Reimagined Lives
By MARTIN RUBIN
Wall Street Journal August 9, 2008
Alfred & Emily
By Doris Lessing
Harper, 274 pages, $25.95
“The hoopla surrounding last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was such an ordeal, and so distracting, that it has caused Doris Lessing to stop writing—or so she has claimed. She has even declared ‘Alfred & Emily’ to be her last book. If it is, she will have finished out her long career in good form. She has never displayed her potent imagination to better effect, or her gift for probing realism.
“‘Alfred & Emily’ is, in part, a daughter’s memoir: Ms. Lessing, now 88, unflinchingly shows how the lives of her parents, both of British birth, were shattered by World War I. But the book is also Ms. Lessing’s effort to imagine, in fictional form, what her parents’ lives might have been like had the war never occurred and had they never married. . . .”
Click here for Martin’s full review, or visit www.wsj.com.