The most enjoyable depressing book you'll ever read

The Grass is Singing, by Doris Lessing

Well, I guess I wouldn't really say that I enjoyed this book--how can anyone really enjoy the telling of the maddeningly slow yet unmitigated disintegration of a woman and her psyche--but it was nonetheless an engrossing read.

The main character, Mary Turner, is an odd bird. The first half of her life, is an unremarkable, daze. She lives life content and complacent with her lack of goals and meaningful personal relations. The woman is almost pathological in her tendency not to leave a trace in the world, or rather, in not letting the world leave a trace in her. She never falls in love or allows anyone else to fall in love with her and she never fosters any personal desires or dreams. She lives a boring life of consistency. The author attempts to give us a psychological explanation of why she is this way--something to do with her suffering mother and her drunkard father--but it is not very convincing (at least to me). What is convincing is the sense that Mary is not a likable woman and that perhaps she is not in full possession of a sound resilient character.

Mary's reasons for marrying Dick are equally strange. She does it because she suddenly realizes that as a single woman, she is the object of people's pity. She thus moves out into the African bush, where Dick has a shabby house on the skirts of a shabby farm. From this point on the mood turns from drab to dark. Little by little, the sun, the poverty, the loneliness, the unyielding heat, and her hatred for "the natives", begin whittling Mary's character and sanity down until there is nothing left but a shriveled-up carcass of a woman and a human being. Ironically, it is a hateful act that Mary commits toward a black farm laborer that makes her start seeing him for the very first time. In her broken down state, this new vision becomes a sick obsession, and it finally explodes with tragic consequences.

Mary's life, we know, is also a parable for racism, colonialism, and white supremacy in Africa and the destructive effect they had on the individuals and its society.

So, yeah, a real pick-me-upper... But what was weird was that, while I could not identify with the characters and, in fact, rejected their weaknesses and faults, I could not put the book down. I tortured myself metro ride after metro ride with this story of a crazy white lady in crazy-white South Africa. I think this was due to Doris Lessing wonderful writing. The author creates a hypnotic psychological vortex in the hot and arid lands of the African bush and she is not afraid to take it to its ultimate conclusion.

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