The Cleft

Doris Lessing isn't for beginning readers. She isn't an "easy" read. The entertainment or consumption value of her works generally isn't very great. If that is what you are looking for, you might want to stick with Harlequin romances. If, however, you are interested in learning what she has to teach, then you should tough it out and put in the effort on her books. But it's not easy. Not everyone can do it. And, unfortunately for us all, not everyone can benefit from the vast knowledge that she imparts to those who can see what is to be seen when there is a seer there to see it (to paraphrase a quote from someone famous whose name escapes me at the moment). This is one of the ways in which "secret" knowledge comes into being. It isn't really a secret, but acquiring it is so difficult for so many people because of the effort required that it might as well be hidden - guarded from the unworthy by dragons or some such monsters. The "unworthy" are deemed such only due to their laziness, habits, expectations, immaturity, etc. Those who have roundly criticized "The Cleft" have in fact - unbeknownst to themselves - only revealed their own shortcomings, prejudices, biases, and glaring blindness to those who can actually see. There are very many Lessing books that are "difficult", like "The Cleft". They all, without exception, contain extremely valuable insight into the human condition. Insight that is rare and nigh impossible to come by in other, more mundane, ways. You can't "gain" such insights in a college course, for instance. "The Memoirs of a Survivor" is one such book. It isn't an easy read. I found it to be not very much fun to read as well. But the insights that can be had from a "Benedictine" style reading of it are of such magnitude that one's life will be positively impacted in a way that can only be truly well described by turning to myth, legend, poetry, and...well it is ineffable in the end. ;-)

I've been a fan of Doris Lessing for over thirty years but haven't read anything of hers in some time. I loved The Golden Notebook and The Summer Before the Dark, and found Canopus in Argos, her science fiction series, fascinating. I was delighted when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. In truth, I was surprised she was still alive. The Cleft is tale narrated by a Roman senator and scholar about pre-history. He finds his information from myths and fragments of clay tablets written long after the time of the Clefts. It is a "sounds like the truth to me" story. The Clefts were the first community--a community of women living by the sea near huge up-cropping of rocks, one of which had a large cleft, a caldera that steamed with noxious gases. This community of women gave birth only to girls until one day, a "deformed" child arrived--a boy. The first deformed children were given back to the goddess in the cleft until one woman refused. Thus came the beginning of history and the beginning of union between women and men as well as conflict between women and men. Interspersed between the telling of the tale is the senator's life story, which has many parallels with the history. The senator also speculates as he writes, "We assume that because these people had shapes like ours, were so much like us, that they felt the same. Perhaps no one had taught them loneliness? Is that such a ridiculous question?... There is not much in the records, for instance of love..." Who knows what tales will be birthed next by the remarkable Doris Lessing? She is the storyteller of the twentieth century and continues her legend into the twenty-first. Her imaginings all hold a kernel of possible truth. by Judith Helburn for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about women

I won't go into any detail about the plot of this book because it has already been well-covered by the other reviews. What I will say is that I found this book immensely enjoyable. Where others felt it was dry or meandering, I found it to be interesting, not because it evokes specific imagery like most of the fiction I read, or holds any literary "special effects", but because it amorphous and open. This story reads like something distant. It is a myth, contrived by the author recently, but bearing an aura of a story dusty with age, but still relevant. Reading this book is like hearing a well-worn story told by a wise person. It is restrained, but somehow it still managed to hold my interest, page after page until I was through with it. Overall, this was soothing to read. It was easy-going, captured my interest, and resonated with my beliefs.

