The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing

The book begins with the murder of Mary Turner, the wife of Dick Turner who is a white farmer in colonial Africa (Rhodesia which later became Zimbabwe) in the early 1900s. Then we find out what lead to Mary’s tragic fate by learning about her childhood with an abusive father and an oppressed and depressed mother. Her young adult years give a picture of a fairly confident and independent woman working in an office in a city, supporting herself and enjoying city culture with cinema, romance novels and lots of parties and friends (although shallow). Eventually out of peer pressure and advancing age, she marries Dick, a stranger, and moves out to the country to live a life in poverty and madness on his barely sustainable farm. The most interesting aspect of the story is the relationship between master and slave—all the white farmers use and abuse African workers who are paid little to nothing and who have virtually no rights under the white man’s rule. The Africans, or natives as they are referred to in the book, are viewed and treated more like animals than humans even though without them, the white farmers’ lives and riches would not be possible. Therein lies the complexity; the whites have to continue to treat the natives like slaves in order to justify their ownership and cultivation of acquired African land. Newcomers must learn this. Poor whites, like the Turners, threaten to upset this racial balance and erase the line between white and black. The book leaves several questions unanswered. For example, was Mary intimate with her houseboy Moses? What were his motives? How much did her husband understand? This book is a 9. By the way, Doris Lessing just received the Nobel Prize in literature.

Shanghai Diary - Ursula Bacon

The story, a memoir, of a young Jewish girl fleeing an affluent life in Germany to escape the Nazis during WWII was interesting from a historical perspective for me. I had never known much about the fate of the refugees in Shanghai, China, before. I learned that they were actually bombed by the Americans intending to stamp out Japanese activity, which I never knew, and that for years they lived in squalor and had to wait several years after the war was over to receive their visas to travel to the United States or other countries. Some of the details of her daily life, thrust into such different culture from her own, were interesting as well. Other than that, the book is supposed to read like the diary of a ten-year-old girl during the subsequent seven years of her life, but the voice is not a girl's. The reflections and descriptions seem to mature like an older person's thoughts but the text is interspersed with parts like "Oh, grownups! They can be so strange sometimes. I don't understand how they are thinking." It gets annoying to read. The best parts were the various wise words of a Chinese-British man, her friend, on a spiritual journey, "You will be able to capture your childhood from within, and you will sweeten it with the wisdom of your years. We are everything we have ever been, only more so. We are our own work." or "Dear friend, always remember. We come here to stay. We come here to go." I rate this book a 5.