What do You think about The Real Thing: Stories And Sketches (1993)?
I'm very sad to say that this was a big disappointment. I guess I had too high expectations but then again, who can blame me? It's a London-based (one of my big passions) book containing short stories written by a well-known contemporary female Nobel Prize winner. Why yes, I was excited. The first story, 'Debbie and Julie', and the story 'In Defence Of The Underground' are the only stories that I actually enjoyed and the only reason why I'm giving this two stars instead of one. The main reason b
—Leila
Once upon a time (in 2008/9) I spent a Christmas/New Year sleeping on a mattress on the floor of the lounge in a flat my son and his wife shared with another couple. And not once did I come across the London in this stories: mean, cold, heartless, petty, gross and dirty.Doris Lessing knows how to use words together, how to control words, how to put the words together for effect and to be both economical and yet figurative with language. It's her subject matter that in places I find repellent. Just a personal thing.
—Diane Warrington
+JMJA gift from the beautiful and beloved J.G.I'm sorry to say this, but this is just bad work. Most of the pieces in this book are sketches, not stories, and the few that are stories are terrible. "Storms" is good, but the rest, as Kakutani noted, feel rushed, unfinished: the characters are all as flat as a line, mere words on a page. This may be the result of trying to compress too much into a small space: their backgrounds all involve multiple divorces, multiple adulteries, multiple children with multiple people, and it can get hard for the reader to keep track of who is related to whom. It might take a novel to do justice to what, in a few lines, Lessing tells us about these characters.The stories usually have some sort of twist ending, but this device loses its effect after the first two or three times; the twist becomes expected.Worst of all is her prose: there are punctuation errors on nearly every page, cliches abounding (e.g. "she was nothing but trouble"), and more ellipses than a bad email. I trust that she won her Nobel not for this book.
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