The opening book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's 'Children of Violence' series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain. When we first meet Martha Quest, she is a girl of fifteen living with her parents on a poor African farm. She is eager for life and resentful of the deadening narrowness of home, and escapes to take a job as a typist in the local capital. Here, in the 'big city', she encounters the real life she was so eager to know and understand. As a picture of colonial life, 'Martha Quest' succeeds by the depth of its realism alone; but always at its centre is Martha, a sympathetic figure drawn with unrelenting objectivity. Martha's Africa is Doris Lessing's Africa: the restrictive life of the farm; the atmosphere of racial fear and antagonism; the superficial sophistication of the city. And both Martha and Lessing are Children of Violence: the generation that was born of one world war and came of age in another, whose abrasive relationships with their parents, with one another, and with society are laid bare brilliantly by a writer who understands them better than any other.
Děti násilí Série
Tato série sleduje dospívání a hledání identity mladé ženy v bouřlivé polovině 20. století. Odehrává se v prostředí Jižní Rhodesie a později Londýna, kde hlavní hrdinka Martha Quest čelí společenským konvencím i osobním dilematům. Autorka mistrně propojuje osobní příběh s širšími politickými a sociálními tématy, jako je kolonialismus, feminismus a hledání smyslu života. Jde o hluboce introspektivní a intelektuální dílo, které zkoumá složitost lidské zkušenosti a touhu po svobodě.
Doporučené pořadí čtení
A Proper Marriage
- 384 stránek
- 14 hodin čtení
An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.
A Ripple from the Storm
- 288 stránek
- 11 hodin čtení
Martha Quest, the embodied heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In a Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing charts Martha Quest's personal and political adventures in race-torn British Africa, following Martha through World War II, a grotesque second marriage, and an excursion into Communism. This wise and starling novel perceptively reveals the paradoxes, passions, and ironies rooted in the life of twentieth-century Anglo-Africa. A Ripple from the Storm is the third novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.
Landlocked
- 288 stránek
- 11 hodin čtení
The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's 'Children of Violence' series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain. 'The Four-Gated City' finds Martha Quest in 1950s London and very much part of the social history of the time: the Cold War, the anti-nuclear Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. Daring to go a step further - as Lessing so often has in her career - the novel ends with the century in the throes of World War Three. In the four previous novels of the 'Children of Violence' series, Lessing explored the end of an epoch. Here she trains her gaze on the present - and the future. The disquieting power of her vision revealed across this series finds its culmination in this brave and visionary work.