Love, Again Lessing, Doris May

Amazon.com Review The first novel from Doris Lessing in more than seven years, Love, Again is the story of a sixty-five-year-old woman who falls in love. Or rather, Sarah Durham falls into a state of love, which is another country altogether, and struggles to maintain her sanity while there. Closer to The Golden Notebook in its ironies and complexities than anything Doris Lessing has written since, this is a brilliant anatomy of love -- of longing, grief, an older woman's sexuality, of all the experiences of love available to a woman in her lifetime -- from a master of human psychology who is also one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today. Product Description A story of love and desire in an older woman finds sixty-five-year-old Sarah Durham in relationships with two much-younger men and follows her struggles with the feelings of her youth. 75,000 first printing. $85,000 ad/promo. Tour. From Publishers Weekly "The country of love... a desert of deprivation... longing and jealousy" is the focus of Lessing's newest novel . She charts her heroine's emotional landscape with assiduous attention to the most minute nuances. Sarah Durham was widowed young; now in her mid-60s, she is manager of and playwright for a London fringe theater group. A production of a play based on the journals and music of a 19th-century quadroon from Martinique, Julie Vairon, inflames Sarah's dormant sexual impulses. And she is not the only one: all of the actors, the director and a rich patron, Stephen Ellington-Smith, are also sublimely seduced by Julie's words, music and the few portraits of her that survive. In this highly charged atmosphere, suggestive of the magical transformations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Sarah craves an actor half her age (who leads her on, but beds others); Stephen, whose marriage is tragically unhappy, becomes unhealthily obsessed with the dead Julia; Sarah and the director then acknowledge their sexual longing for each other?and on and on it goes, in a quadrille of lovesick changing partners. Lessing's perceptive insights into the condition of being female and elderly and emotionally excluded ("on the other shore, watching") are as astute as anything she has ever written, and so are her comments on contemporary English society and on human nature in general. Although the book is long and rambling, asking much of a reader's patience and willingness to spend so much time inside Sarah's head, Lessing, whose memoir, Under My Skin, appeared last year, wields a formidable analytic intelligence that makes this work provocative and often astonishingly beautiful. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Lessing's latest protagonist is a 65-year-old woman who falls for two very young men. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist At 65, Sarah Durham finds herself suddenly, flamingly, in love with a handsome actor who is young enough to be her grandson. Why now? She married young, widowed young, and raised two children. Smart and attractive, she's written a successful play, and she's involved in the joyful group delirium of putting the show on stage. Why this young man? She has nothing in common with him. Then her desire unaccountably shifts to someone else. Part of Sarah longs to go back to her cool elderly persona, "all passion spent," but she knows her wildness is from her own submerged self. Yet more precious to her than any physical passion is her exciting friendship with a man nearer her age; he's also insanely obsessed with someone unattainable. As always, Lessing illuminates the secret intimacy and grief that are "the other side of the well-lit and ordered world we know." With compassion and intelligence, she shows how precarious we all are, how close to those who are crazy and helpless and outside. At the same time she writes about the sane, ordered world with irony and wit. There are dazzling, unforgettable vignettes here, private and public, that change the