارات الزائفة بإسم السياسة و الثورة .. و هذا لا يتعلق فقط بآليس ، بل بجميع سكان منزل 43 ..
نهاية الرواية : هذه الطيبة تتدرج شخصيتها .. لأعمال تخريبية ، كالمشاركة في تفجير ، حتى أنها لم تحاول أن تعلن رفضها لم يحاولون القيام به .. بل رضخت ، و السبب الوحيد لرضوخها ، هو رغبتها في الشعور بالإثارة و روح الجماعة ! لم يدركوا عواقب أفعالهم و لم يكتفوا عند هذا الحد .. فالإرهاب الذي قاموا به ، لا صلة له بالسياسة و لا بالثورة و لا بأية أهداف أو إيدلوجيات .. بل نابع من أنفسهم ، و نزعتهم للعنف .. بل أعطوا مبرر لأفعالهم و كأنهم هم على حق .. و هذا كله سوء إنضباط و تنشئة و ميلهم المستميت للفراغ .
نشرت عام 1985 تدور أحداثها في ضواحي لندن ، تتضمن أحداث ثمانينات القرن العشرين من تفجيرات و أعمال تخريبية في بعض المحلات و الشوارع في لندن .. و نُسبت هذه الأحداث إلى مجموعة من الهواة و المشاغبين ، هذه الرواية تعالج بيئة هؤلاء الهواة ، و ما ترمي إليه حياتهم التي دفعتهم للقيام بهذه الحماقات ..
" آليس " هي بطلة الرواية .. فتاة بعمر السادسة و الثلاثين ، لا تجد ما تفعله سوى ترميم المنازل المهجورة و التسكع مع فتيان أعمارهم لا تتجاوز الثلاثين ، من الجدير بالذكر ، أن كل شخصية عرضتها الكاتبة كانت تحمل في طياتها الكثير .. آليس علاقتها المتزعّزعة مع والديّها ، لا تجد ما تفعله سوى البحث عن ملجأ ، لذلك نجدها تتصرف في كل موقف و هي بالفعل كانت قادرة على حل كل المشكلات و التصرف بشكل لائق ، كالأم الحنون ، تقول دوريس ليسنغ عن بطلتها : " هذا التخطيط المفصل و الترتيب كان يجعلها تشعر بأنها أفضل حالا . كان هذا هو ما تبرع فيه ، كانت تشعر بأنها تسيطر على كل شيء مرة واحدة . " ، حسنا ، آليس تدبرت كل أمور منزل رقم 43 و كانت هي المكترثة الوحيدة في التفاصيل الصغيرة المهمة ، و على الرغم من أنها كانت تدرك بأنهم سيغادرون المنزل في وقت ما ، كانت آليس تتشبث به و ترفض أن تتخلى عن مساعيها في تصليحات و ترميمات البيت ، يا للبؤس ! لا شيء مفيد ، أو فكرة ناضجة تتمسك بها ، فتتخبط في تفاصيل غير مهمة ، و في السعي لإرضاء أُناس لا تملك أدنى صلة بهم ، في حين من كانوا بحاجة إليها كوالدتها ، تركتهم و تخبطت في ضلال البحث عن الإستقلالية و الشعارات الزائفة بإسم السياسة و الثورة .. و هذا لا يتعلق فقط بآليس ، بل بجميع سكان منزل 43 ..
نهاية الرواية : هذه الطيبة تتدرج شخصيتها .. لأعمال تخريبية ، كالمشاركة في تفجير ، حتى أنها لم تحاول أن تعلن رفضها لم يحاولون القيام به .. بل رضخت ، و السبب الوحيد لرضوخها ، هو رغبتها في الشعور بالإثارة و روح الجماعة ! لم يدركوا عواقب أفعالهم و لم يكتفوا عند هذا الحد .. فالإرهاب الذي قاموا به ، لا صلة له بالسياسة و لا بالثورة و لا بأية أهداف أو إيدلوجيات .. بل نابع من أنفسهم ، و نزعتهم للعنف .. بل أعطوا مبرر لأفعالهم و كأنهم هم على حق .. و هذا كله سوء إنضباط و تنشئة و ميلهم المستميت للفراغ .
May 25, 2014
16/5 - I'm a bit scared to start this because it looks deep and complicated and I'm worried I won't understand it. The plot sounds interesting, but the language could be difficult. A bit like what happened with Blood Meridian. Okay, here I go... To be continued...
