Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jul 2007
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
In the last years of his life, a contemplative Roman senator embarks on one last epic endeavor: to retell the history of human creation and reveal the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child—a boy—the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.
"The novel has elements of a feminist tract, but the story it tells doesn't present a significant challenge to that of Adam and Eve." - PW.
"If we are offered the story as an origin myth of human sexuality and gender, I can't accept it. It is incomplete; it is deeply arbitrary; and I see in it little but a reworking of a tiresome science-fiction cliché - a hive of mindless females is awakened and elevated (to the low degree of which the female is capable) by the wondrous shock of masculinity. A tale of Sleeping Beauties - only they aren't even beautiful. They're a lot of slobbering walruses, till the Prince comes along." - The Guardian (UK).
"Can this be Lessing’s playful comment on her earlier worries about feminist essentialism? Whatever, The Cleft, like Philip Roth's Everyman, has the feeling of a conceptual fable, a pared down form that perhaps only writers who have tried so much else can permit themselves. Where Roth gave us life told as a tale by a mortal and altogether male body, Lessing gives us a myth of origin and a speculation on how sexual difference tumbled us into history where generation is key." - The London Times.
"The Cleft is a strange and controversial sort of novel, though not because of its politics. Readers are unlikely to hate any word of it, but might find themselves puzzled and ultimately disappointed, since the Lessing oeuvre and reputation establish unavoidable expectations." - The Sydney Morning Herald.
"Our ageing narrator is like the novelist herself, trying to interpret individual and collective human behaviour. Musing as to when these early humans began to form one-on-one attachments, he says that he is sure they did not use the word love for he cannot hear it in his head. Which is just how writing fiction works. The Cleft offers more insight as an exploration of telling, than as a comment on gender difference." - The Scotsman.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Doris Lessing was born in 1919. The Grass Is Singing was published in 1950, and since then she went on to publish more than fifty books. Named a Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature in Great Britain, she has been awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in November 2013.
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