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| The Summer Before the Dark | 
 enlarge | Author: Doris May Lessing
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Category: Book
List Price: £6.54
Buy Used: £1.95
You Save: £4.59 (70%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 260679
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0394710959
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780394710952
ASIN: 0394710959
Publication Date: March 1983
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Item in good condition at a great price! SHIPS FROM UNITED STATES. Avg Delivery Times are 7-24 business days (may take 6-8 weeks due to customs delays). Visit Got Books for all your media needs.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Boring and dated October 22, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this after reading the brilliant Grass is Singing and what a dissapointment. I imagine this novel was relvant at its time but now it just seems "so what" and I gave up a third of the way through. A woman in her early 40s falls into a well paid job and is shocked to have an identiy other than "wife and mother". She goes to a confernece and has an affair with someone about ten years younger than herself. Wow, a woman in her early 40s like gets a job!
The reason the novel is so uninvolving is that we are told very little about what the characters actually do and instead get pages and pages of what the woman, Kate, thinks . This may show the author to be clever but you don't develop any empathy or interest for the character. Also I think my edition needed some proof reading.
 An enlightening look at one woman's search for self August 27, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Summer Before the Dark was first published in 1970. At the time it must have been a very contemporary novel, and perhaps a little controversial, because its central theme is the role of women in society. The main character, Kate Brown, is a domestic goddess who spends one summer rediscovering herself and her place in the world after some 20 years of marriage and motherhood.
It might sound like a relatively dull premise for a novel, but in Lessing's hands the book sings with great story-telling, intellectual insight and drama. Kate Brown is no dull housewife: she's a complex woman suffering what can be best described as empty-nest syndrome. Her grown up children are getting on with their lives and her husband is working in America for an extended period, leaving her to her own devices for a summer.
Good at languages -- Italian, French and Portuguese -- she accepts a temporary translator job at a conference in London for an organisation called Global Food. She does so well and enjoys the work so much, her stint is extended and she is promoted. Before she knows it she is one of the main organisers of another conference, this time in Istanbul, and it is here that she embarks on an illicit affair with a younger man and goes on a European road trip with him.
The affair, however, is disappointing, and stuck in rural Spain with a lover who has fallen ill, she returns to London alone. Here she holes up in a hotel -- the family home has been rented out for the summer -- only to become drastically ill herself. Lonely and depressed, Kate's sanity begins to crumble and there are a few wobbly moments when she tries to make sense of who she is and why her life no longer holds a meaningful purpose.
It's not until she takes a room in a house occupied by a much younger woman that Kate is able to confront her demons and find the courage to forge on with a new life in which her husband and children are no longer her sole focus.
The book is incredibly moving in places -- you really get to feel Kate's pain and anguish as she comes to terms with growing older. But it's Lessing's wry and insightful observations of a woman's sexuality -- and of its often unspoken importance to a woman's sense of self -- that this book comes into its own. There's a very telling scene in which Kate goes to a restaurant, just prior to the lunch time rush, and finds that her age and her sex have rendered her invisible.
"She sat by herself and waited for service. In front of her stood the unvarying British menu. At the other end of the room, a waitress was talking to a customer, an elderly man. She was in no hurry to come over. When she did come she did not look at Kate, but scribbled the order down hastily on a small pad, and went back to talk to the customer, before shouting the order through a hatch into the kitchen. It seemed a long time before the food came. Kate sat on, invisible, apparently, to the waitress and to the other customers: the place was filling now. She was shaking with impatient hunger, the need to cry. The feeling that no one could see her made her want to shout: 'Look, I'm here, can't you see me?' She was not far off that state which in a small child is called a tantrum."
Later she realises that to receive attention, from both men and women alike, she must dress and groom herself appropriately, to put on her 'Mrs Brown' face. Other revelations quickly follow.
The Summer Before the Dark, had you not already guessed, isn't exactly a cheery or pleasurable read, but it's an enlightening one. As a reader not far off Mrs Brown's age (she's in her early 40s) but the product of a different time (I chose a career over children), the book presented me with many issues to cogitate on. I suspect it would make a rather good book group read, because it throws up so many topics for discussion, many of which are still relevant almost 40 years after it was written.
Dissapointing February 9, 2007
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
I have read several of Doris Lessing's books and enjoyed them, so I was looking forward to this read, especially reading the synopsis which sounded intriguing. However, I was dissapointed. I found the language wordy and pretentious, as if Lessing was trying to 'live up' to her intelletctual image, but I stuck to it hoping things would improve, which they didn't. I found the characters irritating, with little depth (her young lover is a totally cardboard character and we learn nothing about him or any feelings she has for him), the situations utterly unrealistic, and the ending, after expecting the 'devastating consequences' we are told about, a complete let down. Sorry Doris, you didn't do it for me this time.
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