Signed
The Memoirs of a Survivor
Signed first edition, 1974
The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing is a dystopian novel set in a near-future Britain in the grip of slow, unnamed collapse. An unnamed middle-aged woman observes the disintegration of her city from her apartment window — the migration of populations, the formation of tribal gangs, the erosion of civic life — while caring for Emily, a girl of thirteen entrusted to her by a stranger who simply says "she is your responsibility" before vanishing. As the outer world deteriorates, the narrator finds herself passing through the wall of her living room into a shifting interior landscape that operates by different rules than the one outside. Lessing described the novel as "an attempt at autobiography."
Signed copy. Signed by Lessing on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine. London: Octagon Press, 1974. ISBN: 0900860308. #10690.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket.
Signed copy. Signed by Lessing on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine. London: Octagon Press, 1974. ISBN: 0900860308. #10690.
Near fine in near fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
The Memoirs of a Survivor is narrated in retrospect by an unnamed woman looking back on a period of gradual civilizational collapse in a near-future British city. The crisis has no single cause and no official name. It is simply the accumulation of things breaking down, of people leaving, of authority becoming unreliable and eventually absent. Gangs form along tribal lines. Populations move through the streets in waves, heading somewhere else, never returning. The narrator watches all of this from her window with a quality of attention that is neither panic nor indifference but something more like the careful observation of someone who has accepted that this is now the nature of things.
Into this situation comes Emily, a girl of thirteen left in the narrator's care by a stranger who offers no explanation and does not stay. Emily is perceptive, self-possessed, alternately childlike and disturbingly competent at navigating the new conditions outside. She forms attachments to Gerald, a young man who leads one of the street tribes, and to Hugo, her animal companion, described as half cat and half dog, whose nature is as ambiguous as everything else in the novel. The narrator's relationship to Emily is not quite parental and not quite anything else. She watches over her, worries for her, and finds her finally beyond her understanding.
Running parallel to the deteriorating outer world is the narrator's experience of passing through the wall of her living room into a series of interior spaces that do not obey ordinary time. These spaces are not dreams exactly, but they are not realistic either. Lessing renders them with the same flat, observational prose she uses for the street scenes. In them the narrator encounters scenes that seem to belong to Emily's past, to some collective unconscious, or to the rooms of a Victorian house that exists in another register of time. She does not fully understand what she finds there, and neither does the reader, but the passages accumulate into something that feels like an alternative account of reality running beneath the visible one.
The novel does not end with catastrophe. As the city empties into winter silence and the snow rises against the windowsills, the wall opens. Emily, Hugo, Gerald and the narrator pass through into another order of existence entirely, following a figure the narrator can barely describe. "Beautiful" is the word she settles on. Lessing called the novel "an attempt at autobiography," and the ending suggests she meant this in a genuinely metaphysical sense, not a record of events but an account of what it is like to live through the dissolution of one world while sensing, imperfectly, that something else persists on the other side of it.
Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Into this situation comes Emily, a girl of thirteen left in the narrator's care by a stranger who offers no explanation and does not stay. Emily is perceptive, self-possessed, alternately childlike and disturbingly competent at navigating the new conditions outside. She forms attachments to Gerald, a young man who leads one of the street tribes, and to Hugo, her animal companion, described as half cat and half dog, whose nature is as ambiguous as everything else in the novel. The narrator's relationship to Emily is not quite parental and not quite anything else. She watches over her, worries for her, and finds her finally beyond her understanding.
Running parallel to the deteriorating outer world is the narrator's experience of passing through the wall of her living room into a series of interior spaces that do not obey ordinary time. These spaces are not dreams exactly, but they are not realistic either. Lessing renders them with the same flat, observational prose she uses for the street scenes. In them the narrator encounters scenes that seem to belong to Emily's past, to some collective unconscious, or to the rooms of a Victorian house that exists in another register of time. She does not fully understand what she finds there, and neither does the reader, but the passages accumulate into something that feels like an alternative account of reality running beneath the visible one.
The novel does not end with catastrophe. As the city empties into winter silence and the snow rises against the windowsills, the wall opens. Emily, Hugo, Gerald and the narrator pass through into another order of existence entirely, following a figure the narrator can barely describe. "Beautiful" is the word she settles on. Lessing called the novel "an attempt at autobiography," and the ending suggests she meant this in a genuinely metaphysical sense, not a record of events but an account of what it is like to live through the dissolution of one world while sensing, imperfectly, that something else persists on the other side of it.
Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.