Cleft Book

I did not finish this book. In fact I could not. It was my taste as a consumer of books that prohibited me.

Oh sure, I've set aside books before. I've even set aside books with no intention of continuing them in the future. But never with as adamant a certainty that I would never again pick up the book in order to give it a second chance.

Some may question my ability to judge a book based only on a partial reading, which is fair, but trust me: this book is Bad.

Doris Lessing's The Cleft may actually be the worst book I'd ever read. It's not so much that the ideas expressed were repugnant or in any way offensive, but more that in the place of what we commonly refer to as writing there was instead a collection of hieroglyphic fecal matter.

I had never read any of Lessing's impressive oeuvre and so to encounter this as my first taste of what by at least some accounts is a smorgasbord of delicacies was, in layman's terms, a disappointment. Pacing: scattered by what looks to be the onset of senility. Style: fourth-grade chic. Historical sense: senseless and ahistorical. Characters: there were none and those impressions that threatened to become characters were never better than those cardboard standees you used to find in display windows at Suncoast Video, a Leia or Chewbacca or Boba Fett (of course, none of those impressions ever really approached that sense of solidity that those corrugated paper mementos had).

This book was chosen for our bookclub on the basis that mere months prior its publication, Lessing won the Nobel for literature and the synopsis made it sound like an adventurous read into gender studies. It was not anything of the sort.

Here we see the woman who chose the book express her disappointment in Lessing and in the Nobel committee by means of willful conflagration.