Alfred and Emily

What If?
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This work is a little like looking at an endless series of reflections in multiplied mirror images. Although the book is ostensibly about Ms. Lessing's parents, you feel a quest for her self-identity in every sentence. She seems to have a sort of survivor's remorse for having prospered in literature after having sprung, almost miraculously, from the stunted roots of her parents' shattered dreams.

The book opens with a novella in which Ms. Lessing imagines what her parents' life would have been like if World War I had not occurred and her mother had married the doctor of her dreams. From there, Ms. Lessing provides a brief note about the Royal Free Hospital from The London Encyclopedia. In Part Two, Ms. Lessing recounts the lives her parents lived after they married and her youth in Rhodesia.

The pain of World War I is so great that Ms. Lessing has trouble incorporating it into the novella or the nonfiction narrative. Clearly, the demands on her father, a badly wounded soldier, and her mother, an overwhelmed nurse dealing with casualties shipped fresh from the front, created more than the straw that broke the camel's back of normalcy. From that point of view, it's an antiwar book more than anything else.

What would her parents' great energy have led them to do in the alternative? She sees her father as a successful small-scale English farmer, rather than a failed Rhodesian one. She sees her mother emerging as a force behind better education rather than as a woman who is felled by a breakdown in Rhodesia.

It's natural to think of your parents as heroes and heroines, but that must be most difficult when their heroism mainly consisted of dealing with pain and frustration.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is to contemplate your own parents and to ask, "How would their lives have turned out differently if . . . ?" From there, you can cogitate all you want about the effect on whether you would have been born . . . and how you would have been different.

In a sense, it's a play on the common childhood fantasy of believing that one is a royal orphan who has been placed with commoners for safekeeping before the evil contenders for the throne can kill you.

Is it interesting? Yes. Is it something you must read? No.

Eine Rezension von Ein Kunde
vom 19. August 2008


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