this is the 2nd story from lessing for moi. her other story...forget the name...just came to me...The Fifth Child...i marked that as a favorite of mine. it is. it is a good story. i hope this is a good story, too. i'm already prejudiced in favor of it. imagine that.begins:at homea woman stood on her back step, arms folded, waiting.thinking? she would not have said so. she was trying to catch hold of something, or to lay it bare so that she could look and define; for some time now she had been "trying on" ideas like so many dresses off a rack. she was letting words and phrases as worn as nursery rhymes slide around her tongue: for towards the crucial experiences custom allots certain attitudes, and they are pretty stereotyped. ah yes, first love!...growing up is bound to be painful!...my first child, you know...but i was in love!...marriage is a compromise...i am not as young as i once was.okeedokee, then...a bit of toby keith there, no? i'm not as young as i once was...but i'm young once as i ever was... or i'm mishearing lyrics, misremembering them again....excuse me, while i kiss this guy.update...saturday evening, still light out, 9:28 p.m. e.s.t...though still cloudy, overcast, as i has been for most of the day...some rain hit and miss...interesting tale tellingly told...there is this sense of detachment early on..."a woman stood on her back step, arms folded, waiting."....a page or two later, "a woman stood on her back doorstep, arms folded, waiting for the kettle to boil."....a bit later still..."a woman walked out of a side door over a lawn that needed cutting..." a bit later, we get her name, kate brown..."to be accurate catherine brown, or mrs. michael brown."a bit later, "a woman dressed suitably for a family afternoon walked back across the lawn, but with care so that the grass did not mark her shoes."there is a sense that the woman, kate, is also watching "the woman, waiting," this sense of detachment...as if she is watching her self...the telling tells us that her children...4 or 5 of them now, have for the most, grown and and leaving the house...the oldest, stephen, now 23...the second, james...the youngest, tim, now nineteen...her husband and another, alan post, need a translator for their conference, she is employed...and this sense of detachment is carried over there, where she translates...she also provides care and support, instruction and advice...w/global food...this outfit that meets in various parts of the world to plan and such...and so a bit later we get "a woman sat in a public room, relaxed but observant, an official in a public organization, dressed like one, holding herself like one; but letting her life--or the words that represented her thoughts about her life--flow through her mind."a sense of detachment..."she had become a function..."kate has this interesting, recurring dream...dreams are nice and lessing's use of dreams is among the better uses i've read....so....dreamlike...she is promoted from translating to planning and such...we get: "a woman stood in front of large mirrors in many shops, looking with a cool, not entirely friendly curiosity at a woman in her early forties who was still the same shape she had been all her adult life, give or take an inch or so..."there's some business about ribald laughter that i don't know what to make of, as yet...repeated, this thing is...like the images of "a woman"......also...this business of a thermostat...an interesting an apt metaphor for this...detachment...this kind of gauging of others...a wind, too...a bit later, we get, "there she sat, kate brown, just as she had alway been, her self, her mind, her awareness, watching the world from behind a facade only very slightly different from the one she had maintained since she was sixteen...people did not see her. it gave her a dislocated feeling, as if something had slipped out of alignment..."lessing uses this phrase to carry the story to the past, nice: "a long way off she saw kate ferreira, in her thin white embroidered linen dress..." and so the story goes there...kate's past...a bit later, we get, "in a corner of a restless noisy room sat a collected figure, female, holding in well-tended but overcompetent hands that day's newspaper, her eyes lowered, her shoulders rather hunched..."all that up to the 24%-complete mark...onward and upward...kate has met an america...or he has met her...the plot..so forth, so on...update, finished, wednesday morning, 6:26 a.m. 6 jun 12, sun's up and shininga story that doesn't seem to mind being obscure at times...this long protracted dream sequence running through start to finish...a woman carrying a seal...arf arf arf...i guess? there is a time or two, me, reading, and i'm thinking a message...we got a message here...spray-painted on the wall lots of over-spray and hard to read right up close...perhaps never...perhaps nothing more than food! so the lady translates, moves up a pace, is set loose after a time...is in istanbul, goes to spain with some guy who gets sick...ends up with some girl...both younger, as old give or take as her children...if the last, maureen, is some sort of seal being carried, then i spose kate did her job, as maureen cuts here hair and ties the wad around her wrist and acts stooopid. yiipee ki aye.onward and upward...4-stars? ummmm...well, it is better than some 3-stars i read....though there's that taint of we got a message here in the telling
Lessing’s writing has often concerned itself with the relationships and lives of women. In this work she provides the reader with a path to the inner thoughts of Kate Brown, a well off and attractive upper middle class woman, living in London in a lovely and comfortable home. Kate’s four grown children are now off for the summer, traveling or visiting friends. Her husband, a consulting neurosurgeon, is working for several months in a hospital in the United States. Since everyone is gone from the home, Kate’s husband urges her to take a job his colleague is offering her at a United Nations conference where they are experiencing an acute shortage of translators. Kate is proficient in several languages and so agrees to the job. When she arrives to begin, she is astonished at the salary she is provided and finds the work easy and well suited to her natural organizing skills. She also takes on the role of surrogate mother for those delegates who cannot seem to organize a shopping trip, a restaurant reservation or tickets to an event on their own. The delegates all like her and her success at this job leads to another in Istanbul. From there she agrees to accompany Jeffrey a much younger man, on a trip through Spain. They begin a disappointing affair and Jeffrey becomes very ill, struck with a mysterious feverish delirium. When she begins to get ill as well, she decides to leave him and return to London. However since her home has been rented out to another family during the summer, she checks into a hotel. There she continues to deteriorate mentally and physically, unable to eat and losing weight. For several weeks she remains there, unable to function. Grey roots begin to show in her hair without her regular hairdressing appointments and her weight loss is reflected in her clothes that now fit like sacks. She is no longer the embodiment of the efficient well groomed housewife she was when she first left London, and she is struck by the fact she is not noticed on