![]() (In this she is like my absolute favourite writer, D. (Pleasure is a great virtue in reading, but some things are great because they refuse us pleasures we might unthinking expect.) I’m always tense, reading Lessing, because she’s always on the verge of being clumsy and obvious, but actually rarely is. I don’t find reading Lessing an easy or always pleasant experience. ![]() I love Lessing because she is one of those writers who so easily wrong-foot me. It gives us so much to think about that it really deserves to be better known. Although I’ve only read a fraction of Lessing’s vast corpus, I rank Summer as one of my favourites, alongside The Grass is Singing (1950) and the puzzlingly underrated The Good Terrorist (1985). (Here’s hoping the organizers agree.) I’ll leave the comparison itself aside for now, and instead take it on its own merits. ![]() ![]() But I returned to it much more successfully last week because I’d an inkling it could be interestingly compared to one of my favourite novels, Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), in a way that would fit a call for papers for a session at next year’s MLA. ![]() I first tried this book a couple of years ago (apparently on a trip to Chicago-the boarding pass was tucked after p 46). ![]()
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