18/5 - I'm not a fan of well and truly adult women (she's 36!) behaving like innocent 17-year-olds. For the last 39 pages Alice has behaved like a fool; begging for handouts from her parents (50 pounds), verbally and nearly physically abused by her petulant, idiotic boyfriend Jasper and being generally annoying in her naïve belief that the council will ever take the side of some scruffy-looking squatters over the chance to make more money. Council greed, narrow-mindedness and stupidity is pretty much universal and unchanged by the passing of the years. Mum says I should, but I just can't work up enough energy to feel any empathy for a woman crying over a blocked toilet ('evil men' filled the bowls with cement in attempt to make it impossible to use the house as a squat). Why is she with Jasper? Her internal monologue suggests a strong, intelligent woman (despite getting teary over toilets), so why is she allowing Jasper to treat her like dirt.
At least the language has been normal, so that's a hurdle I don't have to worry about. To be continued...
Later on page 58 - She wants to abolish fascist imperialism? How can anyone abolish a way of thinking? Take Nazism, for example, if any 'ism' has been 'abolished' or anything close to it, it's Nazism. And yet, there are still pockets, or communities, of Nazis all over the world, thinking the way they want to think and no public or government movement is going to change their minds. One minute Alice is determined to achieve her goals (mostly unattainable though they may be) and the next she's saying/thinking the stupidest, most naïve thoughts a 36-year-old has ever thought. If I didn't know any better I'd thinks she's been borrowed from one of the rubbish YA novels that kindly Khanh reads for public amusement and edification and safety. To be continued...
22/5 - Alice is beginning to grow on me, plus she hasn't behaved like a whiny teenager for at least 50 pages, so my annoyance with her is fading. I don't understand what Andrew from next door put in the pit in their yard, but Alice did. It's unclear to me whether the reader should have known or not. Hopefully it's revealed more transparently later in the story. To be continued...
Later - I have to ask again, what does Alice gain from her relationship with Jasper? She hasn't come out and stated it to the reader outright, but it seems clear to me why Jasper is with Alice, but I don't see what she gets out of it. He takes the majority of the money she begs, steals, and borrows; he treats her like crap, and all for what? She claims she loves him, appears to have romantic and intimate thoughts about him but is well aware of his proclivities. He rebuffs any show of affection from her and shows almost none at all toward her. She feels lucky if he allows her to sleep in the same room, even if it is in sleeping bags on opposite sides of the room. That's not love, that's not even plutonic friendship. That's one person using another's emotions against them, emotional blackmail. To be continued...
Later on page 179 - Alice is transforming before my very eyes. The more times she spends with Comrade Andrew from next door, the more I see how truly dangerous she could be. The other inhabitants of No. 43 just seem to be playing at the game of being revolutionaries - going to the picket line because it's fun, or it's the least that's expected of a CCU member, doing small stuff like getting arrested at a protest rally - while Alice sits at home cleaning up the squat and putting on an innocuous, mothering front. All the while she's watching people, reading their true natures on their faces, and deciding who will be useful at a later date. If she does decide to do something I hope she starts with drop-kicking Jasper right out of the squat, and her life. She's just played a game of 'what if' with herself, imagining her life without the millstone that is Jasper dragging her down. I cheered, but then she reminded herself that she loves him, and I booed. To be continued...
Later on page 234 - Who or what were Cruise (pretty sure she's not talking about Tom), Trident and the Women of Greenham Common? Have to look them up.
Alice is so blind! She hates the bourgeoisie, but has no problem taking and spending their money. Does it never occur to her to wonder where the bourgeois class gets their money? They work for it. It's not handed to them by their wealthy parents, as often seems to be the case for Alice and those she supports. Why do they eat out or get takeaway so much? Were the 80s a time when home brand spaghetti and home brand Bolognese sauce cost more than fish 'n' chips? Otherwise, it just seems wasteful. The same with all the cigarettes. If they were really feeling the crunch those are some luxuries, some middle class luxuries they could have been going without to save money. To be continued...
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
25/5 - Phew, finished it! It was so DNFy that I wasn't sure I was going to be able to. It picked up in the middle, but then the last 30 pages or so, got a bit weird and left me wondering what was really going on. The conclusion was confusing and seemed to be purposefully tempting the reader to disbelieve what they'd read, to think that maybe Alice had been experiencing some kind of breakdown, and the majority of the book was all in her head.
I don't know what the summaries from the backs of the other editions of The Good Terrorist say, or infer, about the story, but mine was very misleading:
'In a London squat, a band of revolutionaries unite in their loathing for the waste and cruelty they see in the world around them. But soon they become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence.
