December 9th, 2007
Doris Lessing on reading
“Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.”
On Friday, Doris Lessing finally received her Nobel Prize for Literature. Unable to attend the ceremony in Stockholm due to ill health, she pre-recorded her acceptance speech. Most winners understandably use such a high profile speech as a platform, and Lessing’s broached a wide range of important subjects. In it, she tackles illiteracy and the lack of books in Africa, comparing people there who beg for books to complacent boys at an expensive English school where she is told the library is only “half-used”. She has some notable things to say about the distractions of modern life which she believes are detrimental to the pursuit of reading and knowledge:
“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”
and she is very specific about hours spent surfing online, instead of reading and learning.
“How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Lessing mentions that she works for an organisation whose aim is to get books into Africa and she points out that “Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month’s wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe’s reign of terror. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years’ wages.”
And she also talks of a writer she knows in Zimbabwe who learned to read by reading the ingredient labels on jam jars and fruit tins.
While the tone is bleak, you can’t help but feel lucky reading it. It’s quite a lengthy speech, but if you have a spare five minutes, I’d urge you to plough through it here.
December 11th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
I’m glad she got the Nobel as she has been beavering away at novel writing for a half century or longer. I have read some of her interviews and reminiscences about Central Africa, where she spent an unconventional childhood. One novel I liked was actually set in 1980s bohemian, politically anarchic London - The Good Terrorist. Squatting, drug taking, free love and anti-authority hippiness are all well described. So if you missed out on that sort of thing and come from a complacent hellhole like Blackrock, Foxrock or Terenure this is where to satisfy your curiosity. At the end of the novel you will probably conclude that the people you missed knowing were probably not worth meeting.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
I’m so glad you posted this; read her speech over the weekend and was really moved and inspired by it. The stuff she wrote about the boys in the private school in London who will go on to win prizes was really affecting. Well worth reading. Reading is something I worry about. How it seems no one really reads like they used to any more [sweeping generalisation]; how people I know used to read books and now watch TV instead; how I read more books in the few months I was waiting for my telly to get connected than I had read in the previous year;…It sounds simplistic but I think it’s becoming easier and easier to not read.