First Impression Friday will be a meme where you talk about a book that you JUST STARTED! Maybe you’re only a chapter or two in, maybe a little farther. Based on this sampling of your current read, give a few impressions and predict what you’ll think by the end.

Synopsis:

Doris Lessing brought the manuscript of The Grass is Singing, her classic first novel, with her when she left Southern Rhodesia and came to England in 1950. When it was first published it created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth-century literature.

Set in Rhodesia, it tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush. Trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny brick and iron house, Mary, lovely, and frightened, turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding.

A masterpiece of realism, The Grass is Singing is a superb evocation of Africa’s majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a passionate exploration of the ideology of white supremacy.

The weekend has finally come! Happy Friday everyone! Somehow, we were all able to make it through yet another exasperating work week. Over the past few weeks, the heat here in the Philippines has been very oppressive and there seems to be no reprieve in sight. I hope that wherever you are, you are in a comfortable environment. I also hope that you are ending the work week on a high note. I hope you were able to accomplish all tasks you set to accomplish at the start of the week. I hope the work week went well and that we are all diving into the weekend carefree. Otherwise, I hope that the weekend will provide you a badly needed respite. I hope you take the time to pause, rest, and recover. I hope that we all spend it pursuing the things we are passionate about.

As has been customary, I will be wrapping up the work and blogging week with a fresh First Impression Friday update. Woah. I just realized that today is the last Friday of April. In four days, we will be welcoming the fifth month of the year. How time flies. Regardless, I hope that the first four months of the year have been kind to everyone. I hope that the rest of the year will be showering you with good news and blessings. Reading-wise, April has been an extension of my foray into the works of female writers which I started last March to commemorate Women’s History Month. I am now in the process of wrapping this journey up. I am slowly transitioning to works of European literature which I intend to be my reading theme this May.

Currently, I am reading Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. If my memory serves me right, it was back in 2015 when I first encountered Lessing through her novel The Golden Notebook. With its thickness, the book immediately grabbed my attention; I am yet to read the book. A couple of years later, I learned that Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; my knowledge of the Nobel back then was sparse to say the least. Some of her works were even listed as among the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, including the aforementioned The Golden Notebook. However, my foray into Lessing’s oeuvre took me on a different course as The Grass is Singing will be my introduction to her extensive and highly-heralded body of work.

I just learned that the novel is actually the first one published by the Persian-born British writer. The book is rather slender and started in a manner that I did not expected. The novel is set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a former British colony; Lessing’s family moved from Persia to Southern Rhodesia in 1925. The story opened with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner. Turner was a white woman and the wife of Dick Turner. The Turners are farmers but they never interacted with the neighboring farms. Ironically, it was a neighbor who discovered the lifeless body of the veranda. Upon discovery of the body, their neighbor Charles Slatter’s assistant Tony Marston notified Slatter who duly notified the local police sergeant.

At the scene of the crime, the murder was immediately solved. The police found the Turner houseboy, Moses, who turned himself in and confessed to the crime. Lessing’s message was immediately recognizable in the first chapter alone; unless I am wrong that is. One can tell that prejudice played a key role in why no further investigation was conducted and the confession of Moses, a black man, was taken at face value. As one character surmised, no black person can touch the whites, including a black policeman. With no further rebuttals, Moses was found guilty of murdering Mary; it did not help Moses’ case that he was drunk during the night of the incident. However, one can’t help but wonder if justice was truly served, especially when one considers the politics of the time.

In the succeeding chapter, the story drastically shifted. From the present, the story delves into the life of Mary. Her father was alcoholic and would chronically argue with his wife. She also had two older siblings who both died of dysentery. Their death somehow was a reprieve for Mary as her parents stopped squabbling, albeit temporarily. It seems that Lessing was painting a portrait of the murder victim. Does her past hold the keys to the questions that are lingering at the back of my mind? I hope to get a clearer picture of Mary from this flashback. I am also hoping to gain a perspective of Lessing’s prose from the story although I can surmise how the story is going to conclude based on previous literature from the same setting I read previously. I can also be wrong.

As I have mentioned, the book is rather slender so finishing it over the weekend is within the realm of possibility. I am excited to finish my first Lessing novel and hopefully it will be the gateway to more works by the Nobel Laureate in Literature. How about you fellow reader? What book or books are you going to take with you this weekend? I hope you get to enjoy whatever you are reading right now. Happy weekend!