Only Alice, motherly, practical and determined seems capable of organising anything. She likes to be on the battlefront: picketing, being bound over and spray-painting slogans. But her enthusiasm is also easy to exploit and she soon becomes ideal fodder for the group's more dangerous and potent cause. When their naïve radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, they realise that their lives will never be the same again.'
'But soon they become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence.' This is only true if 'soon' is defined as being 300+ pages into a 397 page book. The first 300 pages are focused on Alice and her efforts to clean up the house and look after the other squatters.
'her enthusiasm is also easy to exploit and she soon becomes ideal fodder for the group's more dangerous and potent cause.'
That sentence makes it sound like Alice is tricked into providing assistance with a mission without realising the danger she's in, but that's not what happens AT ALL. The most danger Alice is in is of being taken advantage of because she's so good at looking after people and sorting out crises. The other squatters quickly begin to look in her direction whenever there's a household or personal duty to take care of. They never think of doing anything themselves. A couple of them (Faye) say "Oh, I don't care if you fix up the house. So, it's all your responsibility to look after and it needs to be your money that gets spent." but I'm never going to believe that people would rather pee and poo in buckets that never get emptied, they just sit there polluting the second level of the house with the smell, than have the toilets and water restored for the princely sum of 50 pounds.
'When their naïve radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, they realise that their lives will never be the same again.'
The 'chaos of real destruction' happened with less than 20 pages to go, not giving the characters time to think of their futures. One by one, over the next eleven pages, Jasper, Bert, Caroline, Jocelin, and Roberta left No. 43, leaving Alice six pages to quietly unravel through an internal monologue running her head. I call false advertising - that blurb bears very little resemblance to what Lessing wrote.
Not a lot happened in The Good Terrorist, I was expecting a story where Alice was a revolutionary who didn't really want to be a revolutionary. She joined, not really understanding what she was getting into, and then once she did see she did everything she could to keep the others calm and turn them away from acts of violence. It only works to start with and eventually she is forced to participate in the main goal, mass destruction. She does everything she can to spoil the plans or get the police involved (she doesn't want her friends arrested, she just doesn't want innocent people to die), but they don't listen or don't believe her and the final climax would feature the 'mass destruction', Alice's role in it and the aftermath. That's the kind of book I was expecting, not a domestic drama; what I got was much more, perhaps too much, focused on Alice's 'renovations on a budget'. 3.5 stars.
18/5 - I'm not a fan of well and truly adult women (she's 36!) behaving like innocent 17-year-olds. For the last 39 pages Alice has behaved like a fool; begging for handouts from her parents (50 pounds), verbally and nearly physically abused by her petulant, idiotic boyfriend Jasper and being generally annoying in her naïve belief that the council will ever take the side of some scruffy-looking squatters over the chance to make more money. Council greed, narrow-mindedness and stupidity is pretty much universal and unchanged by the passing of the years. Mum says I should, but I just can't work up enough energy to feel any empathy for a woman crying over a blocked toilet ('evil men' filled the bowls with cement in attempt to make it impossible to use the house as a squat). Why is she with Jasper? Her internal monologue suggests a strong, intelligent woman (despite getting teary over toilets), so why is she allowing Jasper to treat her like dirt.
At least the language has been normal, so that's a hurdle I don't have to worry about. To be continued...
Later on page 58 - She wants to abolish fascist imperialism? How can anyone abolish a way of thinking? Take Nazism, for example, if any 'ism' has been 'abolished' or anything close to it, it's Nazism. And yet, there are still pockets, or communities, of Nazis all over the world, thinking the way they want to think and no public or government movement is going to change their minds. One minute Alice is determined to achieve her goals (mostly unattainable though they may be) and the next she's saying/thinking the stupidest, most naïve thoughts a 36-year-old has ever thought. If I didn't know any better I'd thinks she's been borrowed from one of the rubbish YA novels that kindly Khanh reads for public amusement and edification and safety. To be continued...
22/5 - Alice is beginning to grow on me, plus she hasn't behaved like a whiny teenager for at least 50 pages, so my annoyance with her is fading. I don't understand what Andrew from next door put in the pit in their yard, but Alice did. It's unclear to me whether the reader should have known or not. Hopefully it's revealed more transparently later in the story. To be continued...
Later - I have to ask again, what does Alice gain from her relationship with Jasper? She hasn't come out and stated it to the reader outright, but it seems clear to me why Jasper is with Alice, but I don't see what she gets out of it. He takes the majority of the money she begs, steals, and borrows; he treats her like crap, and all for what? She claims she loves him, appears to have romantic and intimate thoughts about him but is well aware of his proclivities. He rebuffs any show of affection from her and shows almost none at all toward her. She feels lucky if he allows her to sleep in the same room, even if it is in sleeping bags on opposite sides of the room. That's not love, that's not even plutonic friendship. That's one person using another's emotions against them, emotional blackmail. To be continued...
