Love Again: Novel, a

by Doris Lessing

Book Overview

"She has revealed that brilliant kernel at the heart of it all that we recognize as the truth." -- Francine Prose, Washington Post Book World

Love, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her life as she knows it. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060927968
• ISBN13: 9780060927967
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Melancholy and Romantic

"Love, Again" is one of Doris Lessing's "later" novels and it focuses on an older protagonist caught in the snares of romantic love. Sarah Durham is sixty-five and describes herself as not having been in love in decades. All that changes when she, the widow of a founding member of "The Green Bird," a successful London theatre company, decides to stage an avant-garde operatic play concerning the enigmatic Julie Vairon. Vairon lived most of her life in an isolated French village, writing music and painting and was virtually unknown until her "discovery" in the 1970s.It is Julie Vairon's tortured love life that really interests Sarah, however, even more than does her strange and eerie music. Vairon was romantically involved with two Frenchmen, yet neither romance had a happy ending. Vairon did, however, find love at last, or what passed for love, only to have everything end both mysteriously and tragically.As Sarah and her company of actors at "The Green Bird" begin work on their rendition of the life of Julie Vairon, Julie's own eroticism seems to be working its magic on the cast. Everyone seems to be falling in love with everyone else...and some of the romances are of the most improbable imaginable.Although someone not familiar with Doris Lessing's writing may think the above premise sounds more than a little silly, let me assure you that it is not. You won't find any lovesick fools running around in this book. Rather than reaching the heights of ecstasy, the lovers in "Love, Again" are anguished souls who become involved in relationships that don't have even a ghost of a chance of working. And Lessing, a superlative writer, makes us feel the grief and sense of loss experienced by her characters. We don't laugh at them; we grieve with them.Stylistically, "Love, Again" is a different sort of Doris Lessing novel. It is intricate, very internal and reflective. It is also something of a double narrative, a literary device that I, personally, like very much. Lessing very cleverly and skillfully lets the melancholy and tragic ghost of Julie Vairon haunts the love lives of her present-day characters. And the life of Julie Vairon is the perfect background on which to tell the story of Sarah and company.As much as this book concentrates on love, however, love is not its central theme. The book revolves around Sarah Durham and how she copes with her own sexuality and attractiveness in light of the inevitability of growing older. This is subject matter that Lessing has delved into before: in "The Summer Before the Dark" Kate Brown was a woman attempting to deal with the first pangs of growing older and lost youth. Sarah, however, is older and seemingly beyond the changes that sent Kate into a literal panic, but she does have problems of her own to deal with.Sarah's problems are the most problematic area of "Love, Again." While I can readily accept the idea of one "thirtysomething" man falling madly in love with Sarah, the idea of three doi

Incredibly subtle portrait of a wounded child at 65

I write this because of one particular passage that appears near the end. Sarah, the protagonist, has had recurring nightmares in which she is holding her doll and stabbing it with a knife. The doll is bleeding. In this episode, she sees an incident which explains her nightmares. Lessing doesn't say it does, and Sarah doesn't say it does, but the reader knows it because he/she has been shown it. The book is a masterpiece and a heartbreaking scene tops it off. Don't know how she does it.

I found it very powerful.

Lessing writes about being in love and what it means. This is not a misty, romantic story, but talks about the pain and the emotional rollercoaster ride of being in love--or lust. I found it very powerful and moving.

Subtle psychological study of love at any age.

Engaging story of many kinds of love inspired by the production of a musical play about a romantic heroine already dead one hundred years. Subtle, powerful portrait. Won't be enough action for some. I loved it.