Book Four -- The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing

The Memoirs of a Survivor
Doris Lessing
fiction
219 pages

So I stayed up all night last night. I do this sometimes, usually when my sleep schedule is fucked or I want to run errands before Darkrose heads out to work at 11:30. So, as you do after you've been up all night, I stopped at my favorite coffee place--Butch n Nellies--and got myself a 20 oz Mexican Mocha. While waiting for my coffee, I checked out the book exchange bookshelf and, in amongst all the romances, was The Memoirs of a Survivor. Bear in mind, as you read this review, that I still haven't slept and all I've had is the mocha and some sun chip things from Trader Joe's.

Now it's easily been over 25 years since I read any Lessing and when I did, way back in high school, it was her rather odd science fiction series Canopus in Argos: Archives. And honestly? I don't remember a blessed thing about them other than that they were complicated.

The Memoirs of a Survivor is...complicated in some ways and incredibly simple in other ways. Set in a dystopian future, a woman becomes responsible for a twelve year old girl named Emily and her half-cat/half-dog pet, Hugo, as the city they live in falls apart around them. Told in first person from the POV of the woman, whose name we never learn, the novel records the slow slide as the city and society in general falls apart due to some undisclosed series of events, as well as the life that Emily makes for herself in the new shifting social order. Laid over this is the narrator's experience with and in the strange and shifting landscape of a series of rooms beyond a blank wall in her flat. At times the mysterious rooms show her a strange, antiquated version of Emily's childhood and at other times, they are more impersonal reflections of the chaos that goes on outside the flat.

I'm not sure if I can recommend this or not, because I still haven't decided if I like it or not. I like the deceptive simplicity of Lessing's writing and a good dystopia will grab my attention every time, but I'm still trying to figure out what happened in the end.