- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo; New Ed edition (9 Oct 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006548253
- ISBN-13: 978-0006548256
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 280,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
‘Passionate and compelling, a book so packed with extraordinary images that it has obliterated almost everything else I read in 1994.’ Rose Tremain
‘In this immediate, vivid, beautifully paced memoir, Doris Lessing sets the individual against history, the personal against the general and shows, by the example of her life set down honestly, how biography and fiction mesh, how fiction transmutes the personal to the general, how the particular experience illuminates the universe. By putting her life on the page, she has created her greatest work of art.’ Hilary Mantel, LRB
‘The book pulsates with life. The intensity of the sensory world is brilliantly evoked … Not just the story of the first thirty years of one life, this is the biography also of an age.’ Jane Dunn, Observer
Review
'Passionate and compelling, a book so packed with extraordinary images that it has obliterated almost everything else I read in 1994.' Rose Tremain 'In this immediate, vivid, beautifully paced memoir, Doris Lessing sets the individual against history, the personal against the general and shows, by the example of her life set down honestly, how biography and fiction mesh, how fiction transmutes the personal to the general, how the particular experience illuminates the universe. By putting her life on the page, she has created her greatest work of art.' Hilary Mantel, LRB 'The book pulsates with life. The intensity of the sensory world is brilliantly evoked ... Not just the story of the first thirty years of one life, this is the biography also of an age.' Jane Dunn, Observer
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First Sentence
SHE WAS VERY PRETTY but all she cared about was horses and dancing' Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
SHE WAS VERY PRETTY but all she cared about was horses and dancing' Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Under My Skin
Doris Lessing's autobiography traces her political and emotional development from her earliest childhood memories to her growing, overwhelming, disenchantment with provincial (as she saw it) small town life. "Small town" life for her was pre-WWII Salisbury in the (then) British colony of Southern Rhodesia. Salisbury was a complacent capital city of 10,000 white settlers in a country the size of Spain.
Lessing is quick to debunk the myth of the prosperous, close knit, white farming community - poverty was a real fact of life both for blacks and whites. Her most vivid childhood memories are of escaping from the family home and off into the limitless veld. The emptiness of the veld parallels her youthful emptiness and her growing convictions that the communist party represents a real hope for the world.
The book, a masterpiece of autobiographical writing, is brutally honest in parts and wilfully obscure in others. Some of her emotional mistakes are hardly glanced at (leaving her first two children, for example) but others (the joys of being part of a fast, hard drinking sect, embracing radical politics) are wonderfully engaging. Reading her thoughts you could be forgiven for thinking that the "party" was the only opposition to conservative white rule in Salisbury. This is what makes her book so appealing, her supreme skill as a novelist allowing us to enter the heady world of rushed meetings, leftist newspaper deliveries, drinks on the sports club verandah and back in time to find the cook still waiting to prepare supper. Naturally it couldn't last and Lessing is far too intelligent to think that that is all there is to life. The book ends in 1949 as she arrives in London, apprehensive and hopeful in the capital city of her parents.
This is more than a 'who-did-what' from a long time ago, times and dates are (probably deliberately) rarely mentioned. It is the personalities and the ideas - most of all the ideas - sliding from youthful enthusiasm to mature realism which fuse the book with life and vitality. 'Under My Skin', published in 1992, is that rare thing, a candid autobiography written by a consummate novelist with skills to spare. Doris Lessing is a national treasure.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a candid autobiography with as main themes love, sex (good sex, as the author calls it, is a right for everybody) and politics (communism) in South-Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) ruled by the blank minority.,
It is a gripping, moving, and realistic picture, wherein the author tries to find answers to personal and more general human questions: why was she so outspoken rebellious and, on the contrary, so strictly loyal to the communist movement?
Why are people fighting relentlessly each other, and on the other hand, striving for happiness?
Are the people of her generation all children of World War I? Why was her father a freemason?
This book is written like an irresistible waterfall. Not to be missed.
It is a gripping, moving, and realistic picture, wherein the author tries to find answers to personal and more general human questions: why was she so outspoken rebellious and, on the contrary, so strictly loyal to the communist movement?
Why are people fighting relentlessly each other, and on the other hand, striving for happiness?
Are the people of her generation all children of World War I? Why was her father a freemason?
This book is written like an irresistible waterfall. Not to be missed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The first volume of Lessing's autobiography often reminds the reader of the biased version of the narrative she gives us. Memory is a deceiving and partial thing, distorting small events and making other things from the past totally disappear.
She takes the reader along for her archaeological inquiry into remnants of her past and you visit her view of Persia, where she spent the first years of her childhood, you see England through her first brief contact with it and then you move with her parents (analyzed in detail and portrayed as tragic characters) and younger brother to the distant lands of Southern Rhodesia, where white farmers dreamed of making it big. The book debunks the myths of prosperity which those colonists had, while giving the reader a first person perspective of what it must have been like to be young an curious, rebellious and restless.
The book also gives you a concrete example of a cultural hybrid through Lessing herself. She is a product of late British Imperialism and also a product of the first world war, given how both her parents were affected by it.
A fine psychological and self-reflexive novel with historical details which become so personal under her skin.
She takes the reader along for her archaeological inquiry into remnants of her past and you visit her view of Persia, where she spent the first years of her childhood, you see England through her first brief contact with it and then you move with her parents (analyzed in detail and portrayed as tragic characters) and younger brother to the distant lands of Southern Rhodesia, where white farmers dreamed of making it big. The book debunks the myths of prosperity which those colonists had, while giving the reader a first person perspective of what it must have been like to be young an curious, rebellious and restless.
The book also gives you a concrete example of a cultural hybrid through Lessing herself. She is a product of late British Imperialism and also a product of the first world war, given how both her parents were affected by it.
A fine psychological and self-reflexive novel with historical details which become so personal under her skin.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Masterful Autobiography
... Doris Lessing's autobiography traces her political and emotional development from her earliest childhood memories to her growing, overwhelming, disenchantment with provincial... Read more
Published on 6 Feb 2003 by George Reid
First volume of autobiography
The first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography. Born in 1919, she was brought up in Iran and Southern Rhodesia. Read more
Published on 22 Jun 2002 by "budge119"
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