Mirabell
Former Member
Yes!
I forgot to mention him earlier alongside Roth and DeLillo
(by the way, I keep mentioning DeLillo while I'm not so crazy about his work- apart from Underworld, that is. Anyway.)
Also, I forgot to ask earlier:
Mirabell, I am not familiar with Lessing at all- would you mind elaborating a bit on why she is so influential, if you have the time?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/11cnd-nobel.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=doris lessing&st=cseSpeaking from Frankfurt during its annual international book fair, Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins, which has published Ms. Lessing in the United States and Britain for the last 20 years, said that ?for women and for literature, Doris Lessing is a mother to us all.?
joyce carol oates, another one of those writers whose work bears a heavy Lessing influence wrote this in the 1970s
Joyce Carol Oates - A Visit with Doris LessingYet it is natural, I suppose, for her not to know or to guess how much The Golden Notebook (predating and superseding even the most sophisticated of all the "women's liberation" works) meant to young women of my generation; how beautifully the craftsmanship of her many short stories illuminated lives, the most secret and guarded of private lives, in a style that was never self-conscious or contrived. She could not gauge how The Four-Gated City, evidently a difficult novel for her to write, would work to transform our consciousness not only of the ecological disaster we are facing, the self-annihilating madness of our society which brands its critics as "mad," but also of the possibilities of the open form of the novel itself. Never superficially experimental, Mrs. Lessing's writing is profoundly experimental?exploratory?in its effort to alter our expectations about life and about the range of our own consciousness.
Her books, especially the Martha Quest series, The Golden Notebook, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, have traced an evolutionary progress of the soul, which to some extent transforms the reader as he reads. I think it is true of our greatest writers that their effect on us is delayed, that it may take years for us to understand what they have done to us. Doris Lessing possesses a unique sensitivity, writing out of her own intense experience, her own subjectivity, but at the same time writing out of the spirit of the times. This is a gift that cannot be analyzed; it must only be honored.