Later on page 179 - Alice is transforming before my very eyes. The more times she spends with Comrade Andrew from next door, the more I see how truly dangerous she could be. The other inhabitants of No. 43 just seem to be playing at the game of being revolutionaries - going to the picket line because it's fun, or it's the least that's expected of a CCU member, doing small stuff like getting arrested at a protest rally - while Alice sits at home cleaning up the squat and putting on an innocuous, mothering front. All the while she's watching people, reading their true natures on their faces, and deciding who will be useful at a later date. If she does decide to do something I hope she starts with drop-kicking Jasper right out of the squat, and her life. She's just played a game of 'what if' with herself, imagining her life without the millstone that is Jasper dragging her down. I cheered, but then she reminded herself that she loves him, and I booed. To be continued...
Later on page 234 - Who or what were Cruise (pretty sure she's not talking about Tom), Trident and the Women of Greenham Common? Have to look them up.
Alice is so blind! She hates the bourgeoisie, but has no problem taking and spending their money. Does it never occur to her to wonder where the bourgeois class gets their money? They work for it. It's not handed to them by their wealthy parents, as often seems to be the case for Alice and those she supports. Why do they eat out or get takeaway so much? Were the 80s a time when home brand spaghetti and home brand Bolognese sauce cost more than fish 'n' chips? Otherwise, it just seems wasteful. The same with all the cigarettes. If they were really feeling the crunch those are some luxuries, some middle class luxuries they could have been going without to save money. To be continued...
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
25/5 - Phew, finished it! It was so DNFy that I wasn't sure I was going to be able to. It picked up in the middle, but then the last 30 pages or so, got a bit weird and left me wondering what was really going on. The conclusion was confusing and seemed to be purposefully tempting the reader to disbelieve what they'd read, to think that maybe Alice had been experiencing some kind of breakdown, and the majority of the book was all in her head.
I don't know what the summaries from the backs of the other editions of The Good Terrorist say, or infer, about the story, but mine was very misleading:
'In a London squat, a band of revolutionaries unite in their loathing for the waste and cruelty they see in the world around them. But soon they become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence.
Only Alice, motherly, practical and determined seems capable of organising anything. She likes to be on the battlefront: picketing, being bound over and spray-painting slogans. But her enthusiasm is also easy to exploit and she soon becomes ideal fodder for the group's more dangerous and potent cause. When their naïve radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, they realise that their lives will never be the same again.'
'But soon they become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence.' This is only true if 'soon' is defined as being 300+ pages into a 397 page book. The first 300 pages are focused on Alice and her efforts to clean up the house and look after the other squatters.
'her enthusiasm is also easy to exploit and she soon becomes ideal fodder for the group's more dangerous and potent cause.'
That sentence makes it sound like Alice is tricked into providing assistance with a mission without realising the danger she's in, but that's not what happens AT ALL. The most danger Alice is in is of being taken advantage of because she's so good at looking after people and sorting out crises. The other squatters quickly begin to look in her direction whenever there's a household or personal duty to take care of. They never think of doing anything themselves. A couple of them (Faye) say "Oh, I don't care if you fix up the house. So, it's all your responsibility to look after and it needs to be your money that gets spent." but I'm never going to believe that people would rather pee and poo in buckets that never get emptied, they just sit there polluting the second level of the house with the smell, than have the toilets and water restored for the princely sum of 50 pounds.
'When their naïve radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, they realise that their lives will never be the same again.'
The 'chaos of real destruction' happened with less than 20 pages to go, not giving the characters time to think of their futures. One by one, over the next eleven pages, Jasper, Bert, Caroline, Jocelin, and Roberta left No. 43, leaving Alice six pages to quietly unravel through an internal monologue running her head. I call false advertising - that blurb bears very little resemblance to what Lessing wrote.
Not a lot happened in The Good Terrorist, I was expecting a story where Alice was a revolutionary who didn't really want to be a revolutionary. She joined, not really understanding what she was getting into, and then once she did see she did everything she could to keep the others calm and turn them away from acts of violence. It only works to start with and eventually she is forced to participate in the main goal, mass destruction. She does everything she can to spoil the plans or get the police involved (she doesn't want her friends arrested, she just doesn't want innocent people to die), but they don't listen or don't believe her and the final climax would feature the 'mass destruction', Alice's role in it and the aftermath. That's the kind of book I was expecting, not a domestic drama; what I got was much more, perhaps too much, focused on Alice's 'renovations on a budget'. 3.5 stars.
