About this title: The first in Lessings' Children of Violence series, MARTHA QUEST introduces Martha at age 15, chafing at the restraints of her bourgeois home and domineering mother. As soon as she is able, Martha leaves her rural home for the city, where she joins a political left-wing group, has her first sexual experience, and meets and marries her husband. In ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Plume, New York
Date Published: 1964
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. 248 p.; 21 cm. A plume book.. 1970 NAL version. Pages clean, unmarked with light natural age tanning. Binding tight with faint spine crease. Cover shiny and attractive with light edge/shelf wear (sun fading on edge and corner creasing). A very nice copy. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Plume Books
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780452265769ISBN:0452265762
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. some wear to cover at corners and edges; otherwise fine. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 256 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very Good. 0452265762 Condition: VERY GOOD. (Book may have one or a combination of the following characteristics: former library book, cover wear, name written inside cover, light underlining/highlighting, remainder mark, etc. Overall, the book is in solid shape. This is a blanket description. Please email us if you require a specific, detailed description of the book condition. We will typically respond within one week of your request). read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780060976668ISBN:0060976667
Description: Acceptable. Ex-library. 272-Y Books rated "Acceptable" may have significant wear & tear; may have significant amounts of underlining, highlighting, or notes; may have moderate stains, creases, or tears; may have cracked spines or loose pages; may have the previous owner's name, stamp, sticker, or gift inscription; or may be library discards. read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"The relationship between Martha, Joss and Solly was the most interesting dynamic in the book to me. Martha and Joss, what is up? She and Solly are very similar but there is no tension. Classic misunderstanding between a rational and two idealists. I hope this comes up later in the series during their political years."
"I think Doris Lessing is possibly the greatest writer of fiction the world has ever seen. At her best, she can delineate a few characters in a space and make both the characters and the landscape lift off the page into a multidimensional visual and sensory reality in your head. You can smell the Africa that she describes and feel the crises and growth through which her characters expand.
Martha Quest is a superb book, one of her best - deeply autobiographical, and full of penetrating insights into the agony of growing up encompassed by a world full of limits and fears and constraints for which the heroine knows she is too big a spirit.
Doris Lessing has the stature of a modern Jane Austen. There is a legitimate comparison with Jane Austen in Doris Lessing 's brilliant insights into character and her ability to develop the character out of the description of interactions with others - dialogue, observation, reaction. This analysis of interaction is even deeper in Martha Quest than in any Jane Austen novel, because Doris Lessing adds the dimension of acute political insight. Where Lessing goes so much deeper than Austen is that she applies her luminous intelligence and experience to the task of understanding why the backdrop to the characters has the form that it has in each story. In Jane Austen's novels, the background comes alive - you can feel what it was like to live in Highbury or Longbourn or to visit Bath in 1815. But that is all - Jane Austen does not enquire why those places function the way they do; what forces made them so and maintain the relationships of power and authority and custom.
Doris Lessing ’s insight is into a world that begs for political analysis - Southern Rhodesia (referred to in the book as "Zambesia") in the years leading up to the Second World War. On both the black and the white side of the population there are at that time stirrings of major political change, and divisions in society that are so deep as to be unbridgeable.
In this world a girl grows up on a farm with a neurotic mother and a crippled father - just as Doris Lessing did. The book is about that growing up, and the young woman who determines not to give in to the defeat and lassitude that sometimes seem to be willing onto her, but to become a fighter and to make life happen.
Like Jane Austen, Doris Lessing develops subtle interactions among her groups of characters that not only make each character come alive but also drive the development of character and hence plot, naturally. In Lessing and Austen, and in Trollope (unlike, say, Dickens) the plot emerges as a natural progression or force in the story, not requiring the interventions by the author to push the story in the right direction - I hate Dickens’ penchant for the deus ex machina.
