Phyllis read this book when we were in Australia last October. She heartily recommended it. I was sufficiently impressed with her comments that I decided to wait until we returned home and I could buy my own copy. Done. I am glad I did. This book is a classic tale.

I loved her writing style. Very Spartan. Atkinson quickly describes an event and then moves on. She rarely makes any additional comment on the event, leaving that to the reader. There is no philosophy about life added to the story, yet the story itself provides such a philosophy.

I read Doris Lessing's 1971 Introduction to her 1962 novel, "The Golden Notebook" last night. In it Lessing notes that "... it was not possible to find a novel which described the intellectual and moral climate of a hundred years ago, in the middle of the last century, in Britain, in the way Tolstoy did it for Russia, Stendahl for France ...". I feel that Atkinson has again done this for France. This is not the France I learned from history books, nor from visiting it as a tourist. This is the France of the country, where everyone knows everyone else and where everyone helps one another. The book is portrayed by the publisher as a "story of transformation and triumph". Fair enough, but for me the real heros were the French. Their way of life and tacit morality is on every page and Atkinson does a meticulous job of capturing this.

I also learned more about grapes and wine making than I ever have by reading about it. I can now say, as I never could before, why many consider a good bottle of wine to be an art form. The move toward mass production may still permit this, but it is less likely as one leans more toward a formulaic approach than an intuitive approach based on experience. I am a romantic at heart, but I also appreciate a good bottle at an affordable price. Therein lies the difficulty. I may have to shift my allegiance a little - more toward the special wines that have a limited production. I still remember a bottle of "Morgan" wine I had with a friend in San Francisco. It turned out that this wine was made by a small group that bought all of their grapes from local California growers and then blended it to make a small market wine that was fantastic. I also recall a colleague in the United States who would consciously look for such special wines from any region in the states. At the time I was bemused. This has now turned to respect.

I continue to learn, even when I think I will just relax and read a good tale.

Tags: autobiography, wine, France

This will be a different "summary". I have only begun to read the novel. But I have read, and reread, the 17 page Introduction, also written by Lessing, to the 1971 reprinting of the novel. I rarely read such introductions as I want to read the book for myself. I do not want to read an analysis of the story before I begin as I am always afraid it will remove the sense of suspense as the story unfolds. I may, after I have read the novel, go back and read the introduction - although if I am honest, I seldom do this as well. Nonetheless, I read this introduction. Why?

It captured me.

She begins the Introduction, "The shape of the novel is as follows: ...". The skeleton is a short novel divided into five sections and separated by four notebooks, called Black, Red, Yellow and Blue. This is similar to my efforts to try to keep track of my various interests: literature, model trains, bird watching, and non-fiction. The daily journals are my skeleton. No wonder I was captured by her opening paragraph.

Lessing identifies the central theme of the book, "... that sometimes when people 'crack up' it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self's dismissing false dichotomies and divisions ..." and describes her writing of this as "Here it is rougher, more close to experience, before experience has shaped itself into thought and pattern - more valuable perhaps because it is rawer material." Hopefully I am not about to share this experience. Lessing goes on to note "But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as by hostile ones, as being about the sex war, or was claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war.".

"Yet the essence of the book, the organization of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalize." I totally agree. My efforts are primarily ones of time management.

Lessing also identifies a few additional themes that are embedded in the novel:

• to describe the intellectual and moral climate of England at the time of the novel
• to argue that the current emphasis of the "artist" as an individual is misplaced
• to contrast the concerns of the individual with those of society as a whole
• to compare the structure of a novel with the chaos of normal life

Lessing then makes a powerful indictment of our Western educational system. She ends this with, "There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag - and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement." Beautiful. I did the latter once - just last year. I bought Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". On the plus side, I have yet to open it.

I clearly like what Doris Lessing has to say, and am now looking forward to the novel.

Tags: novel, England