- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Fourth Estate; First Edition edition (2 Jan 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007233434
- ISBN-13: 978-0007233434
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.4 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 591,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Cleft
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘Lessing skilfully manipulates multiple perspectives…a bold, inventive and challenging book from a writer who continues to enlighten and astonish as she approaches her tenth decade.’ The Independent
‘The author's reach continues to thrill…there's witchery in the Old She yet.’ Daily Telegraph
‘a strange novel, one of her strangest, but it lures one ineluctably into its toils…Lessing has a lot of fun in her prehistoric world…the novel is best seen as pure entertainment: an amusing series of what-ifs by one of the world's great storytellers.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A narrative with the compelling stamp of Lessing's late tales.’ The Times
‘Lessing's considerable talent…her certainties are persuasive.’ Sunday Times
‘Doris Lessing writes movingly of the human desire for change…she conveys a powerful belief in the impermanence of any stuation in which human beings find themselves and the paradoxically unchanging nature of human relations.’ The Observer
‘Lessing's engaging tale is told with the simplicity of an aural history committed to memory.’ New Statesman
‘Her prose is pleasingly incantatory…the novel has a pleasing gravitational pull on a purely poetic level.’ Metro
‘Lessing writes, as ever, with such calm and assured authority…a fascinating, at times disturbing book; one can't imagine any other writer bringing it off.’ The Scotsman
Praise for Doris Lessing:
'She's up there in the pantheon with Balzac and George Eliot. We're lucky she's still writing.' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent
'She has an extraordinary feeling for the peculiar vulnerabilities of the young and the elderly. And her portraits of human relationships are of quite staggering beauty.' Ruth Scurr, The Times
'Doris Lessing has changed the way we think about the world.' Blake Morrison
The Observer
'Doris Lessing writes movingly of the human desire for change...'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I often wait a day or two before writing a review. I find that my appreciation of a work often changes on reflection, sometimes magnifying the experience, sometimes diminishing it. In the case of Doris Lessing's The Cleft, a little distance has considerably enhanced the initial impression, which was less than favourable.
The Cleft is quite a short novel. It just seems long. The language isn't difficult, likewise neither are setting or plot. Not that there's much of either.
We begin with a society that's entirely female and where procreation just happens. When "monsters" appear, babies with ugly extra bits on the front, they are either killed or mutilated. Killing involves leaving the tiny bundles of flesh on a rock for eagles to take. But the cunning birds aren't always hungry.
A community of squirts - grown-up monsters - begins to thrive and the women find they have to interact. New activities are mutually invented and suddenly all is change. A new race or perhaps merely a new society develops via proto-parents, develops at least twice, in fact. Journeys are made. Promised lands reveal promise. New orders establish themselves.
Meanwhile, we realise that this creation myth is being related by a Roman gentleman who has his own domestic battle of the sexes. At first sight this extra layer of narrative seems redundant. Eventually an elemental force binds the myth to the narrator's present. The link is tenuous and as a plot device, its impact fails. It does, however, conceptually link the narrator with the related myth.
After all, Romans were themselves created, they believed, out of a myth where a pair of lads were nurtured by an animal. The military tradition (equals male) by which Rome prospered was founded on the social control of Sparta, not the demos of Athens. Sparta was probably the ultimate macho male society, where the old were revered and women were chattel, though they could own property. Doris Lessing at one point refers to Spartan youth being separated from their families at the age of seven to hone military and combat skills via camaraderie. Such an exile the monsters of The Cleft invent for themselves.
Galling at first reading and later informative were the repeated gender stereotypes that dominate Doris Lessing's narrative. The repeated use of these bludgeoning concepts had more than an air of artifice. Looking back, I now see that this actually enhanced what emerged as the book's overarching idea, which is our need for myth and the necessity of reducing it to the level of populist fairy tale.
The eagles who nurtured the monsters play god. The way we organise our society demands certain role models, while ceremony, often barbaric, such as genital mutilation, allies us to ideals and ideas we prefer not to question. In the end we have to explain elemental forces beyond our control and myth is our refuge.
Stick with The Cleft. It's a tortuous journey, but it is worth it in the end, an end whose only solace may only be found in myth.
The Cleft is quite a short novel. It just seems long. The language isn't difficult, likewise neither are setting or plot. Not that there's much of either.
We begin with a society that's entirely female and where procreation just happens. When "monsters" appear, babies with ugly extra bits on the front, they are either killed or mutilated. Killing involves leaving the tiny bundles of flesh on a rock for eagles to take. But the cunning birds aren't always hungry.
A community of squirts - grown-up monsters - begins to thrive and the women find they have to interact. New activities are mutually invented and suddenly all is change. A new race or perhaps merely a new society develops via proto-parents, develops at least twice, in fact. Journeys are made. Promised lands reveal promise. New orders establish themselves.
