Product Description

"In the last years of his life, a contemplative Roman senator embarks on one last epic endeavor: to retell the history of human creation and reveal the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child -- a boy -- the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #82110 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-07-31
• Released on: 2007-07-31
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Eminent novelist Lessing offers an alternative origin story for the human race, indirectly recalling the alternate world speculations of her Canopus in Argos SF novels. Positing that the primal human stock was female rather than male, Lessing invents a cult of ancient women called the Clefts, a name derived, in part, from that essential part of female anatomy. The story of the Clefts is bookended by the journal of a Roman historian, who interprets ancient documents stating that females were originally impregnated by a fertilizing wind or a wave, to give birth to female children. But one day a deformed baby is born, with a lumpy swelling never seen before. The first rape and the first murder follow soon enough, as do the first instances of consensual intercourse and the babies—the first of a new race, with a nature derived from both sexes—that are the result. Humor, which may or may not be intentional, is introduced into a generally lethargic text when women and men discover they can't live with or without each other, and the battle of the sexes commences. The novel has elements of a feminist tract, but the story it tells doesn't present a significant challenge to that of Adam and Eve. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Elizabeth Bear

Doris Lessing is a legend. The author of nearly 50 books, she has earned her reputation as a notable prose stylist and a writer whose work defies categorization. Several of her novels are numbered among the modern classics; she has reputedly been considered for the Nobel Prize in literature.

These facts only make The Cleft more mystifying. Because it is not merely a flawed novel or a failed novel. It is an actively bad novel.

The Cleft is a braided narrative, in which a Roman historian of Nero's time tells the story of an earlier, mythic period. Almost all narratives commence with a change; in this case, that inciting incident is the birth of a male baby into a species of parthenogenic, semi-aquatic women. The babe is presumed deformed and exposed upon a rock to die. But soon, more male infants follow (the males are referred to as "Squirts," the females "Clefts," for obvious reasons). After predictable phases of denial, anger, mutilation, murder and reconciliation, the human race as we know it is born.

This seems a promising setup for an exploration of the founding of society, even for a sly satire. I found myself comparing this novel to Kurt Vonnegut's superior Galapagos, to which it forms a sort of mirror-image, and hoping throughout that I was simply missing the point and that some justification would emerge "Rashomon"-like from the narrative's fragments. Instead, The Cleft delivered a moral message, an uncomplicated binary that reduces gender roles and relations to exactly the level of childishness implied by identifying most characters by the shape of their genitals.

Lessing appears to have drawn her background from Elaine Morgan's notorious pseudoscientific tome, The Descent of Woman (1972), which argues that human evolution was shaped by a seal-like return to the sea. Crackpot theories can make for great fiction, but in this case they have produced a novel as static and circular as the placid, bovine society that Lessing assigns to the Clefts. She portrays the denizens of her early matriarchy as Victorian caricatures: passive, incurious, interested in nothing except filling their wombs and maintaining the status quo -- except for occasional bouts of bloodlust. The males, on the other hand, are curious, inventive, exploratory, irresponsible.

Representatives of both sexes are equally thick, however. The exception is the Roman historian, a thoughtful older man married lovelessly to a younger woman. He could have been a finely drawn character, providing a needed counterpoint to the pseudo-history. But, alas, he too quickly descends to the level of parody.

Additionally, the historical sections of the book are told in an unconvincing manner. I suspect they were meant to have an air of fable, as of antique retold tales too misty to be recalled accurately. Instead, they seem thick and meandering, a kind of narrative oatmeal, and the societies constructed are so naive that they too lack energy. The women in their coastal caves expose the first male babies, mutilate the next few, expose a few more. Eventually, inexplicably, eagles begin to carry the male infants to a nearby valley, where an equally inexplicable friendly doe raises them.

For some reason, the females lose the ability to have babies without male assistance and begin making forays over the dividing mountain to get pregnant. There is a thematic and mystical cleft along the mountain pass, a volcanic vent of sorts, which seems intended to represent the female mysteries, the male attraction to and fear of them, and their eventual shattering as a result of random masculine violence. Unfortunately, since all of this occurs without emotional weight, it fails to provoke insight. Critic John Clute has said, tongue-in-cheek, that novels have a "real year," which is to say that no matter when a book purports to be set, there are always clues to when it's really set. And this novel is so firmly crystallized in post-WWII social roles of the Valium-housewife-and-unavailable-working-stiff variety that it feels more native to 1954 than to 2007.

