Lessing, Doris (Vol. 94) - J. M. Coetzee (review date 22 December 1994)
J. M. Coetzee (review date 22 December 1994)
SOURCE: "The Heart of Me," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 41, No. 21, December 22, 1994, pp. 51-4.
[Coetzee is a South African novelist, critic, essayist, and translator. In the review below, he offers a summary of Lessing's life and career, remarking on Lessing's thoughts concerning feminism, politics, sexuality, and her mother.]
Presented with snapshots of the Tayler family and asked to pick out the artist or artist-to-be among them, one might at a pinch settle on the father, rather stiff and military but clearly not unintelligent; certainly not on the daughter, pleasant enough but ordinary as a loaf of bread. Yet the daughter had it in her not only to escape a future that one can almost read in her face—marriage to a decent young chap and life on a farm in Rhodesia managing servants and having babies—but also to become one of the great visionary novelists of our time.
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