Trop de sujets sur lesquels je n'ai aucune lumière. Lu toutefois l'article sur Jane Austen grâce à M. Google livre.

This reading experience was like having a huge tray of yummy appetizers delivered to me between two covers. Lessing reviews a wide variety of books with much intelligence and wit - from the writings of Jane Austen to the Sufi teacher, Idries Shah. Her views on chosen topics are delicious.
What a great introduction to a new-to-me British author. If I had marked every quote I loved in this book with a sticky flag, it would now look like a porcupine. No doubt I will revisit many sections of this book. ( )

Lessing has been prolific for decades, writing diverse novels, short stories, plays, nonfiction, and autobiographies. She is also a superb essayist: lucid, wise, knowledgeable, and witty. Most of her conversational, fast-moving, often wry inquiries into literature, politics, and ethics were originally published in England. Lessing has always been outspoken about literature, politics and social issues. The 65 essays and book reviews collected here range over those topics and others, all declaimed in Lessing's brisk, wry voice and articulated with pragmatic intelligence. Her literary reviews always amplify the book at hand; the pieces on Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy and Jane Austen resonate with fresh insight. Her enthusiastic reconsiderations of authors who are little read today, including Olive Schreiner, George Meredith, A.E. Coppard and Walter de la Mare, may pique readers' curiosity. Another obscure book, about an American prostitute, comes to light in the fascinating "The Maimie Papers." Six essays discuss the writer Idries Shah and his books about the mysteries and consolations of Sufism, which, Lessing claims, were "like a depth charge" and fulfilled all her philosophical and spiritual needs. There's a tirade against Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia was Lessing's homeland) and a coruscating indictment of American complacency before 9/11. The main theme, whether addressed overtly or underlying her literary criticism, is the indispensable place of books in the life of an educated person and an enlightened culture.

Lessing revs up readers'love for books, observes that "the voices of common sense are always softer than the noisy rhetorics of extremism," and, in one of her more contemplative pieces, "Problems, Myths, and Stories," considers how intrinsic storytelling is to humanness, even as education loosens its connection to great literature, and the art of reading is altered by new technologies and expectations.

Worth the price for the Jane Austen essay if nothing else. Brilliant. ( )