My trip to Montreal last week was colored by the fact that I was reading Doris Lessing’s Love, Again. I hadn’t read anything of her writing for at least twenty years. It was both refreshing and frustrating reading. Her style is often very straight forward: he said, she said. Yet within that, she examines love from just about every angle as seen by a woman in her mid-sixties, from every view, that is, except that of sexual consummation. Hence, frustration. All the frustrations of being in love (in contrast to being “in love”), being “in lust”, differentiating the many facets of friendship, infatuation and love without the satisfaction of enduring love, holding someone close in your heart and body.
Intensely involved in a small theatre company, the woman, Sarah Durham, had put “that aspect” of her life away, feeling love was not part of her story any more. Coincidentally all the young men involved in the current production (which is about a woman all men love but cannot completely “have”) pursue her affections, stir the pot of “love’. It is an interesting stew, fascinating ingredients but not as enriching as I would have liked. I’m not sure I learned anything new about love (something I do think about and think I have experienced in many ways) but I did enjoy the ride on Sarah’s emotions. Perhaps Sarah was a richer person for having all the feelings (again) of love, but being alone (again) at the end of the book feels too much like real life. And probably that is what makes reading this book such an absorbing experience.