I did not finish this book. In fact I could not. It was my taste as a consumer of books that prohibited me.Oh sure, I've set aside books before. I've even set aside books with no intention of continuing them in the future. But never with as adamant a certainty that I would never again pick up the book in order to give it a second chance.Some may question my ability to judge a book based only on a partial reading, which is fair, but trust me: this book is Bad.Doris Lessing's The Cleft may actuall...

A Review…and a Few QuestionsIn June, 1992, Doris Lessing wrote an Op-ed for the NY Times entitled, “Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer.” The questions that Lessing especially does not want to hear are, “What is the story really about? What does it mean?” In other words, we must take her stories at face value and see them as just that – works of her imagination, nothing more.After finishing “The Cleft,” however, it seems impossible not to ask those questions. On the surface, Lessing’s latest...

I am thoroughly surprised by the other reviews of this book. I thought I had made a bad choice when I read some of them but I loved this book, well, I loved the clever, witty gender politics that ran all the way through it just underneath the story. I couldn't help thinking all the way through that Lessing was poking fun at "the battle of the sexes" while making some very pertinient points about our patriarchal society. I loved the ironic twist that a man was re-writing history but with a kind o...

What some people have found disturbing and difficult to read, I have found interesting and engaging. Lessing's The Cleft offers the reader an almost non-fiction account of an alternative creation story. Some reviewers on here have argued against lack of characters or direction, but that is precisely the point. It is meant to be read as an historical account. It is the narrator's story (a Roman historian) that becomes the fictionalised character - and whilst I don't find him that interesting, he

I think it was the idea of the book that kept me reading it....I was spurred on by my own curiosity about the premise more than the actual story that was told.

An interesting alternative view to evolution, but at its heart it was "Men are From Mars Women are from Venus" meets "The Lord of the Flies". A quick read that seems to drive home the differences between the sexes, sometimes annoyingly so. I enjoyed the narrator's viewpoint as a male in the Roman society illustrating, in a much less hit-you-upside-the-head style, that the differences remain. And of course as a modern reader it causes one to consider that if not much changed between Paleolithic a...

Lessing's novel proposes a new creation myth, one of a first race of females, the "Clefts", that give birth to males, "Monsters" (later, "Squirts"). That THE CLEFT is both a clever satire of gender roles as well as a thoroughly entertaining book is because of Lessing's talent for humanizing shards of a fictional myth. She does this vis-a-vis an elderly Roman historian who is writing his account of the history of the Clefts. This makes for an interesting, if at times fractured, framing device for...

nothing in this book is like i expected it's not connected, not interesting and definitely not convincing enough. the only thing i liked about this book is that she called boys stupid multiple times.

I liked the unusual, story-telling, almost biblical style of this story. You have the feeling that you are sitting near the chimney at a time when tv, radio and the internet did not exist and that you are listening to a story told by a wise elder.I also liked Doris Lessing's observation of the human nature, the description of women that "are" and men that "do", of women that give and care about life and men that are restless and seek to discover and conquer. The description of this fundamental h...

i'm surprised this book has such a low rating on goodreads. maybe i shouldn't be. lessing's idea here, that women came first, and men evolved later, might be shocking or disgusting to some people. this isn't a 'normal' novel in that there aren't characters, per se, that one follows their development (though lessing does give a few names to key players in her narrative). the story is told by a roman historian who is sifting through documents, trying to make a cohesive story of the beginning of hu...

The author takes infanticide, incest, genital mutilation, murder, and rape as a matter-of-fact instinctual course of humanity. I'm sorry, but I just can't continue reading this drivel. Call me a prude if you must. When I saw a picture of a 90-year-old author on the back cover of a nobel-prize-winning novel, I certainly didn't expect such a trashy novel. There is no reason that pre-history novels have to assume that humans started out on this awful course. I like the author's writing style and th...

I didn’t particularly like the format of this book. The first 30 pages or so were the most interesting and the rest hardly added anything.

Now! What is it about all these terrible ratings? Accusations of sexism? Of the text lacking quality/being boring? I can identify so little with previous reviews of this work that I made it a point to write a review for this one. I had never read Lessing before and when I read the synopsis for this one I knew that it was just meant to be. It is definitely not what I had expected – I had hoped it would be a cleverer version of Herland, maybe. It does share certain similarities with Gilman’s sepa

Lessing is a class-A writer which is the only reason this isn't an even lower score. The main issue is simply that this is a history not a story and historie real or feigned are just never that exciting.This one is told from the point of view of an ancient roman scholar putting together a forbidden history from various fragments. The main conceit being that this version of mythology/history claims that women where the first sex and males where some later after thought.This conceit doesn't really...

To the Nobel Prize for Literature committee of 2007: what were you smoking?I read “The Cleft” on a flight from Sydney to San Francisco. One hour into the flight, we encountered turbulence and it didn’t abate for the next couple of hours. The movie (singular, because this was a United-breaks-guitars flight) was crap. I was trapped in my seat by the fasten seatbelts sign, and in any case even the flight crew had hit the deck in crouched position. I was 70 pages into “The Cleft” when the turbulence...

I expected to whip through this book but found that I needed to read it a little slower to absorb what the author was trying to convey. I almost didn’t finish it. Around page 160, I was completely frustrated on how the book was written and decided to read some reviews to help clarify what the author was trying to do. Well, I’m glad I did! It changed my whole attitude. After one review, I realized how brilliant the author was by how realistically portraying how a Roman would have told his story.

I suppose this book earns it's one star by being the straw that broke this 'always finish a novel no matter how good it is' camel's back...About 80 pages from the end and I just cannot. Repetitious, slow (& I have a particularly high tolerance for the meandering novel) and oh my god the painfully binary gender generalisations. Lots to say about them but other reviewers have already been there, one thing to point out - exclusively male and exclusively female civilisations pre any kind of moralisi...

I should caveat this review by saying that I did not finish this book. While it was an interesting premise (a society entirely comprised of women begins bearing males), its message was very obvious and heavy-handed. It was also very repetitious (the narrators continually define and redefine the terms they use for male and female). I would have enjoyed it much more as a short story as it became wearisome to read, but it did have a lot of interesting suggestions about how groups of people react to...

An exercise in unreliable narration that fails to rise above the fundamental flaw of being remarkably dull.

Well that was certainly unique. That's probably about the nicest thing I can say about this book. This was my first foray into the writings of Doris Lessing, who I can see has a brilliant skill worthy of all the recognition she's received, so I don't know if this is a typical Lessing book or something completely different.For me the book was just too hard to follow. I didn't find any connective thread linking everything together, no story arc, no real central conflict, no climax, no central char...