the streets or when trying to order a meal in a restaurant. Not confident she has the funds to stay in the hotel, she moves to a rented room in a flat where she meets Maureen, a young angst ridden but beautiful girl, who is trying to sort out her own issues. Among them, her main concern is whether she should marry, and if so, who should she choose among her circle of suitors. During the stay in the flat with Maureen, Kate gradually makes her way back to normalcy and she begins her journey home. When we first met Kate, she was an attractive middle age woman with good clothes, a great hair style and a comfortable life. But this summer has changed her. It has been a time of great reflection. Never before had she looked at her life with such a close lens, never had she questioned what kind of person she was or who she had become. Brought face to face and appalled with a vision she can no longer tolerate, she returns to her home determined to relocate her true self psychologically as well as physically, without the predefined roles of wife and mother. This book was first published in 1973 when society was beginning to question many of the roles and relationships for women that had been preordained and dictated by previous generations. And this was one literary offering that was part of that effort. The novel was also written from a very different perspective, almost entirely from inside Kate’s head. That allowed Kate to share her innermost thoughts and fears, exploring and sharing her thinking with the reader and simultaneously examining what her life had been and what she wanted it to become after this critical summer when she was determined to create a new “self”. This an informative read. It does not contain colouful characters or an exciting plot and is blanketed in a rather somber tone. But it is an interesting look into the mind of an intelligent woman, who in middle age becomes aware of how she has let others define her, and how she has always done what others expected of her. This summer spent alone has allowed her to tear away that curtain and she is now looking to a future that may be different. Yes, she is returning to what she left behind, but with her new self awareness, she may be able to forge a different relationship with her partner whose infidelities she has long tolerated and her children who no longer need her motherly care and suffocating nurturing.
Do You like book The Summer Before The Dark (2002)?
Timing is all, and it seems like on first reading I completely missed the richness of the insights recorded in this short book. Skimming through it as a young adult, I could not imagine myself bogged down by such a miasma of self-deception as the narrator slogged her way through in search of her own authentic self.I certainly was never going to allow myself to be blinkered!Suffice to say, now that I am the age of the protagonist,I marvel at her courage and i found myself completely engaged by her process. What I dismissed as tedious analysis I recognize now is a depth of perception that did not appeal to one intent on skimming the bright shallows.Not for everybody then, the existential crises of a genteel lady coming to terms with her life and attempting to place it in context.
—Magdelanye
Kate Brown is a 45-year-old London housewife and mother of four young adults who finds herself at a loose end. Neither her husband nor her children--all of whom are immersed in their own interests and do not spare her much thought at all--need her. She takes a job with an international civil service organization called Global Foods, the primary purpose of which is to host lavish conferences for well-heeled, jet-setting civil servants who are about as connected to the native workers they represent as Kate is to her family (despite all she has come to believe about herself after a quarter century of devoted caring).In this 1973 bildungsroman for the new woman, Kate Brown wrestles with a serial dream about a stranded seal struggling to return to the ocean as she wrestles with the truth of herself and of her life .Along the way, she becomes a star with Global Foods, has a pathetic romantic affair with an American in Spain, and finds herself the flatmate of a young woman named Maureen--a well-off waif whose own search for the right road for herself coincides with Kate's. Kate and Maureen become each other's foil and friend for a little while, and then they move on--but only after they each make the startling realization that women make their reality by the image of themselves they project and that nothing matters. This is to say that they realize they can create their own realities and decide for themselves what is worth caring about--and in their own good time.In the end, liberation is not a group project but an individual one. The rewards come slowly and strangely, but they do come. This is a rich and lyrical story.
—Sandy
Kate Brown, who lives in the London suburbs, is happily married and the mother of four children. But she has reached a point in her life when she feels extraneous. Invisible,even. As her husband gets ready to leave for a conference in the States, she ponders what her summer will be like. And then an opportunity presents itself that will allow Kate to spread her wings a bit and explore another world. As she leaves for the position as an interpreter, she has no idea what will be unleashed over the next few months.As we follow Kate's journey, we experience with her the joys of freedom, along with the risks. Will a foray into a brief affair bring her what is missing in her life? Or will the opportunity to earn her own money give her something she wants? But unexpected events turn these experiences into something quite different, as we see Kate's journey turn dark, with strange and symbolic dreams.Then her journey takes her to a flat and a young girl who is on the verge of her life, while Kate is at a different crossroads. They share experiences and thoughts, and when the journey ends and the dark unfolds into springy lightness, Kate is ready to finally go home and rejoin her family. But she has a different perspective and a new way to be.The rich symbolism throughout "The Summer Before the Dark (Vintage International)" reminded me once again why Lessing is such a great writer. Kate's recurring dream of a seal she is struggling to rescue and carry to safety reminds us that her nurturing aspects have controlled her life. She now must move on to something different. As she thinks about going home, she realizes something significant, as described in this passage:"The mood she was in when she walked in at her front door again would be irrelevant: now that was the point, it was the truth. We spend our lives assessing, balancing, weighing what we think, we feel...it's all nonsense. Long after an experience which has been experienced as this or that kind of thought, emotion, and judged at the time accordingly—well, it is seen quite differently. That's what was happening, you think; and what you thought or felt about it at the time seems laughable, jejune."There were parts of the novel that seemed very heavy with introspection, and the feelings evoked sometimes weighed me down. But then I moved on to the richly textured parts during which Kate arrives at her realizations. Definitely recommended for anyone who loves following a woman's journey toward finding herself. Five stars.
—Laurel-Rain
