Reviews for La buena terrorista (The Good Terrorist)

The average rating for La buena terrorista (The Good Terrorist) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-18 00:00:00 Errika Walker My admiration for Nobel laureate Doris Lessing continues to grow with this novel about a naïve group of revolutionaries living in a squat in mid-1980s London. Lessing's triumph is getting deep inside the complex mind of Alice Mellings, a spoilt, entitled and very clever upper-middle-class woman in her 30s who acts like the squat's den mother and is filled with contradictions. Alice detests the striving, materialistic middle classes, and yet she enjoys - really thrives on - fixing up her squat and feeding her lazy comrades. She hates that her parents have split up, and yet she's enmeshed in a doomed relationship with a man named Jasper who's clearly closeted and is repulsed by her physically. And she loathes capitalism, although she's all too ready to steal cash and valuables from her parents and their friends. What's remarkable is that Lessing lets us see things through Alice's perspective, but also shows us how appalling her behaviour is on a human level. Alice is such a good judge of human behaviour, but lacks the ability to understand her own failings. I imagine Lessing drew on her observations and experiences - and eventual disillusionment - with the Communist party decades earlier. It's never really clear what the revolutionaries in this book want to do or achieve. At first they want to join the I.R.A. Then there's talk about Russia. Some of them affect working class accents to seem legitimate, even while ignoring actual working class people in their midst. No one discusses politics, but they go to the odd demonstration, occasionally quote Lenin and call anyone they disagree with "fascists." While the book ticks away quietly for 300 pages, taken up with all manner of domestic and bureaucratic matters, Lessing sets the stage for a truly explosive finale. The casual way the climax is handled will make you think about the randomness and sheer banality of some terrorist acts and organizations. Besides Alice, and perhaps Alice's mom, Dorothy, who's also disillusioned (is it a coincidence that Lessing's given them both names that evoke fictional girls who find themselves in fantastic, often scary worlds?), the characters aren't all that well-rounded. But that's intentional. One of the most disturbing things about the book is how the revolutionaries don't care about human life, only their own needs. When someone leaves, or attempts suicide, or even dies? Meh. They barely care. (Comrades, indeed.) Alice does, but is it because she's "well brought up," earning that adjective in the book's title? This book is proof that you don't necessarily have to like a book's characters to be engrossed by them. Alice's insights and frustrating contradictions will haunt me, as will Lessing's brilliant, disturbing image of burying shit - literally, buckets of human waste - in one's back yard. Sooner or later, that buried crap will come back. And Christ almighty will it be messy.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-02-28 00:00:00 Villy Svahn [ preferably without reading Lenin (hide spoiler)]