Meanwhile, we realise that this creation myth is being related by a Roman gentleman who has his own domestic battle of the sexes. At first sight this extra layer of narrative seems redundant. Eventually an elemental force binds the myth to the narrator's present. The link is tenuous and as a plot device, its impact fails. It does, however, conceptually link the narrator with the related myth.
After all, Romans were themselves created, they believed, out of a myth where a pair of lads were nurtured by an animal. The military tradition (equals male) by which Rome prospered was founded on the social control of Sparta, not the demos of Athens. Sparta was probably the ultimate macho male society, where the old were revered and women were chattel, though they could own property. Doris Lessing at one point refers to Spartan youth being separated from their families at the age of seven to hone military and combat skills via camaraderie. Such an exile the monsters of The Cleft invent for themselves.
Galling at first reading and later informative were the repeated gender stereotypes that dominate Doris Lessing's narrative. The repeated use of these bludgeoning concepts had more than an air of artifice. Looking back, I now see that this actually enhanced what emerged as the book's overarching idea, which is our need for myth and the necessity of reducing it to the level of populist fairy tale.
The eagles who nurtured the monsters play god. The way we organise our society demands certain role models, while ceremony, often barbaric, such as genital mutilation, allies us to ideals and ideas we prefer not to question. In the end we have to explain elemental forces beyond our control and myth is our refuge.
Stick with The Cleft. It's a tortuous journey, but it is worth it in the end, an end whose only solace may only be found in myth.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If ever there was a writer who exemplified the desire to improve one's craft and to explore new ways of working, new ways of expressing ideas, it is Doris Lessing. She takes ideas where many writers would not even think of going, and if they did, would not dare to go. Bold, always questioning and challenging, her books have always delighted and surprised me. The Nobel Prize was well deserved (if somewhat overdue) and accepted in true Lessing style.
The Cleft is no exception to any of the above. It is beautifully written; a fluent narrative that I found difficult to put down. I read it without once being conscious of reading - despite the changes between the story and the narrator and the interpolations. It seemed to slip directly into my consciousness, and there it haunted me.
The narrator is a Roman historian reconstructing a myth from fragments of documents that have come into his possession. The myth tells of the beginning of human society; how women who for generations uncounted have, by parthenogenesis, produced only female offspring suddenly find themselves giving birth to Monsters - children with tubes and lumps instead of clefts.
But this is no feminist utopia destabilised by the appearance of men. That would be the simplistic route. Instead, what unfolds is a complex fable in which we see humanity struggle to come to terms with its own nature; struggle to move forward and search for some accord between apparently disparate elements.
It could have been a turgid and lengthy book, full of portentous argument, but its mythical quality and the fluency of style elevate this work beyond its specific context. It is a brilliant insight into human nature; it is clearly written by someone at the height of their powers as a writer and as a storyteller (and those don't, sadly, always go together); and it shows the promise of new directions of work. One can but hope that Doris Lessing has more to offer us, despite saying her next book will be her last.
The Cleft is no exception to any of the above. It is beautifully written; a fluent narrative that I found difficult to put down. I read it without once being conscious of reading - despite the changes between the story and the narrator and the interpolations. It seemed to slip directly into my consciousness, and there it haunted me.
The narrator is a Roman historian reconstructing a myth from fragments of documents that have come into his possession. The myth tells of the beginning of human society; how women who for generations uncounted have, by parthenogenesis, produced only female offspring suddenly find themselves giving birth to Monsters - children with tubes and lumps instead of clefts.
But this is no feminist utopia destabilised by the appearance of men. That would be the simplistic route. Instead, what unfolds is a complex fable in which we see humanity struggle to come to terms with its own nature; struggle to move forward and search for some accord between apparently disparate elements.
It could have been a turgid and lengthy book, full of portentous argument, but its mythical quality and the fluency of style elevate this work beyond its specific context. It is a brilliant insight into human nature; it is clearly written by someone at the height of their powers as a writer and as a storyteller (and those don't, sadly, always go together); and it shows the promise of new directions of work. One can but hope that Doris Lessing has more to offer us, despite saying her next book will be her last.
Format:Paperback
I finished reading The Cleft a few days ago. It is written from the point of view of a male Roman historian narrator. It commences with a mythological society from an unidentified time where all people are female (of course the concept of male and female does not exist at that time). These people are known as Clefts, after the mountain/volcano close to the caves where the people reside.
Then, the first Monster (male baby) is born. Others begin to follow. Initially the Clefts think the babies are deformed and mutilate them, or leave them on the Killing Rock for the Eagles to pick off. However, some survive and form separate, male communities. Eventually, it becomes apparent that people can now only reproduce with both males and females.
