The Grandmothers

The Grandmothers is a collection of later-life novellas by Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Published in English as The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels in 2003, the Chinese edition was translated by Zhou Xiaojin and published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2012. The volume gathers four novellas of varying length whose subjects and narrative methods differ, yet all continue Lessing's characteristic cool, sharp, almost ruthless observational eye. The title novella, set in an Australian seaside town, tells of Roz and Lil, inseparable friends since girlhood: they married in the same year, became neighbors, each bore a son, and in the year the boys turned seventeen each fell into a long affair with the other's son. The relationship lasted until the young men married, then resurfaces through two old letters and stirs upheaval in the next generation's lives. "Victoria and the Staveneys" follows the years-long entanglement between a poor Black girl and a comfortable white family, touching on class, color, and the hidden pain of a mother-daughter separation. "The Reason" uses an elderly narrator to relay an account of an ancient civilization's rise and decline, with clear allegorical overtones. "A Love Child" tells of a soldier in World War II who, after a brief affair with a high official's wife, believes for the rest of his life that he has a child, and thereby redirects his life's course. Together the four stories present Lessing's persistent inquiries into desire, friendship, class, motherhood, and historical recurrence; the language is spare and restrained, yet the structure is layered with traps, making this an important volume for understanding her late short fiction.