Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 by Doris Lessing

Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 Reviews

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  scott89119

  After Lessing won her Nobel, I began reading her work, as well as whatever interviews and videos were available. I loved the straightforward way she told her stories, I liked the intelligence she put into them, and I appreciated the scope and breadth of her oeuvre. When I learned that she had a two volume autobiography published I pick it up immediately. It is as frank and enjoyable as you would ever hope it to be. It was fascinating for me to read the story of a proper young girl who would later grow up to be a world renowned author and Nobel laureate. Lessing always tells her story with honesty and candor, sparing no details and taking no victims. I haven't started on her second volume yet, but after the first one I feel like I know her quite well, and have infinite respect for her as an artist. She writes with a non nonsense intellectualism that stands out in world literature. Read her.
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  proton

  Doris Lessing serves up an arrogant, hateful and angry autobiography. She appears to have
  acquired very little insight into the circumstances of her youth.
  
  There is nothing special about the writing.
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  Linda Talisman

  I loved every moment of reading this book.
  It begins with the story of how Doris Taylor's parents' met in the aftermath of World War I, in the hospital where her mother was a nurse and her father was recovering from the loss of a leg. With remarkable vividness she describes her earliest experiences, first in a country house in the mountains of Persia (now Iran) and then in the city of Teheran.
  The Taylors then moved to a farm in Southern Africa. Except the farm wasn't actually there yet when they got there, the land had to be cleared and the house built. Doris describes her father sitting and smoking with the native African foreman of the crew that was building the house, talking with great profundity but just a few words, while the little Doris played nearby. This scene stood out for me, because it seemed to explain why the young Doris always took it for granted that the indigenous people were human beings deserving of equal rights, when the society she was growing up in was based on the premise that they were not. Yet she never mentions her father, whom she also describes as criticizing her mother for speaking disrespectfully to the servants, as a positive influence in this area.
  I loved the book's evocation of landscape; the plants, animals, earth and sky of southern Africa. The girl whose story this is seems a part of that landscape, a creature of bush and veld and vlei. She struck me as unflappable, irrepressible, sensual, and somehow larger than life. When she describes the first money she earned, by shooting some birds and selling them to the local butcher, I imagined her a bronzed Artemis, striding through the bush with a rifle over her shoulder. It seems this was her true home, which she loved passionately, yet where she could not live, because the exploitation of the indigenous people was intolerable and would have driven her insane if she'd stayed. She hasn't exactly described the loss, in so many words, but I feel it, poignantly.
  This autobiography is also a remarkable piece of history, vividly documenting British colonialism in Southern Rhodesia during this period, as well as World War I and its effects on an entire generation, World War II, and the influence of colonial racism in pushing whites who couldn't stand the injustice into communism.
  If you are a Doris Lessing fan, you must read this book. If you'd like a first hand history of the first half of the 20th century, read it. If you're not a Lessing fan because you've tried to read her work and found it too wordy or intellectual, you might really enjoy this one. Loved it!
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  David Schweizer

  This is a hard hitting piece of autobiography. Lessing looks at her parents and their world of colonial mastery from the point of view of her younger, increasingly disenchanted self. Lessing was gathering steam in those years, to emerge as one of the prominent novelists of the post war era. In this, the first of a two volume autobiography, she is beginning to grow critical of her parents, colonialism, white supremacy, men her husband in particular and just beginning to flirt for a short time with the great experiment in group think of the period known as Communism. She falls for it for a time, but not for long. It will take her a while, but she finally emerges along with George Orwell as the most articulate critic of this mindless, toxic form of self imposed mental slavery. She writes of her fellow traveling, communist sympathizing friends as silly people, which strikes me as as good a way to think of them as any. Lessing provides, along with her political autobiography, a lovely evocation of Africa, the landscape and people, about whom she wrote as a young novelist and to whom she has continued to refer throughout her long and continuing career as a writer.
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  elizabeth daniel

  This first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography is an intimate soul searching of her early life into adulthood. Beautifully written and constructed, she views her life with a razor sharp lens of observation and a critical sensitivity. Few writers are capable of the objectivity and honesty she reveals. Her intellect is one of deep and elegant structure.
  
  This is a book that can enrich the reader. She creates an intimacy with her reader that is trusting and challenging. Many of her choices went against established standards: she leaves her husband and children from her first marriage and she has a not casual involvement with the communist party until her eventual disillusionment with it. This is only a part of the framework that also reveals her iconoclastic view of many sacred cows of 20th century culture and literature. She realizes her identity and destiny through her writing. Doris Lessing's origins as a daughter of English colonialists in Africa after World War 1 is exquisitely captured as is her arrival in London as a young woman when she finally, fully claims her own life.
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  mintymoor

  Beautifully, honestly and intelligently written, full of insights. Apart from Doris Lessing's personal life, and particular her free childhood in Africa, the book is also a realistic history of the 20th century in terms of consciousness, English values, the effect of the World Wars, left wing sensibility and communism, colonialism all seen through the prism of Lessing's private and public life. Incidentally, there were a few pages at the end that were deeply shocking
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  georgie44

  Engrossing & brilliant writing!
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  Kindle Customer

  a wonderful book so interesting
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  Ms. Riane Revah

  terribly dense and virtualy unreadable
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  K. F. M. Fisher

  This came after a short delay and was in good c onndition and well wrapped. Rather awkward read as it is personal and depressing !