This book took me a while to get into, due to the style of the narration, but the more I read the more I enjoyed it and the quicker I found myself turning the pages. This novel is multi-faceted - it explores not only gender, but the subjective nature of history, and how people develop and are shaped by their environment. It is not the sort of book that gives you answers, and at times can be uncomfortable to read.
Throughout the book's fictional narrator intervenes with his interpretation on his events, or his thoughts on the sources of his research. He also tries to make sense of what happened in those pre-historic times, by looking at events and relationships in his own life.
Lessing's language throughout is sparse, but some words and phrases are repeated several times over the course of a few pages. This gives the reader an impression of the narrator mulling things over in his mind, but I think Lessing uses this trick a bit too often. In addition, the Clefts do not have much concept of time and this is reflected in the style of writing the book, ie, it does not have the 'rhythm' other books have and there are no neatly divided chapters. This means it is better read over a short space of time, rather than dipped in and out of over the course of a daily commute (unless your commute is quite long and you can get a seat).
The Cleft is ultimately a rewarding read, and as my fellow reviewer states it is the sort of book that makes one reflect after reading it. However, to get the most out of it, read it over the course of a couple of weekends or on holiday.
Then, the first Monster (male baby) is born. Others begin to follow. Initially the Clefts think the babies are deformed and mutilate them, or leave them on the Killing Rock for the Eagles to pick off. However, some survive and form separate, male communities. Eventually, it becomes apparent that people can now only reproduce with both males and females.
This book took me a while to get into, due to the style of the narration, but the more I read the more I enjoyed it and the quicker I found myself turning the pages. This novel is multi-faceted - it explores not only gender, but the subjective nature of history, and how people develop and are shaped by their environment. It is not the sort of book that gives you answers, and at times can be uncomfortable to read.
Throughout the book's fictional narrator intervenes with his interpretation on his events, or his thoughts on the sources of his research. He also tries to make sense of what happened in those pre-historic times, by looking at events and relationships in his own life.
Lessing's language throughout is sparse, but some words and phrases are repeated several times over the course of a few pages. This gives the reader an impression of the narrator mulling things over in his mind, but I think Lessing uses this trick a bit too often. In addition, the Clefts do not have much concept of time and this is reflected in the style of writing the book, ie, it does not have the 'rhythm' other books have and there are no neatly divided chapters. This means it is better read over a short space of time, rather than dipped in and out of over the course of a daily commute (unless your commute is quite long and you can get a seat).
The Cleft is ultimately a rewarding read, and as my fellow reviewer states it is the sort of book that makes one reflect after reading it. However, to get the most out of it, read it over the course of a couple of weekends or on holiday.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Thank you reviewers :>))
The CleftThank you for the reviews on this item, I followed a reviewer (sorry can't remember who) from another book review, and bought this book for the first time ever on the... Read more
Published 14 months ago by bea
An amazing tale of humanity
Stylistically clever and conceptually far reaching. A seminal work of 20th century gender fiction which pulls into focus innate gender differences, their prehistoric sources and... Read more
Published on 3 Jun 2010 by R. Thain-gray
Only printed because of her name
A very disappointing introduction to Doris Lessing's books. With her reputation I expected more but this was like a half-finished essay that was never really meant for publication. Read more
Published on 19 April 2009 by Lit Chick
Fantastic book!
The women (the clefts), living in their timeless coastal community, were getting along happily without men. Read more
Published on 28 Feb 2009 by Butterfly A
Don't waste your money - Money for old rope!
This is the biggest load of rubbish I've read in a long time. It is the first and last time I will ever read a Doris Lessing novel. Read more
Published on 22 April 2008 by Ariadne Jones
Do not read this book
The Cleft has a bizarre plot, tedious writing and no literary merit. Do not waste your time reading this book. It's a bore.
Published on 18 Mar 2008 by Anonymous
Thought-provoking, weak elements but worth reading
This novel is the first I have read by Lessing and I expected it to be hard going but found it quite a page turner. Read more
Published on 9 Feb 2008 by E. Davis
The Cleft: Glad to have reached the last page!
This is the worst book I have read for a very long time. Given the author, I hoped it would satisfy my interest in feminism, but it does nothing of the sort. Read more
Published on 7 Feb 2008 by S. Altmann
Disappointing book from acclaimed author
This was the first book I've read from the author. It was a bad choice. The idea of the book was really promising, an ancient community where only women exist and the effects of... Read more
Published on 13 Jan 2008 by flowers in the window
Disappointing book from acclaimed author
This was the first book I've read from the author. It was a bad choice. The idea of the book was really promising, an ancient community where only women exist and the effects of... Read more
Published on 13 Jan 2008 by flowers in the window
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