Doris Lessing, author and Nobel Prize winner, died on Sunday at the age of 94.
The Associated Press praises Lessing while acknowledging she stirred controversy.
LONDON (AP) Doris Lessing emerged from a black cab outside her home in London one day in 2007 and was confronted by a horde of reporters. When told she had won the Nobel Prize, she blinked and retorted "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less."And the obituary goes on.
That was typical of the independent and often irascible author who died Sunday after a long career that included "The Golden Notebook," a 1962 novel than made her an icon of the women's movement. Lessing's books reflected her own improbable journey across the former British Empire, and later her vision of a future ravaged by atomic warfare.
The exact cause of Lessing's death at her home in London was not immediately disclosed, and her family requested privacy. She was 94.
"Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational," her editor at HarperCollins, Nicholas Pearson, said in one of the many tributes.
Lessing explored topics ranging from colonial Africa to dystopian Britain, from the mystery of being female to the unknown worlds of science fiction. In winning the Nobel literature prize, the Swedish Academy praised Lessing for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power."
The often-polarizing Lessing never saved her fire for the page. The targets of her vocal ire in recent years included former President George W. Bush "a world calamity" and modern women "smug, self-righteous." She also raised hackles by deeming the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States "not that terrible."
She remains best known for "The Golden Notebook," in which heroine Anna Wulf uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating life. The novel covers a range of previously unmentionable female conditions menstruation, orgasms and frigidity and made Lessing an icon for women's liberation. But it became so widely talked about and dissected that she later referred to it as a "failure" and "an albatross."
Was Lessing a great intellectual?
I don't view her that way.
Here's a post from February 10, 2008:
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Respect your elders, right?
Some elders don't deserve respect, like 88-year-old Doris Lessing.
Just because she's an award-winning author, including the Nobel Prize for Literature, doesn't mean that what she has to say is wise or is of any value at all.
Lessing has said outrageous things.
From the BBC:
Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing has said that the 11 September attacks were not as significant as the terror campaign waged by the IRA.Lessing seems to be forgetting that nearly 3000 people were killled on 9/11.
She acknowledged the events in the US on that day in 2001 were "terrible".
But she told Spanish newspaper El Pais: "Some Americans will think I'm crazy... but it was neither as terrible or as extraordinary as they think."
The 88-year-old added that "people forget" the IRA bomb attack on Margaret Thatcher's government in 1984.
"September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible," she said.
"Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think."
She described Americans as "a very naive people, or they pretend to be".
"Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government.
"It killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was [attending]. People forget," she said.
Five people died and 34 were injured when an IRA bomb exploded in a hotel in Brighton where leading members of the Conservative Party - including Mrs Thatcher - were staying for their annual conference.
United Airlines Flight 93 was heading for the U.S. Capitol Building or the White House.
But no, 9/11 wasn't that terrible. It wasn't that extraordinary.
This woman is a fool.
Lessing won the Nobel Prize, worth £763,000, honouring her 57-year career.
She was recognised for her "fire and visionary power."
Maybe all the smoke from her "fire" has blinded her.
...The writer, whose novels include The Golden Notebook and Memoirs of a Survivor, also branded US President George W Bush "a world calamity".
"Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."
Lessing would fit in well at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and all the other arms of the liberal media.
Let's see, according to Lessing:
9/11 wasn't all that terrible. "Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think."
Americans are a "very naive people, or they pretend to be."
President Bush is "a world calamity."
"Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."
What brilliance!
And now, this fount of wisdom is sharing her thoughts on the U.S. presidential election landscape:
STOCKHOLM (AFP) -- If Barack Obama becomes the next US president he will surely be assassinated, British Nobel literature laureate Doris Lessing predicted in a newspaper interview published here Saturday.Lessing is clueless.
Obama, who is vying to become the first black president in US history, "would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him," Lessing, 88, told the Dagens Nyheter daily.
Lessing, who won the 2007 Nobel Literature Prize, said it might be better if Obama's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton were to succeed in her bid to become the first woman president of the United States.
"The best thing would be if they (Clinton and Obama) were to run together. Hillary is a very sharp lady. It might be calmer if she were to win, and not Obama," she said.
She sullies her literary achievements by proclaiming such idiocy.
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Lessing was an atheist.
May she rest in peace?
