Re-read after about 7 year's break.One of the unusual things about this, Lessing's first published book, is the extreme omniscient author position she takes. She describes a character's appearance to others, then swoops into her psyche to reveal her thoughts. She describes someone's response to another person's expression and then jumps to his companion's view of him. To emphasise her power even further, she shifts from objective descriptions of the landscape to characters' experiences of it. Ho...

This is a bummer of a novel--a mostly distasteful reading experience. But the honest evocation of human cruelty and misguided actions, alongside the brutal beauty of nature is so powerful and skillfully crafted that everyone should read it anyway.Before becoming Zimbabwe, Southern Rhodesia was a British colony, from 1923 to 1970. Doris Lessing, born in Iran, was six years old when she moved to the country in 1925 with her parents, whose hope (unrealized) it was to make a fortune from farming.“Th...

In her first novel, The Grass is Singing (first published 1950), Doris Lessing begins with a short description of a crime on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe):MURDER MYSTERYBy Special CorrespondentMary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of valuables.For Lessing, the cri...

2.5 Stars The Grass is singing by Dorris Lessing was a bookclub read.I found the book an ok read, I liked the setting of the novel and thought the author conveyed an excellent sense of time and place. The story at the core of this novel is about race and the racist attitudes of society at this time in Southern Rhodesia.The book is a challenging read and I found the characters quite dislikable and a relentless air of doom and gloom about the plot. The novel opens with the announcement in a local

Published in 1950 and set in Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) in the 1940s, the book opens with a news announcement that Mary Turner, wife of struggling local British farmer Richard Turner, has been found murdered on her verandah. The couple’s house attendant, Moses, has been arrested. The neighboring successful farmer, Charlie Slatter, seems anxious to downplay the murder and move on. A young newcomer to the area, Tony Marston, wonders why the authorities do not want to find out what happen...

“It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses.” -Author Unknown****4.5 Stars**** I was shattered with the outcome of this novel. Disturbing. Unflinching. Compulsively readable.

This book is a stunning exposé of why Zimbabwe has Mugabe and why he, evil as he is, is certainly no worse than that great white hope, Sir Cecil Rhodes. The whites in this book, with one exception, are all devotees of Rhodes and his brand of racism - Rhodesia for the whites, the blacks are suitable for being farm animals as they are all simpleminded thieves, liars and hate the white man. It's the same mindset as slavery really. The grass is singing cicada songs, songs of blood, songs of freedom

Doris Lessing's first novel has the precision of a fine short story and the depth of a longer novel. This portrait of the psychological disintegration of a farmer's wife saddled with an ineffectual husband on a luckless South African farm is precisely realized and and completely convincing. The last quarter of the novel, however, is weaker than the rest. The character of the black house servant Moses is more of a symbol than a human being, and the ending--meant to be tragic--descends to melodram...

Colonialism in southern Africa: both sides left in destruction Doris Lessing, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature, tells the incredibly haunting story of the disintegration and descent into madness of Mary and her husband Dick Turner, simultaneously revealing the scathing truths of apartheid-ruled life in Rhodesia. This was her first book, published in 1950. What a debut! I'm stunned, I have goosebumps; I'm unfit to do this book justice, to convey the claustrophobic, solitary descen

If this novel impresses from the very beginning it is because of the openness in which Lessing plays her cards in the first chapter. The voice of the omniscient narrator glows with the clarity of objective facts that is missing in the rest of the novel, replaced by an increasingly suffocating account of two doomed lives that slowly disintegrate in polarized madness.The tragic end of Mary Turner, a white woman, in the hands of Moses, her black servant, in a remote, hostile South African hell is r...

The Grass is Singing is a novel of colonialism, human degradation, and an uncomfortable view of the prevailing attitude of a time and place, and yet, to me it was more so a powerful portrait of a crumbling mind. Mary Turner is a hideous woman; bitter, cruel, entitled. What started out as a woman’s resentment over a boring farm life and a distant marriage soon turned into something deeper and much more unsettling. Sometimes people are broken so early in their life that it’s impossible to ever be

“Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.” ― Doris Lessing, The Grass is SingingAmazing..rating and review to follow.Sometimes a piece of literature comes along that just leaves you speechless. The Grass is singing is one such book.So I believe I read this as a kid. It has been on my TBR list for several years and I wish I had read it sooner. After reading it I did n...

I wouldn't say that I enjoyed this book (because how can you enjoy the telling of the slow but constant decomposition of a woman and her psyche) but I do have to say that it was an engrossing read. Although I could not identify with the characters and rejected their weaknesses and frailties, I could not put the book down. The author creates a wonderful psychological vortex in the hot and arid lands of the African bush and she is not afraid to take it to its ultimate conclusion. The book is also

The Grass is Singing is Doris Lessing's first novel, published in 1950. It is a savage and stark indictment of South Africa's apartheid system. It is set in what was formerly Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and concentrates on Rhodesian white culture with its racist and prejudiced attitudes. The system of gross racial injustice dominates both the society and this story.The novel is told in flashback. At the beginning of chapter one there is a brief news report of the murder of a white woman plu...

There should be a few warnings on the cover of this short novel : contains no likeable characters and many descriptions of really disgusting racist behaviour. I can’t remember reading so much intimate detail about the white racist’s seething physical and mental horror at the very presence of a black person before. This is going to upset some readers for sure. Here is a mild passage about that :She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother’s se...

The Grass Is Singing, Doris LessingThe Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing. The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed off by her black servant Moses for money. The news actually acts like an omen for other white people living in that African setting. After looking at the article, people behave as if the murder was very much expected. The bulk of the novel is a flashback

Today would have been Doris Lessing’s 100th birthday. I had trouble believing that this novel a) was Lessing’s debut and b) is now nearly 70 years old. It felt both fresh and timeless, and I could see how it has inspired writing about the white experience in Africa ever since, especially a book like Fiona Melrose’s Midwinter, in which an English farmer and his son are haunted by the violent death of the young man’s mother back in Zambia 10 years ago.For The Grass Is Singing begins with two sly w...

3.75 starsI always seem to find Lessing difficult to read, and this was no exception. This is Lessing’s first novel and it is set in what is now Zimbabwe in the 1940s. The title is from Eliot’s The Wasteland. Dick Turner is a poor white farmer who wants a wife: he meets Mary and asks her to marry him. The novel starts with Mary’s murder by Moses, one of the black workers on Turner’s farm. The rest of the novel is a linear chronology up to that point. It shows Mary’s disillusion with her life, he...

South AfricaThe novel is set in Rhodesia now Zimbabwe in the 1940s. At this time the country was governed according to the rules of apartheid, a system of institutionalized racism in which the white minority was socially, legally, and politically dominant over the black majority. I had a feeling this was going to be a challenging book for me. The opening chapter is very difficult to read, begins with a newspaper report about the murder of a white woman by a black man, a servant in her house.The...

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” ----F. Scott FitzgeraldDoris Lessing's, the Nobel Prize winning debut book, The Grass is Singing revolves around a youngish woman who after marrying a South African white farmer, and within a few years, looses herself and becomes a victim to immense loneliness as she realizes her husband's constant failure both in his farm as well as in their shared marital li