Book Review: The Cleft by Doris Lessing

Book: The Cleft

Author: Doris Lessing

Publisher: Harper Collins

I have never left a book unfinished. But, for the first time I did. This book review will hence happen with me not having finished reading it. In fact, I will never try and read it again. What is amazing, and amusing, is that this book won the Nobel Prize! If anyone has read this book then please share your thoughts here.

This book has no protagonist but just a bunch of women, who, apparently, had started the human race. They were actually just a group of women who spent their time swimming in the water and doing the job that had been assigned to them. Their story is now being put together, from ancient records which are a really oral testimonies, by a Roman historian. The entire book is about their lives and how it becomes chaotic when the first boy is born. The women become cruel and the eagles and the deer help the race of the men to grow. Over time the two communities develop a mutual need to each other – the women can’t make babies alone anymore and that causes a sense of exasperation within them. There is nothing else that the book offers.

This book is about repetition. Starting from page 9 and till the end, all that was harped on was the phrase “squirting protruding things” and everything related to that gender. A little crude and perverse in a way. Needless to say that reading about little else, for pages, became immensely boring.

What was she actually trying to do in the book? Writing about women starting humanity or gender stereotyping by saying that the women were fat, unadventurous, made babies, and did nothing but stayed in water! It was repulsive. And then came along this – the squirts (read men) were brave enough to rape! Really? This is literature that gets the Nobel?

Is it that when you have written a few other novels, have aged, and have been recognised that you feel that you can dole out any trash and the readers will buy it?

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