At eighty-eight Doris Lessing has not lost her love of provoking, politicizing, turning traditional beliefs upside down, taking on any topic that she finds interesting and her wonderful sense of humor. THE CLEFT, the newest novel is her ouvre is a very different, though not particularly difficult or long novel, whose premise is that women came first and the creation of men was an afterthought. Needless to say some readers will be deeply offended by this notion and the way Lessing portrays the early inhabitants. The narrator is a Roman scribe who lives in the time of Nero and has found an ancient set of hidden documents that tell a tale of a world nobody could ever have conceived. He nervously tells the reader who he is and shares bits of his life which humanizes him and adds to his verissimitude. The story begins ages and ages ago, but time does not exist before and during the copying of the scrolls. He reminds readers that long ago has no real context in trying to date the events that are outlined. At some time, in some place a community of "sea" women lived on a small beach surrounded by high cliffs and mountains. These creatures had no capacity to think, to be curious, to want to explore, to wonder why about anything. All they knew was to swim, sun themselves on the rocks, eat what the sea provided and give birth at the behest of the moon. Their only ritual was to climb the rock above them that is called the Cleft because it looks like female genitalia. They push red flowers into the crevice and watch the water that flows through it get red ... then some of them get pregnant. They are called 'Shes' and have always given birth to "babes" who are shes. Inevitably, one day a boy is born. These vessels had never seen one of these deformed, unacceptable "Monsters" or "squirts" as they were labeled. As more of them appeared they were tortured, mutilated and ultimately left on the killing rock as food for the eagles, who also inhabited this strange place. Neither the scribe, the "She" telling the story or the reader has any sense of context or time frame. As the story unfolds readers are privy to the fact that the eagles did not eat the children. Rather they took the infants over the rough mountains to a safe meadow and somehow the first group survived. As more and more babies came to them they approached a doe who lay down and offered her swollen teats to the tiny humans in order to feed them. She licked them and was the only mother/nurturer they knew. They all grew big and strong and in many ways were more industrious than the sea creatures they knew nothing about. They built primitive huts of branches and leaves, they invented fire, they learned to cook and were always looking for new inventions to work on. Time passed. How much? Nobody knows. And one day a young "She" crawled over the mountains to see where the eagles were taking the squirts. She was frightened, overwhelmed and for the first time saw grown-up "Monsters." These hairy crea

When an ageing Roman senator agrees to undertake writing a history of the first recorded society, he does so knowing that many questions will remain unanswered, vast gaps in an ancient tale of the beginning of life. Though first recorded via oral tradition, the senator also has fragments of written documents from which he tentatively composes the story of the Cleft. A society composed entirely of women- babies are born through the cycles of the moon- this sedentary group lives quietly in caves above the sea, performing ritual sacrifices, content to remain in the shelters they have always known. With the Old Shes (of indeterminate age) as titular guides, the existence of the women is uneventful until the birth of a male, immediately named a Monster. So remarkably different from the females, with his ugly protuberances, this first Monster is cast out, left on the Killing Rock, where it is expected that the eagles will consume the infant. When more Monsters are born, much to the chagrin of their mothers, the women become curious about their bizarre physical differences, alternately toying with, torturing, starving and abusing the tiny creatures. Much later (although time has no sense of measurement) it is learned that the eagles have not feasted upon the small carrion, but have delivered them safely to a nearby valley where others of their kind nurture the babes, eventually building a community of Monsters, later to be known as Squirts. As time passes, curiosity prevails and communication between the species, as well as ignorance, ushers in a phase of uneasy coexistence. Nature, of course, prevails and eventually the males become the necessary tools of procreation, the females forced to deal with the males' intransigence to provide more children and a future for the tribes. In Lessing's imaginative scenario, the battle between the sexes evolves, if only in its most elementary incarnation. Age old questions arise, the thoughtlessness of men, the irritating whine of women's complaints ("Don't you care what happens to us?") and the endless cycle of attraction-repulsion that so defines male and female society. Profoundly simple, yet provocative, Lessing easily engages the reader in a scenario that speaks to the uneasy truce that has always attended male-female relations, the troublesome issues of gender coexistence, combined with an irresistible attraction. Which came first, male or female, is not addressed in this engaging portrait of early tribal identity; the Cleft assumes dominance merely by its existence. Yet the inevitable need for procreation transcends even the most egregious differences, an interdependence that has plagued humanity from the distant unrecognizable past to the present, where "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars". Luan Gaines/2007.