The Art of Travel

The six week trip from which I've just returned was not abundant with reading, but I certainly went through a fair few (almost making the almost certainly-mahoosive fines from the library worthwhile). The following were among those on my list:

• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  
• The Grass Is Singing, Doris Lessing
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

I also managed to watch two Woody Allen classics, Manhattan and Annie Hall. So not bad going at all. I enjoyed them a great deal, although probably not as much as I thought I would.

Of the books, the best I read, by far, was the astonishing debut by Lessing. It is a truly remarkable book. It simmers with tension - everything in it is singing with the overwhelming oppression felt by everyone in South Africa at that time - white men through the heat and the pace of reform, white women through their roles as women, and the general humiliation, horror and nightmare of the black African's life. The menace emanated through the clear, simple prose. I read it at the time when we were feeling particularly isolated and weird in Mozambique; on every trip of length you feel weird at some point, and the book coincided with that, and feeling tense because at this point one of the guys there was trying to proposition my friend, another was obsessively trying to get her to marry him or get him a visa, and we were suddenly aware of the isolation of the tent, the noises everywhere, and not speaking the language, being trapped there. Except, of course, we weren't, but the novel heightened all these sensations and observations.

Therefore, I am desperate to read more Lessing. When I pay off my library fines (that may well take some time), I will head to The Golden Notebook. Lessing's acute observations, wry turns of phrase and general humour are excellent. Even more so, she was writing extraordinary things about the constraints of women and black people in society well before things started changing and there was international pressure to progress from these conditions.