Love, Again
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Review
'”Love, Again” grips, maddens, depresses and excites the reader from the first page to the last. A. S. Byatt, The Times
'A grand novel, boldly hewn … An encounter with a magnificent mind and temperament in artistic maturity, capable of turning her equal gaze on George Eliot.’ Independent on Sunday
'I have never seen love's effects and depredations described in more minute detail … a wholly compelling book, as vigorous and thought-provoking as anything she has ever written.' New Statesman
'By restoring love to the centre of the novel, Lessing has written a book that readers will love; a novel that Stendhal and Colette would have been proud to have written.' Scotsman
Product Description
A fierce, compelling account of the nature and origins of love from Doris Lessing, one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth-century and Winner of the Nobel Pize for Literature 2007.
Sarah Durham, sixty-year-old producer and founder of a leading fringe theatre company, commissions a play based on the journals of Julie Vairon, a beautiful, wayward nineteenth-century mulatto woman. It captivates all who come into contact with it, and dramatically changes the lives of all those who take part in it. For Sarah the changes are profound - she falls in love with two younger men causing her to relive her own stages of growing up, from immature, infantile with the beautifual and androgynous Bill, to the mature love, Henry.
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First Sentence
Easy to think this was a junkroom, silent and airless in a warm dusk, but then a shadow moved, someone emerged from it to pull back curtains and throw open windows. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Easy to think this was a junkroom, silent and airless in a warm dusk, but then a shadow moved, someone emerged from it to pull back curtains and throw open windows. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have read most of Doris Lessings books, and they have always meant a lot to me. She writes with an honesty that I have only found in a few other authors. (Axel Sandemose is another).I read "Marta Quest" in my teens, and it helped me understand a lot of things. Now I read "Love, again" book as a middle-aged woman, and I got the same feeling of having learned something about myself, and of not being alone. It is an unusual book about love. It is not only about relationships but about the feeling of love itself.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I must admit that I found this book hard going. I was more than half way through it before I began to wonder what might happen to the characters. The main character, Sarah, is a woman of 60 who mixes in theatrical circles, the book is full of literary quotes and references which I didn't recognise, and Sarah seems absorbed in self-analysis for too much of the time.
The book does have some telling insights into how it feels to be infatuated with someone, and how it feels to be depressed. There are also some beautiful descriptions of nature. Little bits of it will stay with me, but it doesn't make me want to read any of her other books.
The book does have some telling insights into how it feels to be infatuated with someone, and how it feels to be depressed. There are also some beautiful descriptions of nature. Little bits of it will stay with me, but it doesn't make me want to read any of her other books.
Format:Paperback
A thought-provoking novel about love, and about the theatre. Lessing's protagonist is Sarah, a widow in her 60s who for years has invested most of her energies in her small theatre company. The company have decided to put on a play about a French-Creole 19th-century musician called Julie Vairon - a free-thinker, who mysteriously died (probably committing suicide) in her thirties in southern France. In the process of getting the play to performance, Sarah experiences love in various forms. Firstly, she watches one of the play's sponsors, an unhappy middle-aged man named Stephen, fall in love with the long-dead Julie Vairon. And later, when the play is in rehearsal, Sarah herself begins to experience feelings uncomfortably like love, first for one of the dashing young actors, and later, and more deeply, for Henry, the director. Meanwhile another of the actors in the group begins to make amorous advances to Sarah...
Lessing beautifully captures the experience of being in love (or in lust) and writes very interestingly on why Sarah may have avoided these emotions for so long. Her descriptions of the world of the theatre are brilliant, and the story of Julie Vairon (invented by Lessing) is fascinating, and very believable. If I had to criticize the book, it would be for the scenes dealing with the fantasist Stephen: I never quite believed in his passion for a long-dead woman, and Lessing seemed unable to make up her mind whether Stephen's wife was really a lesbian, or had simply turned to lesbianism in frustration at her husband! Also, Sarah's feelings for the young actor in her company (who appeared a spoiled brat) were less convincing than her feelings for Henry. But I'd still give the novel five stars - such excellent writing doesn't come round that often.
Lessing beautifully captures the experience of being in love (or in lust) and writes very interestingly on why Sarah may have avoided these emotions for so long. Her descriptions of the world of the theatre are brilliant, and the story of Julie Vairon (invented by Lessing) is fascinating, and very believable. If I had to criticize the book, it would be for the scenes dealing with the fantasist Stephen: I never quite believed in his passion for a long-dead woman, and Lessing seemed unable to make up her mind whether Stephen's wife was really a lesbian, or had simply turned to lesbianism in frustration at her husband! Also, Sarah's feelings for the young actor in her company (who appeared a spoiled brat) were less convincing than her feelings for Henry. But I'd still give the novel five stars - such excellent writing doesn't come round that often.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The most terrible sentence Time could deal her
Listening to another's love agonies can be as boring and tiresome as listening to their dreams, and an entire book dedicated to characters dying - literally, in one case - and... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Four Violets
Cringingly bad
I love Doris Lessing and have read many of her books, however this one was so cringing, badly written and unbelievable. I read it to the end to see if it got better. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Jacksy x
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