The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches - Softcover

Lessing, Doris M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060924179 ISBN 13: 9780060924171

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1993

Synopsis

The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the piece are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, its transitoriness, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing's fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.

About this title

About the Author

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing was one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards. She wrote more than thirty books—among them the novels Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, and The Fifth Child. She died in 2013.

From Kirkus Reviews

In a new collection, Lessing (The Fifth Child, 1988, etc.) again demonstrates the formidable intelligence and lucid vision that make her writing so distinctive. Set mostly in present-day London, the sketches reflect a smaller, more domestic world where pleasures are as simple as watching dogs run in the park (``Pleasures of the Park''), and where characters remember when they were young and the city itself was ``pinko-grey English'' and not the great polyglot city it now is (``In Defence of the Underground''). But the sketches, interesting and perceptive as they are, are secondary to the short stories, which are mainly about the terrible self-absorption that can, if left unchecked, afflict even the most decent men and women. Four are especially fine: ``Debbie and Julie,'' almost clinical in the telling but devastating in effect, is the story of pregnant teenager Julie, who runs away, bears her child alone, and then comes back to her emotionally cold home, having left the baby in a telephone booth because she ``understood that Rosie, her daughter, could not come here, because she, Julie, could not stand it.'' In ``Among the Roses,'' a mother and a congenitally quarrelsome daughter accidentally meet and warily become reconciled as both are admiring a display of roses. Sarah, the abandoned wife of James, with a terrifying insight, suddenly understands (``In the Pit'') why Rose, who supplanted her, behaves so deviously and melodramatically; and in the title story, two couples--both previously married--realize that relationships between the sexes are more complex than they imagined, and learn that there is indeed a place for friendship. No warm and fuzzy feelings here, only bracing truths--but then that's what Lessing has always done best. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0060924179
• ISBN 13: 9780060924171
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224