I cannot explain why I love The Memoirs of a Survivor, at least not as directly as I can explain my love for the work of James Joyce or Márquez. The story of an unnamed protagonist who takes care of a mysterious girl in the aftermath of an unexplained fall of civilization is not for those who like to have their questions answered. It is for those who like to gather new sets of questions. It approaches human nature without drama, talking about acts of inexplicable violence in the same way as acts...

The Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris LessingThe Memoirs of a Survivor is a dystopian novel by Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing. It was first published in 1974. The story takes place in a near-future Britain where society has broken down due to an unspecified disaster, referred to as "The Crisis." The new society that emerges after the collapse retains many features of the old world but is fundamentally different. What serves as a government in the post-crisis nation is unable to consolidate its auth...

One of the best dystopian works everA woman, living in a great city, somewhere in the future, after some catastrophe has hit the earth, observes how society slowly collapses and living turns into surviving. Suddenly a 12-year-old girl is put into her custody, and a very subtle relationship develops between the two. We see how the girl, Emily (Emile < Rousseau?) gets to know the hard facts of life in a very short period of time. Doris Lessing really succeeds in mixing the different themes (surviv...

It may not be fair for me to rate this book as I was not able to finish it. I even thought of just deleting it from my book list - that's how I don't like it. Tried to read it at different times of the day but I can't help but fall asleep over it, every time! Much as I hate to leave a book unfinished, this isn't just worth my time and effort. I won't mind if people will think of me as shallow, but in my opinion, deep subjects such as the one tackled in this book can be presented in a more intere...

At its many heights, I was reminded of one of my favorite movies ever, 'Spoorlooz' ("The Vanishing"). The golden egg, the absolute elements that make up the inside & the outside, their ever-separation... Yep. Lessing is incredibly able at giving us an "autobiography" that seems more like a Picasso-esque self portrait than anything else; scribbles of nonsense as well as strict, blocky absolutes--all less colorful than in the mind's eye. I was also reminded of those superb short stories by J. G. B...

When I tell others that I am reading Doris Lessing, most people give me a blank stare. Either they have never heard of her, or they have. But, never anything more. I only know one other person who has read Lessing, and that is my my professor of Practical Criticism. And, she is the one that recommended her to me. I was studying post-apocalyptic fiction at the time, and my professor, during one of our conferences about my essay, said that I should try Lessing's work in that sub-genre.So, I gave h...

If I was asked to say what this book was about I would most likely answer “I dunno really, I feel real bad inside for not knowing.” Perhaps after all, one has to end the read by characterising it as a sort of cloud or emanation, but invisible, like the vapour you know is present in the air of the room that you sit in, makes part of the air that you know is there when you look out of a window – your eye is traversing air, so your intellect tells you when you look at a sparrow pecking insects off

Doris Lessing's "The Memoirs of a Survivor" is the ideal novel to read when the threat of social disorder looms (whether it be international terrorism, environmental disruption, war or pandemic). The volume tells the story of a middle class Englishwoman who finds herself unexpected caregiver for an adolescent girl during the worsening aftermath of societal breakdown. Although a dystopian novel, the loss of order occurs more insidiously than in Saramago's "Blindness," the injustices less stark at...

I really liked this book. It might have something to do with the fact that I read it all in one go, which tends to completely absorb you in the world, but I got really caught up in it. Finally, a dystopia which owes nothing explicit to Nineteen Eighty-Four, something original! A modern, British dystopia that actually addresses contemporary issues. Reading this, I imagine, was like reading 1984 within Orwell's time. Frightening because it seems so starkly possible, so relevent to the zeitgeist. I...

I am ridiculously stalled out on this... the writing is just stupidly dense in some ways, and I'm having some problems identifying with the author and her subject. I asked the person who gave me the book for any suggestions, and she told me to just read it, enjoy it, and then read it again to get a feel for some of the heavier subject matter.Now, seriously, it's not a bad novel, but I'm not going to read it twice. Not in a row, and not twice at all. I'm kind of frustrated - this was one of my mo...

I feel compelled to give this remarkable novel five stars for it's sheer audacity and total unwillingness to compromise, that is to say to infect itself, with anything resembling literature--much less realism or any such strategy. No, Memoirs of a Survivor is neither real nor fantasy, if that's the opposite of realism in standard literary jargon. Obviously I'm quite impressed with Lessing's ability to conjure up a whole new beast out of the limbs and organs with which we mad scientists also know...

A surreal and disturbing narrative exploring worldwide social disentegration from the calm, centred perspective of a middle aged woman caring for a mysterious child

Doris Lessing for the most part made her name as a mainstream novelist, while frequently dipping her toes into science-fiction. The most famous example is probably the "Canopus in Argos" space opera series, but she also wrote the dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel "Memoirs of a Survivor" which uses a lot of those genres' basic building blocks in interesting ways.The plot follows an unnamed middle-aged woman (who narrates the book in first person) living in a high-rise apartment complex, where she

This was a slight book (only 182 pages), yet it has taken me a long time to read it. I have been quite busy, but I think I was also infected by the mood of the book, which seems to describe a sort of hiatus between civilisation (as we currently know it) and savagery (a future where violence, theft, murder and cannibalism are “inconsequential”). In the present in this story, the major protaganists (the narrator, Emily, Hugo) are waiting. They are waiting for things to get so bad that they need to...

I really loved this book. It was post-apocalyptic, but without an apocalypse. It was just society falling apart totally dramatically and how people were quite unable to come to grips with that. It was interesting to see how people adapted and carried on, how things changed slowly and were accepted as just another part of normal. It felt so painfully real. The book consisted of three intermingled parts, the destruction of society, the growing up of Emily and the world behind the walls. Of the thr...

Hrm. This book really didn't grab me. It's well written and describes a very believable not-far-future dystopia as civilization slowly decays, and I found that believable and interesting. However, Lessing also has a weird and never-explained parallel world that occasionally opens up, appearing through the wall of the narrator's flat. At first it seems like a heavy-handed metaphor but by the end of the book it seems as if it's genuinely real, a parallel dimension into which they can escape. This

What a most disturbing book. Set sometime in the future where civilisation has all but broken down we are shown what the remnants of society has become through the eyes of a middle aged woman. She, though, is only half in reality and reverts through a wall to explore earlier times and memories. The key person in the story is a teenage girl called Emily who was brought to the house for the narrator to care for. We never learn her name, which is perhaps significant. Emily is resourceful, young and...

I was really captivated by this book for the first 60 pages or so, but after a while it became a bit more of the same and I just found it tedious to get through.

Okay, this is my first Doris Lessing, and I must say I'm not impressed. Apparently a lot of her books are sort of like this one, and I'm starting to see a pattern, when you also take into account J. M. Coetzee's books, specifically: white southern African writers often go for these dehistoricized, lean, spare, high-concept parables as a way of exploring human brutality. This kind of stuff is just red meat to comp. lit. majors and Nobel committees, and I'm sure that the writers themselves feel th...

This was a work of speculative fiction that only Doris Lessing could write. The narrator, whose memoir it is, describes a near (near to 1970s though still plausible today) distopian future. This future is not quite apocalyptic - for the 1%/bourgeoisie life goes on more-or-less as usual. But for everyone else, the order of things gradually disintegrates over the course of the narrative. The power is cut off and then water. People move increasingly to barter economy and theft; to intentional commu...