The last third or so focuses on two characters, one male and one female, who have inscrutably Celtic or Anglo-Saxon names -- Maronna and Horsa -- for this ostensibly Roman narrative. These two may in fact represent several persons, lines of descent wherein a series of leaders bear the same name. (This is another one of those places where something that should have been brilliant and a bit unnerving wound up feeling pointless.) These two, and their tribes, come into conflict over the sort of things that couples would fight over in a stereotypical 1950s sitcom: The woman thinks the man does not take care with the children, the man can't see what all the fuss is about. The men are shortsighted and careless; the women are able to predict disaster but curiously unable to do anything more useful than lie about on rocks and catch fish.

In the end, these two great leaders come to an epiphany that boils down to "we have nothing in common, but we need each other." Which was not the poignant insight into human nature that this reader, at least, was hoping for.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Outspoken, prolific, and influential, Lessing has cycled through an array of literary genres in her quest to tell stories that protest prejudice, fathom consciousness, and chart the entrenched battle between the sexes. In her newest audacious, ludicrously titled novel––yes, The Cleft does refer to the aspect of the female anatomy you suspect it might––Lessing employs a classic framing device. During Nero's rule, a Roman senator with a much younger and more sexually adventurous wife is working through "a mass of material accumulated over ages," pertaining to a prehistoric all-woman tribe. The Clefts loll about in the surf and are mysteriously impregnated by the sea, until nature plays one of its tricks, and they suddenly give birth to what they call Monsters, but which we recognize as males. After the females' attempts to kill off the baby boys fail, thanks to the intervention of giant eagles, the two adversarial groups gradually discover that they need each other to reproduce, and that just as their bodies are different yet complementary, so, too, are their temperaments. As the good Roman chronicles, to the best of his ability, the way these early, contentious humans formed families and opened themselves to love, he marvels over the processes by which memories morph into myth, and history is assembled. As for Lessing, she overcomes initial narrative awkwardness to forge a mordantly entertaining fable rich in incident, discernment, and reflection. Seaman, Donna

Customer Reviews

"How few we are. How easily we die."


When an ageing Roman senator agrees to undertake writing a history of the first recorded society, he does so knowing that many questions will remain unanswered, vast gaps in an ancient tale of the beginning of life. Though first recorded via oral tradition, the senator also has fragments of written documents from which he tentatively composes the story of the Cleft. A society composed entirely of women- babies are born through the cycles of the moon- this sedentary group lives quietly in caves above the sea, performing ritual sacrifices, content to remain in the shelters they have always known. With the Old Shes (of indeterminate age) as titular guides, the existence of the women is uneventful until the birth of a male, immediately named a Monster. So remarkably different from the females, with his ugly protuberances, this first Monster is cast out, left on the Killing Rock, where it is expected that the eagles will consume the infant. When more Monsters are born, much to the chagrin of their mothers, the women become curious about their bizarre physical differences, alternately toying with, torturing, starving and abusing the tiny creatures.

Much later (although time has no sense of measurement) it is learned that the eagles have not feasted upon the small carrion, but have delivered them safely to a nearby valley where others of their kind nurture the babes, eventually building a community of Monsters, later to be known as Squirts. As time passes, curiosity prevails and communication between the species, as well as ignorance, ushers in a phase of uneasy coexistence. Nature, of course, prevails and eventually the males become the necessary tools of procreation, the females forced to deal with the males' intransigence to provide more children and a future for the tribes. In Lessing's imaginative scenario, the battle between the sexes evolves, if only in its most elementary incarnation. Age old questions arise, the thoughtlessness of men, the irritating whine of women's complaints ("Don't you care what happens to us?") and the endless cycle of attraction-repulsion that so defines male and female society.

Profoundly simple, yet provocative, Lessing easily engages the reader in a scenario that speaks to the uneasy truce that has always attended male-female relations, the troublesome issues of gender coexistence, combined with an irresistible attraction. Which came first, male or female, is not addressed in this engaging portrait of early tribal identity; the Cleft assumes dominance merely by its existence. Yet the inevitable need for procreation transcends even the most egregious differences, an interdependence that has plagued humanity from the distant unrecognizable past to the present, where "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars". Luan Gaines/2007.

A Dusty Mythology
I won't go into any detail about the plot of this book because it has already been well-covered by the other reviews. What I will say is that I found this book immensely enjoyable. Where others felt it was dry or meandering, I found it to be interesting, not because it evokes specific imagery like most of the fiction I read, or holds any literary "special effects", but because it amorphous and open. This story reads like something distant. It is a myth, contrived by the author recently, but bearing an aura of a story dusty with age, but still relevant. Reading this book is like hearing a well-worn story told by a wise person. It is restrained, but somehow it still managed to hold my interest, page after page until I was through with it. Overall, this was soothing to read. It was easy-going, captured my interest, and resonated with my beliefs.

