Ben nel mondo (Ben, in the World)

by Doris Lessing

Overview

Ben Lovatt, il bambino che Doris Lessing ci ha presentato nel suo memorabile romanzo Il quinto figlio, considerato inumano dalla sua stessa famiglia, è diventato grande. Troppo grande: chi lo incontra si spaventa e solo raramente suscita curiosità; molto più spesso provoca paura, fastidio, un certo grado di nervosismo. Nessuno crede che sia ancora solo un ragazzo, ma in realtà ha da poco raggiunto la maggiore età, momento funesto per Ben perché significa che più nessuno è obbligato a occuparsi di lui. Non la famiglia che, dopo essersi spezzata proprio a causa sua, si è faticosamente ricostruita; non l'assistenza sociale, anche perché lo stesso Ben non è in grado di farsi aiutare. E' alla mercé di chi incontra, talvolta sono persone gentili, più spesso profittatori. E così si trova a viaggiare per il sud della Francia e poi verso il Brasile, coinvolto prima in un traffico di droga e poi in affari molto più loschi e pericolosi. Fino alla fine, col fiato sospeso, il lettore è avvinto alle sorti di questo gigante buono, di questo ragazzo inesorabilmente diverso, sempre in cerca di qualcuno che gli sia simile e che non lo faccia più sentire così disperatamente solo..

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788858800386
Publisher:	Feltrinelli Editore
Publication date:	10/18/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1
File size:	2 MB
Language:	Italian

About the Author

"Doris Lessing is the kind of writer who has followers, not just readers," Lesley Hazleton once observed. But the Nobel Prize-winning Lessing, whose classic novel The Golden Notebook was embraced as a feminist icon, has seldom told her followers exactly what they wanted to hear. For much of her career, she has frustrated readers' expectations and thwarted would-be experts on her work, penning everything from traditional narratives to postmodern novels to mystic fables.

Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) and grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father made an unsuccessful attempt to farm maize. Though she loved living on the farm, her family life was often tense and unhappy. Lessing married at the age of 20, but three years later, feeling stifled by colonial life and increasingly distressed by the racism of her society, she joined the Communist Party, "because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives."

Soon after that, she left her husband and first two children to marry fellow Communist Gottfried Lessing, with whom she had a son. They divorced, and she took her son with her to England, where she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, to high acclaim. After several more novels, including the semi-autobiographical series Children of Violence, Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook, a postmodern, fragmentary narrative about a writer's search for identity. The Golden Notebook gained a passionate following in the feminist movement and "left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women," as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote.

To Lessing's dismay, she was frequently cited as a "feminist writer" after that. Yet as Diane Johnson pointed out in a 1978 review of Stories, Lessing "also understands men, politics, social class, striving, religion, loneliness and lust." Johnson added: "Mrs. Lessing is the great realist writer of our time, in the tradition of the major Continental novelists of the 19th century, particularly Stendhal and Balzac, but also Turgenev and Chekhov -- a masculine tradition with which she shares large moral concerns, an earnest and affirmative view of human nature, and a dead-eye for social types."

But Lessing, who once called realist fiction "the highest form of prose writing," soon launched into a science-fiction series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, which baffled many of her fans. Lessing used the term "space fiction" for the series, which recounts human history from the points of view of various extraterrestrial beings. Though Lessing gained some new readers with her Canopus series, her early admirers were relieved when she came back to Earth in The Fifth Child, the story of a monstrous child born to ordinary suburban parents, which Carolyn Kizer deemed "a minor classic." Later novels like Mara and Dann included elements of fantasy and science fiction, but recently, with the publication of The Sweetest Dream, Lessing has returned to domestic fiction in the realist mode, which many critics still see as her best form.

Throughout her life, Lessing has been drawn to systems for improving human experience -- first Marxism, then the psychiatry of R. D. Laing, then Sufi mysticism. But her yearning for a single, transcendent truth coexists with a sharp awareness of the contradictory mix of vanities, passions, and aggressions that make up most human lives. As Margaret Drabble noted, Lessing is "one of the very few novelists who have refused to believe that the world is too complicated to understand."

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

October 22, 1919

Place of Birth:

Persia (now Iran)