Alfred and Emily

Resumen del libro

The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without.

What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.' In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital.

In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives.This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land. 'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that.

Biografía del autor

P Hija de padres ingleses, B Doris Lessing /B nació en Persia (ahora Irán) en 1919, y a la edad de cinco años se trasladó con su familia a Zimbabwe. Desde 1949 y hasta su muerte, residió en Londres. Fue una de las escritoras más influyentes del siglo XX y obtuvo prestigiosos galardones como el Premio Príncipe de Asturias en 2001 y el Premio Nobel de Literatura en 2007.<br> P Autoraprolífica, a menudo polémica y genial narradora, de entre sus libros destacan I El cuaderno dorado /I (1962), I Memorias de una superviviente /I (1974), I La buena terrorista /I (1985), I El quinto hijo /I (1988), I De nuevo, el amor /I (1996), I La grieta /I (2007), I Alfred y Emily /I (2008) y sus recopilaciones de relatos, como I Cuentos europeos /I . Acompañan su obra narrativa varios libros de ensayo y varios volúmenes de talante autobiográfico, entre los que se encuentra I Made in England, Gatos ilustres /I o I Las cárceles que elegimos /I .<br>