Analisi critica di "Alfred and Emily" di Doris Lessing

"Alfred and Emily" is a novel that was written by the English author Doris Lessing.

The book is divided into two parts.

The second biographical part

In particular, the second part is a painful biographical chronicle of the life of the author's parents, in a time harassed by historical vicissitudes of primary importance and yet morbidly amusing for the whole series of particular cultural aspects, and social custom, today historically no more repurposable.
On the contrary, the first part is a novel of a few pages whose banality seems the appropriate outline to the hasty writing of the script, a semi-didactic literary exercise in which the facts are listed without a precise chronological order and overlapping points of views that do nothing but create a sense of confusion and detachment in the reader, the second part, for our luck, turns out to be the exact opposite: a precise and careful chronicle full of delicious details that catapult the reader into an ancient world, directly more violent, uncomfortable and precarious, but no doubt more engaging and adventurous. A fascinating world painted in the strong and concrete tones of the events that really happened, facts that only those who lived them in person can represent so vivid and free of that little authentic romantic nostalgia that in some literature seems to pervade all sorts of memories (making it completely artificial).

Stylistic and critical differences

So Alfred and Emily is not a single novel, but in fact they are two books, two different stories, written in different styles; however, if this difference is for the majority of users the strong point of the book for me is its weak point, the little oiled gear of an otherwise perfect machine, with this "literary tectonic fault" in fact it seems almost that Doris Lessing wants to tell us, "I agree to write a novel for contractual obligations, but this time I do not like it because I prefer to tell of my reality that is significantly higher than any kind of fantasy." The result is not a new literary style the mixture of two different genres (as some have tried to say), is not a new way of conceiving the novel: they are simply two written in one, strident as they are reality and fiction, the true and the false.