It is the book of Psalms in its late theocratic redaction of Pss 90–92, which offers an answer to the question of Moses’ fate. However, the Pentateuch has no answer to Moses’ fate of a premature death in Moab. In the end, it is the canon itself that provides an answer of salvation to Y hwh’s prediction of doom for the people. Is there a connection between these two perspectives of an individual and a collective tragedy? Furthermore, what have these Pentateuchal perspectives to do with the book of Psalms? It is my thesis in this contribution that the divine announcement of annihilation of the people finds a positive solution in the postexilic “Fortschreibung” (re-lecture) of the book of Deuteronomy 1 in Moses’ farewell song in Deut 32, 2 which is an “amphibolical psalm,” alluding to and quoting many texts of doom and salvation from the Prophets and Psalms.
THE GRASS IS SINGING MOSES SKIN
Would Emily have been happier if she could have become a matron, if she could have re-connected with her love of literature? Would her daughter have pursued a writing career of her own with such energy if her mother had found fulfilment? Our readers say:Īrrivederci: Nobody has yet mentioned her wonderful two-volume autobiography Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade … she was a great writer.Īsterixhannah: The Grass is Singing was the first book which spoke so directly to my experience and life in Harare (though that was some decades later than when the book is situated).The Pentateuch ends with two catastrophes namely a collective one announced by Y hwh in Deut 31:16–21, predicting doom and annihilation of the people, and an individual catastrophe for Moses, Y hwh’s arch–prophet, who had to die before the people could cross the river Jordan.
THE GRASS IS SINGING MOSES FREE
The second half returns to reality: Alfred loses a leg in the trenches, meets Emily in the Royal Free Hospital and then leaves for Persia and Rhodesia. Alfred and Emily (2008)Ĭombining fiction and non-fiction, this exploration of her parents' lives begins with a 137-page novella, a golden-hued re-imagining of what might have happened if her parents had never married. Caring, passionate, tireless, Alice finds herself gradually drawn into violence as the bourgeois revolutionaries' naive fantasies turn into the chaos of real murder. The Good Terrorist (1985)Īfter two short novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers, Lessing returned to publishing under her own name with this story of a well-intentioned revolutionary, Alice, who lives in a north London squat with a motley bunch of fellow militants. Despite critical dismay at her new direction, Lessing was unabashed, suggesting that "science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time", and confessing an admiration for the "classic sort of science fiction". Johor travels to Rohonda and finds it with too little "Spirit of We Feeling", a world which has turned to greed, war and destruction.
THE GRASS IS SINGING MOSES SERIES
The first in her five-volume series of SF novels, Canopus in Argus, Shikasta is the story of a fallen paradise, a planet cut adrift from the influence of the advanced civilisation that has brought peace, prosperity and accelerated development. Lessing herself, typically, was less enamoured with the book's reception, complaining that it had become an "albatross" after critics focused almost exclusively on the feminist aspects of the novel, failing to engage with the novel's scope and structure. The Swedish Academy called it one of a "handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship".
Framed by a third-person story of a writer, Anna Wulf, and her friend Molly, the novel weaves together four of Anna's notebooks which mirror the different strands of her life – Africa, the Communist Party, a doomed love affair and her journal – to arrive at a fifth, The Golden Notebook, which binds them all together. This account of the fractured lives of British women after the war has been hailed as a feminist masterpiece. Gradually she begins to develop a relationship with one of their black servants, Moses – a relationship the reader knows will end in tragedy from the first page. When Mary Turner's husband becomes sick she takes over the running of their failing Rhodesian farm. Lessing arrived in London in the spring of 1949 with £20 and the manuscript of a novel drawing heavily on her life in Africa, exploring the power and fear at the heart of the colonial experience.