Nobel. Doris Lessing.

"Doris Lessing, the novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her feminist engagement with the social and political issues of her time, today won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature," announces Motoko Rich in the New York Times. "Ms Lessing's strongest legacy may be that she inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough novel, The Golden Notebook. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said: 'The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th century view of the male-female relationship.'"

The NYT has set up a "Featured Author" page linking to its reviews and related articles.

Updated through 10/15.

Not a whole lot of Lessing's work has been adapted for the screen. Here's her IMDb entry; on DVD, we have Memoirs of a Survivor, an adaptation of Lessing's dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel starring Julie Christie, and it's "what one might kindly call a flawed film," writes Richard Scheib at the Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Review.

Updates: "She is a refreshingly uncosy presence in the pally world of literary London," blogs Claire Armistead at the Guardian. "Perhaps her biggest achievement is to end where she began - as an outsider, who, whatever her faults, could never, ever be parochial. A natural, then, for the international pantheon of the Nobel."

And the Guardian's set up a special page as well.

"[T]o this day her taste for alternative worlds has not waned," notes London Times literary editor Erica Wagner, mentioning both the Children of Violence and Canopus in Argos series and her collaboration with Philip Glass on the opera The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. "It is peculiar, perhaps, that 'science fiction' is perceived as 'male' genre when so many of its serious and gifted practioners - Lessing, Ursula K LeGuin, Margaret Atwood - have been women."

Ed Champion's happy and rounds up linkage.

More at the Literary Saloon.

"Her quote today, in the Guardian, was priceless: 'I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot. It's a royal flush.'" Dwight Garner also points to the best bits of his 1997 interview with Lessing for Salon.

Also: Word from Motoko Rich at the Frankfurt Book Fair on how Lessing's publishers are celebrating (and planning to capitalize on) the big win.

"Although both feminism and Communism have laid claim to Lessing, she avoids being identified with movements or ideologies, political or literary," writes Time's Lev Grossman. "She refuses to settle for simple answers or received wisdom, and she has never been afraid to commit heresy."

Updates, 10/12: For the Guardian, Lisa Allardice and Sam Jones gather gracious quotage from Lessing herself and other writers, including AS Byatt: "Lessing, she said, was one of the 'few prophets' of literature who had 'an uncanny instinct for writing about things that are going to be a problem before they come over the horizon - not many writers can do that.'"

And the editors comment: "The lack of romance can make for a tough read. Even fans acknowledge that her writing is often unforgiving and metallically hard, but a softer voice could not plausibly convey 'that hell which is multiplied all over the world, everywhere human beings make our civilization.'"

"Doris Lessing's books have irritated me as much as delighted me," blogs Erica Jong at the Huffington Post. "I believe that the greatest writers are irritants. (Think of Jonathan Swift). The Golden Notebook inspired me because its heroine was a woman as engaged by her intellectual and political life as her sexual life. She was a woman in full."

"This week it's books, books, books." Rounding up highlights from the German papers, Signandsight reflects the state of my own real-life desktop, groaning under the weight of a rapidly growing stack of dead trees and ink. With the Frankfurt Book Fair underway and literary prizes being announced practically by the hour, it may take weeks to wrestle that stack back down to size.

"Earlier this year, Lessing also published a passionate introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover," notes Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. "She wrote in defense of the writer demonised by many of the very feminists who once lionised her: DH Lawrence. 'What we do have from him,' she argues, 'is a report on the sex war of his time, and no one has done it better.' Except, perhaps, Doris Lessing in her time. And, as with Lawrence, her unblinking dramatisation of conflict, cruelty and devastation extends from sexual and family relationships through the state of politics to the state of the planet. 'The furious energy of his talent, his power,' she writes on Lawrence, 'set him above his contemporaries, on whom he had an extraordinary influence.' Change the pronoun and the judgement stands."

euro|topics adds reactions from Austria and Spain.

"If the Swedish Academy has awarded Lessing based on the fact that she is 'that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny,' then it is perhaps part of the bargain that she would have her missteps," writes Dan Kellum in the Nation. "In order to scrutinize, one must take risks, and if Lessing is political, her political significance as a writer is that she doesn't just throw stones. Instead she grapples. She makes her missteps, but at the end of the day she is still asking an all-important question - in an age that values the individual, how is the individual supposed to stem the tide of what appear to be the increasingly catastrophic forces that threaten our world?"

Updates, 10/13: "A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is." The New York Times runs a 1992 op-ed by Doris Lessing.

More linkage at the Literary Saloon.

Update, 10/14: "Here is a great contemporary woman novelist and London intellectual who has dedicated her long life and impressive body of work to the tireless and unflinching exploration of man's (and woman's) place in the world, together with issues of race, gender and social justice," writes the Observer's Robert McCrum. "This prize finally acknowledges what has been true for at least 40 years: that she is one of the most important literary voices of her generation." Praise from a slew of other writers follow.

Update, 10/15: "Almost intoxicating to see the Nobel committee do something honorable and creditable for a change," writes Christopher Hitchens at Slate. "It's as though the long, dreary reign of the forgettable and the mediocre and the sinister had been just for once punctuated by a bright flash of talent. And a flash of 88-year-old talent at that, as if the Scandinavians had guiltily remembered that they let Nabokov and Borges die (yes, die) while they doled out so many of their awards to time-servers and second-raters. Had they let this happen to Doris Lessing as well, eternal shame would have covered them."

Posted by dwhudson at October 11, 2007 6:03 AM