March 8, 2017
هذا الكتاب بائس فعلًا .
يتحدث عن مجموعة احداث يومية لمجموعة ثوّار (هواة بالطبع) من وجهة نظر أليس ولا بأس في ذلك لكن الترجمة قتلت اسلوب دوريس ليسنج جدًا ! اسلوب باهت .
الشيء الوحيد الجيد فيه كان قدرة أليس على توقع الشخصيات بدقة والباقي مضجر .
اعتذر لكن سحر توفيق لم تكن موفقة في الترجمة .
يتحدث عن مجموعة احداث يومية لمجموعة ثوّار (هواة بالطبع) من وجهة نظر أليس ولا بأس في ذلك لكن الترجمة قتلت اسلوب دوريس ليسنج جدًا ! اسلوب باهت .
الشيء الوحيد الجيد فيه كان قدرة أليس على توقع الشخصيات بدقة والباقي مضجر .
اعتذر لكن سحر توفيق لم تكن موفقة في الترجمة .
Read
April 7, 2008I hated this damn book. I was forced to read it for class, and now I have to write a fucking 10-page paper on it by Wednesday. Every page was torturous to read. Nothing happened until the very end, and even that sucked. I recommend that you never read this book. There was not one character or plot line worth investing a second of your life on. Thanks for listening.
March 2, 2018
From BBC Radio 4 Extra:
Episode 1 of 2
A band of inept revolutionaries in a London squat are trying to court the IRA while Alice is homemaking. Stars Olivia Vinall.
Episode 2 of 2
Faye is found bleeding after a suicide attempt, but Alice has promised not to involve the authorities.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09s...
Episode 1 of 2
A band of inept revolutionaries in a London squat are trying to court the IRA while Alice is homemaking. Stars Olivia Vinall.
Episode 2 of 2
Faye is found bleeding after a suicide attempt, but Alice has promised not to involve the authorities.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09s...
Read
September 1, 2016I read this whole thing on a plane from Helsinki to New York.
THE STYLE. I don't think I've ever read a book that does quite what this one does with style. Alice Mellings is appreciably manic in a way that's absolutely intentional, and yet that is and isn't what the book is about. As she flits through life and the events of her days, making them both more and less significant than they should be, but never at the right times, you become exhausted when she's tired and energized when she's energized. I skimmed the other goodreads reviews and yet didn't see one that touched on the possibility of Alice having a mental illness, which is something I thought of nearly immediately upon picking up the book. I have no idea if that's intentional or not.
THE STYLE. I don't think I've ever read a book that does quite what this one does with style. Alice Mellings is appreciably manic in a way that's absolutely intentional, and yet that is and isn't what the book is about. As she flits through life and the events of her days, making them both more and less significant than they should be, but never at the right times, you become exhausted when she's tired and energized when she's energized. I skimmed the other goodreads reviews and yet didn't see one that touched on the possibility of Alice having a mental illness, which is something I thought of nearly immediately upon picking up the book. I have no idea if that's intentional or not.
May 6, 2016
اوایل کار، سخت بود خواندن این کتاب برای من. یعنی خیلی کند بود و شخصیتها همه روی اعصاب بودند. سردرگمی عجیبی هست و شخصیت آلیس هم که درست از آن آدمهایی هستند که با طرز تفکر و اعمالشان حرص من را درمیآورند. البته ماجرا رفتهرفته جالبتر شد و به نظرم پایانبندی خوبی داشت.
فکر میکنم نویسنده به عمد از این شیوهی روایت استفاده کرد تا با زبان بیزبانی نظر خود را در مورد این شخصیتها و این طور اعمال بگوید. اسم کتاب هم که فکر میکنم تا حدودی گویاست.
این کتاب البته یک جورایی هم در تأیید نظر شخصی خودم است که صرف داشتن نیت خوب باعث بهبود اوضاع نمیشود، بلکه مهمتر از آن واقعگرایی و داشتن درک درست و واقعگرا (نه ایدهآل) از شرایط است
فکر میکنم نویسنده به عمد از این شیوهی روایت استفاده کرد تا با زبان بیزبانی نظر خود را در مورد این شخصیتها و این طور اعمال بگوید. اسم کتاب هم که فکر میکنم تا حدودی گویاست.
این کتاب البته یک جورایی هم در تأیید نظر شخصی خودم است که صرف داشتن نیت خوب باعث بهبود اوضاع نمیشود، بلکه مهمتر از آن واقعگرایی و داشتن درک درست و واقعگرا (نه ایدهآل) از شرایط است
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