The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to an SF writer. Sort-of.

[elfs]

So, Doris Lessing has taken the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's nice to see an SF writer take the brass ring, but, I mean, Doris Lessing? This Doris Lessing:

A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalized sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (a male word, that) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm and that is when a man, from the whole of his need and desire, takes a woman and wants all her response. Everything else is a substitute and a fake and the most inexperienced woman feels this instinctively.

I know that it is a disease of writers that they have to generalize their own experiences into some kind of universal, but there's a point at which saying "It works for me, therefore it works this way for everyone" goes too far. Miss Lessing was always guilty of that in her writing (and not just about orgasms, although that's a subject near and dear to my heart), and for her to take the Nobel prize just seems to me a little off.

Comments

Oh, I dunno...

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

It sounds like science fiction to me. -_-

Thanks for reminding of why I don't like her

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read any Lessing for years. I knew that it was certainly because her books were pretentious, overwraught, and consciously literary, but I'd forgotten that crap was in there as well.

[solarbird]

Well, at least she had the good grace not to be impressed.

[(Anonymous)]

Doris Lessing is wonderful. She asks the questions we all want to ask == there are no answers in literature or life. And it isn't all about orgasms. Important though they are.

I am hosting a discussion about Shikasta this month in my FTF book group. I expect few will have read the whole book, but it is an amazingly ambitious work and worth reading for those interested in the origin of good and evil on our planet. I re-read about every 5 years for a reconnection with reality.

No one deserves the Nobel more than Doris Lessing. And I won't put up with crap about her. She is truly sepectacular.