A Man & Two Women by Doris Lessing

I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed a realist book of short stories as much as I’ve enjoyed this, A Man & Two Women.

Certainly not since reading that massive book of collected early Hemingways when I was 19 or 20. Yes. It has been that long.

(all the short fiction I’ve read and loved over the past few years has been SF.)

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I’ve been dipping in and out of this 1963 collection of short fiction by the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing for a couple of weeks now, while reading some less than perfect other texts.

Originally I picked it up in a moment of despair when under 10% of the way through a novel that I could tell was never going to resolve itself into something deserving of its own inflated length, after I remembered that my mood is always intimately connected to the quality of the book that I am reading.

With maturity and wisdom comes self-knowledge.

The ability to troubleshoot before trouble arises.

I struggle to stop reading a book once I have begun it and the long novel that I was reading was one that I knew I would see to its conclusion… but I understood that were I to do so without building some kind of carapace, I would be forced to question the power, interest and validity of literature itself, lofty ideals which the novel in question claimed to be engaging with, yet seemed to believe that no novels of any value had been produced since the second World War. Yes. It was a struggle (and I’ll post a blog about it eventually, once I’ve recovered (which I haven’t)).

I don’t regularly read multiple books at once, but on this occasion I knew that to do so had become a near necessity.

And what better way to balm my literary wounds than with some short form texts from one of my absolute favourite purveyors of literature.

And oh my fucking Christ did it deliver? (Yes it did.)

There are 19 short stories in here, ranging from a few pages in length to about 40.

This is an under 300 page book, which basically means that the pacing is electric.

As soon as we are in, established, living a narrative – bish bash bosch – we are out again and onto the next…

And every single story has a different protagonist, different locations, different settings, different stories…

Some of them are funny.

Some of them are dark.

Some of them are deeply serious.

Some of them are ultimately frivolous, but all of them are fundamentally (near?) flawless pieces of fiction writing.

The opening piece is one of the more striking texts in here, and is about coercive sexual assault, from the perspective of the awful middle-aged man who is perpetuating the act. Even this story of awful male chauvinism, Lessing infuses with the humanity and the artfulness that is common to her all of her writing.

Elsewhere, we are in London, we are in colonial South Africa, yes, and we are in other places, and there is nothing in this book that that ever feels outside of the purview of Lessing at this point in her career. There are allusions towards the postmodern flourishes and genre experiments she would begin to play with as her career went on, but here they don’t quite come out to play – and that’s fine!

This is excellent stuff, wall-to-wall (I mean cover-to-cover).

There is writing here about dreams, there is writing about culture, about working in culture, about class, about rationing, about London recovering from the blitz, about education, about socialising and integration, about ambition, about fake ambition, about sexuality, about sex, about gender, about pottery, about all sorts of things, really…

There are 19 pieces of writing here that consider, essentially, every facet of the human mind and the human lived experience.

Maybeeeee it was because I was reading this text on breaks from something that missed an understanding of the way in which people exist that made me love this so much. But I don’t believe that.

In One Man and Two Women, Doris Lessing was doing phenomenal work. And I was reading that phenomenal work in conversation with another writer who was writing with supreme confidence, but an absence of (imo) meaningful literary humanity.

So I’m not saying that that this is the best book ever written, but it’s definitely the best book that I’ve read this month…

It’s a text full of rich, dense, characters (I mean rounded and complex, not moneyed and stupid) who are all fully sketched out and fully realised within a handful of pages…

It’s not hard to compare a book like this to poorly written novels, as it’s possible for writers to fail to evoke a character in hundreds of pages, and Lessing here does that in a handful of pages over and over and over again.

It’s a collection that emphasises the potency and the brilliance of Doris Lessing.

Highly recommended.

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I have been picking up every unfamiliar Doris Lessing book I’ve encountered now for possibly as many as six years, which means I now probably have loads of her books unread in my home, and I’d love to read more of them.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t fully unpacked several of my boxes of books from when I moved from Canada to the UK 3 years ago, so I don’t know where those books are, so maybe it will have to wait until I’ve done a bit of serious home storage management…

This was brilliant.