HOW DID HUMANS EVOLVE AND FROM WHERE?
At eighty-eight Doris Lessing has not lost her love of provoking, politicizing, turning traditional beliefs upside down, taking on any topic that she finds interesting and her wonderful sense of humor. THE CLEFT, the newest novel is her ouvre is a very different, though not particularly difficult or long novel, whose premise is that women came first and the creation of men was an afterthought. Needless to say some readers will be deeply offended by this notion and the way Lessing portrays the early inhabitants.
The narrator is a Roman scribe who lives in the time of Nero and has found an ancient set of hidden documents that tell a tale of a world nobody could ever have conceived. He nervously tells the reader who he is and shares bits of his life which humanizes him and adds to his verissimitude.
The story begins ages and ages ago, but time does not exist before and during the copying of the scrolls. He reminds readers that long ago has no real context in trying to date the events that are outlined.
At some time, in some place a community of "sea" women lived on a small beach surrounded by high cliffs and mountains. These creatures had no capacity to think, to be curious, to want to explore, to wonder why about anything. All they knew was to swim, sun themselves on the rocks, eat what the sea provided and give birth at the behest of the moon.
Their only ritual was to climb the rock above them that is called the Cleft because it looks like female genitalia. They push red flowers into the crevice and watch the water that flows through it get red ... then some of them get pregnant. They are called 'Shes' and have always given birth to "babes" who are shes.
Inevitably, one day a boy is born. These vessels had never seen one of these deformed, unacceptable "Monsters" or "squirts" as they were labeled.
As more of them appeared they were tortured, mutilated and ultimately left on the killing rock as food for the eagles, who also inhabited this strange place. Neither the scribe, the "She" telling the story or the reader has any sense of context or time frame.
As the story unfolds readers are privy to the fact that the eagles did not eat the children. Rather they took the infants over the rough mountains to a safe meadow and somehow the first group survived. As more and more babies came to them they approached a doe who lay down and offered her swollen teats to the tiny humans in order to feed them. She licked them and was the only mother/nurturer they knew. They all grew big and strong and in many ways were more industrious than the sea creatures they knew nothing about.
They built primitive huts of branches and leaves, they invented fire, they learned to cook and were always looking for new inventions to work on. Time passed. How much? Nobody knows. And one day a young "She" crawled over the mountains to see where the eagles were taking the squirts. She was frightened, overwhelmed and for the first time saw grown-up "Monsters." These hairy creatures had "sticks" sticking out that didn't look like the squirts of their infancy. From the time of what we know is adolescence these "Monsters" had a yearing and a drive none of them understood until the naked "She" appeared before them. They were begining to realize what their erections were for and as one they allowed their "needs" to guide them. The poor young and oh so innocent creature died during the gang rape.
But since none of the Shes had any curiousity or any allegiance to each other they never missed her. As the tale unfolds more Shes venture over the mountain and the squirts come to spy on them. Eventually the two find intercourse in common and both enjoy it immensely. Eventually as babies are born they make the connection between the "squiet's sticks" entering the Shes has something to do with pregnancy and childhood. The Shes realize that after thier behavior with the Monsters they no longer can get pregnant at the moon's desire. One of the most fascinating themes in THE CLEFT is that sometimes things are not what they seem ... and alternate explanations are fun to play with.
Doris Lessing penned important iconoclastic books like: THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, THE CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE, SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK, BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL and so many others that earned her a place in the pantheon of great writes of the 20th and 21st Centuries. She has written short stories, plays, a libretto, fiction, non-fiction, literary journalism, literary criticism, essays, lyrics and has won many awards.
She has never shied away from controversy and has always written what she believed to be important statements about the relationships between women and men, madness as a way to sanity, mothers and daughters and social injustice in a variety of forms.
She said in an interview that she expects her readers will probably hate this book ... but that did not deter her in writing it. Lessing has a sharp sense of humor and patient readers will understand that it is at work in THE CLEFT. Whether seen as a myth, a parable, a cautionary tale or just plain "weird," one can say only that Lessing, as usual, has written a book that demands attention, discussion and literary respect. In the note at the front of the book Doris Lessing says that after reading an scientific article that proposed men came after women she found this something she wanted to explore. Her inspiration has always come from the world around her and been transformed into some of the best literature etc. ever written.
THE CLEFT should be read with an open mind and valued for its ideas, presentation and value as a story that is certain to leave readers thinking "who knows?"