The Memoirs of a Survivor (Vintage International) - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394757599 ISBN 13: 9780394757599

Publisher: Vintage, 1988

Synopsis

A novel--set in a future city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the street--that combines both Lessing's "visionary" and realisitic writing.

About this title

Review:

"One of her profoundest visionary excursions." --Gail Godwin, Chicago Tribune Book World

"An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility." --Time

"A brilliant fable." --Maureen Howard, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Doris Lessing again presents herself as one of the most intelligent of all modern novelists." --Philadelphia Bulletin

"The most fluid and suggestive of all her books." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A short, easily read novel...part science fiction and part 19th-century realism, its effect is profoundly affecting and mystical... especially moving for those who have responded to Lessing's previous work." --Houston Chronicle

"A major work, one that well proves her vigor, originality and importance as a novelist." --Cleveland Free Press

From the Back Cover:

Many years into the future, city life has broken down, communications have failed and food supplies are dwindling. From her window, a middle-aged woman – our narrator – watches things fall apart: hordes of people migrating to the countryside, gangs of children roaming the streets.

One morning, a young girl, Emily, is brought to the house by a stranger and left in her care. A strange precocious adolescent, unafraid of the harsh world outside, she is slowly drawn into the tribal streetlife and its barbaric rituals. Meanwhile, the narrator watches and waits, and as civilisation crumbles, retreats into her hidden world, where reality fades and the past is revisited...

‘Brilliant, persuasive and circumstantial in its imagination, so that each step towards barbarism seems completely necessary. From a reality of food shortages and adolescent gangs to the final image of all but a few cave-dwellers flavouring rabbit stews with the weeds sprouted from cracked pavements, the novel carries you forward with such total conviction that it comes as a shock to step outdoors and find the traffic merely at a standstill, the buses only running late, as usual.’
NEW STATESMAN

‘An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility in an unprecedented time.’
TIME

‘Quite possibly you’re one of those people who for some years and books now have been reading Doris Lessing to find out what’s going on – what is happening to our society’s nervous system and how it affects the way we live with each other... She is one of those acute emotional intelligences whose stories provide keys to our personal dilemmas.’
W.L. WEBB, 'Guardian'

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0394757599
• ISBN 13: 9780394757599
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 213