Book notes, Fiction # The Grass Is Singing  By Doris Lessing (1950) ★★★★★ First read in August 2022 --- What a horrible fucking book. Fucking horrible little book. Excellent but absolutely ruthless. Last time I felt so strongly for a character was more than 20 years ago when I first read Dostoyevsky's _The Idiot_. I would violently throw the book against the wall in a fit of rage every 20 minutes or so and fantasise of slapping Myshkin so hard that he would finally come to his senses.  This time it was a different kind of frustration, but almost as intense. This time it was deep, deep sadness. So deep it felt bottomless. Hopeless. She gave me nothing to cling to, the monster. I wanted nothing more than to reach in and hug those two poor souls whose story was playing out inside this horrible book, and tell them it was all going to be alright. Although I knew it wasn't -  the witch put the end in the literal beginning - it’s right there in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first page. No hiding from it, no hope, brutal. She gave me nothing to cling to, the monster. So my despair was - is, accompanied by an intense hatred for her, for the author, for Doris Lessing. Five star hatred for a five star book. --- Wordsoup: South Africa, kitchen kaffir (spoken by White farmers to their black slaves), the bush, “boy”, “after all he was like a dog”, poor whites, displaced. The whole book is describing the how.   ## Quotes **Pg 14** Don't let unstable ppl have guns. "Slatter believed in farming with the sjambok. He once killed a native in a fit of temper. He was fined 30 pounds. Since then he had kept his temper. But sjamboks are all very well for the Slatters; not so good for people less sure of themselves." **Pg 39** They would have been kind to her, because she had _"missed the best things of life."_ But then there are so many people who don't want them.  **Pg 43** =="It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be able to create another to enable him to go on living?"== **Pg 90** "The women who marry men like Dick learn sooner or later that ==there are two things they can do: they can drive themselves mad, tear themselves to pieces in storms of futile anger and rebellion; or they can hold themselves tight and go bitter.== *Mary followed the course that her upbringing made inevitable.*" *** "He was obeying the dictate of the first law of white South Africa, which is: 'Thou shall not let thy fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because if you do, the nigger will see that he is as good as you are.' The strongest emotion of a strongly organised society spoke in his voice. ” Pg 182 =="A man cannot work 12 hours a day and then feel fresh enough for study."== Pg. 94 "By ten in the morning half a dozen native women and their children were sitting under the trees. If she disliked native men, she loathed the women. She hated the exposed fleshiness of them, their soft brown bodies and soft bashful faces that were also insolent and inquisitive, and their chattering voices that held a brazen fleshy undertone." "She could not bear to see them sitting there on the grass, their legs tucked under them in that traditional timeless pose, ==as peaceful and uncaring as if it did not matter whether the store was opened, or whether it remained shut all day== and they would have to return tomorrow." "Above all, she hated the way they suckled their babies, with their breasts hanging down for everyone to see; ==there was something in their calm, satisfied maternity that made her blood boil.== “Their babies hanging on to them like leeches,” she said to herself shuddering, for she thought with horror of sucking a child. The idea of a child’s lips on her breasts made her feel sick. ==And since so many white women are like her, turning with relief to the bottle, she was in good company, and did not think of herself, but rather of these black women, as strange==.  Pg 123 "The stinting poverty in which they lived was unbearable; it was destroying them. It did not mean there was not enough to eat: it meant that every penny must be watched; new clothes forgone, amusements abandoned, holidays kept in the never-never land of the future.  ==A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is always shadowed by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself.=="