Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #24

!bookworms

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers. (NON BOOK-CLUB RELATED ONLY).

Before starting Blood Meridian I forced myself to finish The Grass is Singing. So the depressed female protagonist's undoing started when her husband got ill with malaria, resulting in her running the farm and dealing with the kaffir laborers. She ends up whipping one of them in the face after he begs for water (she didn't know her husband gave them a few minutes rest every one hour ) the native starts looking at her in a menacing way after that. Some point later her husband gets tired of her nonsense, he hires the whipped boy (he doesn't know she did that) as a house servant and she ends up being scared to heck of him, yet she refuses to tell her husband.

The servant boy begins to dominate her to the point he even dresses her and she says things like “thank you” with a terrified face. At some point their neighbor who wants to buy their farm visits them, gets horrified by how “insolent” their native is, tells the husband he'll buy the farm and that he should leave for a few months with his wife to the coast. They are pretty much broke and in poverty so he reluctantly accepts (rich neighbor is trying to help because of some code that whites in Rhodesia shouldn't sink lower than a BIPOC). Just a couple of day before they leave she dismisses the servant boy angrily and during the night before leaving he murders her.

Is a bit more complex than that (she's afraid he'll come to kill her, but awakes in the middle of the night and goes outside where he's waiting for her), but I'm trying to summarize. Lessing writing becomes more engaging in the second part, at least for me, so if you're interested in a well written character study of a woman descent into madness that's the right book for you, and what's interesting is that Mary does it all to herself, she could have lived happily in town, but pressured herself to get married with the first man who proposed her after overhearing her mean “friends” calling her a spinster on party, even after he told her he was poor and lived in the middle of nowhere, there was something terribly wrong about her even before considering her enormous insecurity.