{"id":287,"date":"2014-03-09T22:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-09T22:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/03\/09\/alfred-and-emily-by-doris-lessing\/"},"modified":"2019-12-31T08:17:19","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T21:17:19","slug":"alfred-and-emily-by-doris-lessing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/alfred-and-emily-by-doris-lessing\/","title":{"rendered":"Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is another book from the not-so-good pile.<br \/>As a devoted fan of Doris Lessing for many, many years, I found <i>Alfred  and Emily<\/i> extremely disappointing; in fact, I wonder if it had not been  better for her literary image if she had never written it. It was a  book that I kept putting to one side, wondering whether or not I would  eventually have the energy to see it through to the end. The prose is  laboured and the two parts &#8211; the real and the fictional &#8211; work against  each other to cause confusion. The idea of writing two stories about her  parents, both as they were and as Lessing would have liked to them to  have been, did not work for me; it is possible that the book may have  gained by being completely factual or completely fictional but not as a  mixture of both. I also felt that Lessing used the book as a platform to  expound on her own talents, which, for me, seemed very out of sync with  what one would expect from Lessing. There is a point where the dancer  hangs up his\/her dancing shoes, and, perhaps, there should also be a  point where the writer lays down his\/her pen.<\/p>\n<div style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-d-eJ6VMfGXU\/UwPeySfNwlI\/AAAAAAAABLY\/4LlnTupeFkw\/s1600\/lessing.jpg\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-d-eJ6VMfGXU\/UwPeySfNwlI\/AAAAAAAABLY\/4LlnTupeFkw\/s1600\/lessing.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp; <\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-size: x-small;\">Photo from mccchurch.org <\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is another book from the not-so-good pile.As a devoted fan of Doris Lessing for many, many years, I found Alfred and Emily extremely disappointing; in fact, I wonder if it had not been better for her literary image if she had never written it. It was a book that I kept putting to one &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"readmore-btn\" href=\"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/alfred-and-emily-by-doris-lessing\/\">+<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diane.eklund.abolins.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}