Doris Lessing goes this further step, and it is what makes her novels revelatory and revolutionary. She will describe the relationship, say, of a few people on a farm in Rhodesia and people in the shop that supplies them and the people whom they see in the neighbourhood and the neighbouring city. And she explores the forces - economic, political, historical - that made that social background work the way it does, and what keeps the relationships in place. Doris Lessing has a framework for interpreting history and politics that gives her the power to do this - Marxism/Leninism is, if nothing else, a handle on this complex dimension of reality that enables one to discuss it and analyse it. So what you read is not only a brilliant evocation of life and interaction and the growth of human beings, but also a dissection of the society that links them and holds them down. And she will even go on, in many of her novels, to sketch out how it could be different.
Doris Lessing manages to weave all of this into a fabric that is alive and engaging and exciting. (Certainly in the novels she wrote in the first three-quarters of her long and immensely productive life. Some of her later novels are sketchier, as if she is in a hurry to get on paper all the ideas she wants to write about.) Her novels are nearly all really hard to put down. She is a genius and absolutely totally deserving of her recent Nobel Prize. (Too recent - she has clearly deserved this honour for decades.)
Doris Lessing 's unauthorized biographer, Carole Klein, quotes Olive Schreiner (another poor white woman in Africa) writing a generation before:
"You, you, yourself must save yourself. From those weak limbs strike off the fetters; with your strong hands bend down and heal the wounds your hands have made; remove the sand about the heavily sunken feet. When they are healed and free and strong, they, they and not another will bear you to the mountains where you would be." [From Man to Man]
That catches the spirit of what Martha Quest strives for, and attains. Doris Lessing then takes her character through four more volumes of the series of novels (series title "Children of Violence") to create one of the truly great works of fiction of all time."
"Since she won the Nobel (and received it with what I thought was funny, dry nonchalance--utterly unimpressed with herself) I finally made good on a years-old, smiling-nodding pledge to a former roommate of my brother's (Ploughman anyone?) that I would check out some of Doris Lessing's stuff. It helped that there was a hilariously large English books section at the Brockihaus (massive 2nd hand store common in Switzerland) where we went halloween costume shopping last year. I made my Palin powersuit selections rather quickly, and while male friends tried on dresses and everyone browsed various clownish Fasnacht Guggämusik get-ups and put on smelly wigs, I went and found a couple Doris Lessing books and The Great Gatsby.
It took me forever to get through the two 'Children of Violence' books I bought. Of the five, this is the first, and the other one I read (the Four-Geted City, review forthcoming) is the last. Suffice it to say that I will not be rounding out my experience with the middle three.
At first, 'Martha Quest' really charmed me. There have been so many books about disaffected adolescents at odds with society and expectations, struggling with identity, rebelling for the sake of rebelling, blah diddy blah...some of them are OK, some of them are garbage, a lot in between...but it honestly never even occurred to me that it would be far more interesting if this conflicted Holden Caulfield protagonist were a girl. The perspectives Lessing explores through the volatile eyes of Martha Quest, a tragically attractive destitute farmgirl from an English family on the Veld in South Africa in the 30's, are myriad and surprising and fresh--and one can assume they were even more astonishing to readers at the time of the book's writing. Martha moves to the 'city' at 16 against the wishes of her parents and is confronted all at once with enormous moral and personal quandaries...racism, nationalism (English-Dutch), sexism, class divisions, sex and boys, work and money, drinking and smoking, anti-semitism, the approaching war in Europe...
She approaches all of this with a genre-typical mix of independence, occasional obnoxiousness, feigned disinterest, pendulation between over-self-confidence and crushing self-doubt...and gradually tries to orient herself politically and socially in a way that she can accept, nonetheless cordially navigating the immense pressures of überconservative South African white society.
That's the book. I guess I didn't realize at the moment I started it that it was the first in a quintet, and that it was going to be exposition from cover to cover. I kept waiting for a punchline, for a plot to begin, for a point. Apparently Lessing had much bigger plans, and this whole book was serving the basic purpose of providing a very detailed social and psychological background for a complicated protagonist who would move through the next four books over the next four decades. Unfortunately, though I liked Martha, and though the context was wildly new to me (I've only read one other book based in SA, but it was modern SA and by JM Coetzee...overwhelmingly male perspective...), it just wasn't enough to compel me through thousands more pages of non-story."
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