å'件人: Mike Blaauw <mikebla1@dslextreme.com>å'é€æ—¶é—´: 2009å¹´4月13æ—¥ 22:31æ"¶ä»¶äºº: 'Sunforever' <cscguochang@gmail.com>主题: RE: On not winning the Nobel Prize-Doris Lessing - Nobel LectureHi Leo,
Thank you very much for the lecture by Doris Lessing, I had not read it before and found it very interesting. I don’t know if you realize but she was raised in Rhodesia and I thing she was expelled or at least not let back into the country because of her left wing views. I have read many of her books and find some of them capture some situations with incredible insight. She once wrote a novel using another name and tried, with difficulty, to get it published whereas with her own name she had no problems. She did it to illustrate the difficulties new authors have publishing books. She also wrote a book full of optimism after the Mugabe government took over the country and then another some years later describing how the country had deteriated. When she eventually did win the Nobel Prize she did not go to the acceptance saying that it was all really something she could not get excited about at her age. She must be close to 90. When she talks of Anna Karenina I think of reading a Russian novel about the prisoners having to heat the frozen cement so they could work with it while I was on the hot banks of the ZambeziRiver on a fishing trip.
It has always amazed me how almost all groups of people have so much artistic talent and I think some groups have more of some than others. I remember a story by an Irish guy who was a story teller and when he told a story in England they wanted to hear exactly the same story each time and any variation was not accepted whereas in Ireland if it was the same he lacked the ability to be imaginative. Africans have a real talent for telling stories. If a servant broke something the explanation would be incredibly detailed and elaborate â€" he never just dropped it!
I do despair over the future of Africa and find references to it depressing. There is in my mind no clear path to improve the sad situation that the young woman finds herself in because of the corruption throughout the society. You noted that the library books were stolen and the teacher needed to keep the calk in his pocket because it would be stolen. The sad fact that she has two children with another on the way and relying on charity for water for them is also sad. When I was there the government had wells in the tribal areas and I lived with a guy whose job it was to inspect and repair them. Today there is nothing like that. It was interesting about the Indian store. Indians have stored throughout Zimbabwe and trade the necessary items for the people in the country. When we travelled there it seemed that no matter how far out in the country or how remote it was there was a small shack of a store with a Coca Cola sign on it.
Thank you again for the article and I hope you continue to read good books. Sadly a lot of people don’t read books in the US. When I was in college the teacher did a casual survey asking how many books the students had read in the previous year. I had been working nights part of the time and had most of the shift available to read so sometimes I would read a book a day and then I went to the US and had no friends so I read a great deal and had read something like 200 books. The average for the class was about 2 which had been required by a teacher and he threw my number out because he thought it was a joke!
Write again soon, Mike
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