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Particularly Lessing’s Cats

Back in my college years, I handed my best friend Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which appealed to our conflicted academic Riot Grrrl sensibilities. Last week’s announcement that Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature made me want to call her so we could mutually gush and express dorky joy over Lessing’s historic recognition.

Although my BF went on to develop a strong liking for Lessing’s work, unfortunately for me, I followed The Golden Notebook with Lessing’s debut novel The Grass is Singing, which struck me as overwrought and simplistic. I then picked up The Fifth Child. Such a cool idea for a book (a family’s middle-class happiness is destroyed by their disturbing fifth child named Ben), but unsatisfying and poorly executed.

Then, some years later while browsing a used book store, I found a Lessing book called Particularly Cats. This thin autobiographical tome features Lessing’s meditations on cats she has lived with, and centers around Grey Cat and Black Cat, whose actions and temperaments she describes with the obvious admiration of a cat lover. The book instantly appealed to me, the subject matter was well-suited for Lessing’s prim and detached writing style.

Particularly Cats never appears on the lists of Lessing’s selected works that float around since she won the Nobel, because the Nobel Prize is not awarded based on anecdotes about domestic cats. One analysis of her Nobel commendation prizes Lessing’s writing for grappling with the question “in an age that values the individual, how is the individual supposed to stem the tide of what appear to be the increasingly catastrophic forces that threaten our world?”. Whatever. I like her stories about kitty-cats.

Posted in Culture.

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