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Summary: One of Pepe's Passionfruits
Review: All pleasure: fast, furious, and completely modern. One of the best of the past century.
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Summary: This book was a complete waste of time!!
Review: I took over a month to finish reading this BORING BOOK because everytime I started a page I would fall asleep in the middle of that same page.It is such a shame that I HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO READ THIS [STUFF] because I had to do this book for one of my most important exams.Mrs.Lessing must have been going through some sort of madness or sickness I assume while she was writing this sorry excuse for a novel.God help us all who must read this book!
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Summary: a coming of age novel?
Review: If I had the choice, I wouldn't read this book. Unfortunately, our A/S Level Literature class had to do this -terrible- book that is apparently, a work of literary art.
Martha is depicted to be a self absorbed adolescent who is 'struggling' to come to terms with her self discovery. She is also coming to terms with herself as a sexual being. She is somehow, meant to represent all seventeen year old girls out there with her self indulgent views on the world. Her arrogance and pride, meant to be some of her 'positive' points, grate on the nerves. Martha, as a character reeks of unnaturalness, a pity as the story rests upon her.
The only redeeming factor, in my opinion, is Lessings description of the natural beauty of South Africa and her depiction of the simmering racial tensions in the veld. The era of World War Two and the legacy of World War One perhaps, created a world which my generation could not relate to. Or at least, I could not.
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Summary: This book was a complete waste of time!!
Review: it's been so long since i read this, i'm ready to read it again! the incredible vulnerability of someone like martha, who has no self through which to really make sense of her emotions or her options in life - is really quite heart rending and astounding... Martha's story really helped me to find compassion and understanding for my own younger self, not to mention other young people in my life... it's darned difficult to manage without much of a self. that is for sure. poor martha. But! even with all that, it's still fun to read, believe it or not! the whole series is amazing...though not perfect, a really really great, somewhat sudsy read... hey, when are they going to make this a miniseries anyway?
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Summary: I expected to like it.
Review: MARTHA QUEST covers part of the same time period as UNDER MY SKIN, volume one of Lessing's autobiography, girlhood through marriage. I loved the autobiography, so I expected to love the fictional version. I was already disappointed in Part 1, in which Martha is a teenage girl living on her parents' farm in Southern Africa. I can understand why generations of girls and young women in the grip of resenting the family and place into which they did not choose to be born have loved this book. I, however, am old enough to have put such feelings behind me, but not so old that I don't cringe at being reminded of them. The landscape that was so lovingly described in UNDER MY SKIN here is seen through the eyes of someone who hates it, and wants to be gone. The descriptions do not transcend the dissatisfaction of the character, and I didn't enjoy reading them. I found the endless conflict between Martha and her mother tiresome. I was impatient reading about months of quarrels about the childish clothes her mother forced her to wear, with both parties complaining to Martha's father, trying to get him to take sides. This feud was finally resolved when Martha took money she had been given for Christmas and bought fabric to make her own clothes. I couldn't help comparing this with the much briefer but immeasurably more enjoyable passage in UNDER MY SKIN in which she strides out into the bush with a rifle, shoots some birds, sells them to the butcher in town, and uses the money to buy the fabric. Problem solved, without endless whining. In Book 2, Martha takes a job and moves into town. I enjoyed the account of her first week of work as secretary at a law firm. I liked her uncertainty about what she was supposed to do, how surprised and disconcerted she was when she realized she had no skills, and the descriptions of office gossip and politics. Pretty soon, though, her social life takes over, and she becomes a girl about town. I have two problems with this. One, she is a very unlikeable character. Vain, passive, mirror-mad, and eerily detached. I remember having the same reaction to THE GRASS IS SINGING, Lessing's first published novel. I couldn't stand any of the 3 characters in it, and didn't enjoy reading it at all. The difference is, I was utterly riveted and couldn't put it down. Which brings me to my second problem. The narrative is painfully analytical. Much of the time I don't care about the situation, I don't want to know what is going to happen, and so I am not willing to put up with such painstaking prose. (Example: "She was just about to telephone Jasmine, when the phone rang for her; but not at all as simply as that statement sounds. First, the instrument on Mrs. Buss's desk gave a shrill and prolonged peal, so that Martha, who had been about to pick it up..." Do you really want to know how that sentence ends?) There are passages like this in later Lessing novels, but the prose is more gracefully contructed, and the situation warrants the analysis. Here, much of the book is written this way. If you're wondering whether you would like this book, balance this review with the others before deciding. Many people have loved this book. If you've disliked other Lessing books, you won't like this one. I usually at least like, if not love, Lessing's work, and I don't like this one at all.
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Summary: Vital stuff
Review: The greatest purchase I ever made in my life was when I picked up a copy of 'African Stories' for $1.75 at a used bookstore in Hollywood. The 30 short stories in that book represented some of the most ecstatic writing I had read since Nabokov and Stendhal. To this day it remains my favorite book. The first two parts of 'Children of Violence'--'Martha Quest' and 'A Proper Marriage'--are like an expansion of some of those stories and a comprehensive analysis of everything that can possibly happen within and without the psyche of a young girl becoming a woman in Southern Africa. I'm not exaggerating when I say that almost every page of these two books is a revelation. They're works of genius pure and simple. In fact, no psychologist could've dug this far. Read them or suffer a permanent lack.
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Summary: Introducing Martha Quest
Review: We meet Martha Quest as a resentful 15 year old girl, growing up on a farm in Africa. As noted adequately here, this is the first book in her Children of Violence series-- held by many to be Lessings most important body of work (with the exception of _The Golden Notebook_). I'm one of these Lessing fans from back in the day when _The Golden Notebook_ changed my life, and I haven't read much of her other work. I was impressed by Martha Quest-- it falls in the category of our classic coming-of-age novels, and as such stands well on its own as a novel. Lessing's Martha is at times so frustrating you want to shake her, but I think that's typical for the age of the character portrayed. Martha is all sharp edges-- she can't seem to fit with her parents, the men around her, the people with whom she tries to interact. With the blindness of her age, she's able to acutely feel how hard she has it, without really feeling the struggle of others around her who may have an even more difficult time. By turns infuriating and attractive, it can be painful to read Quest's story precisely because so it's so human as to be disturbingly familiar. A should-read book.
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