All the brouhaha about Al Gore's Nobel Prize win makes me very very happy. I hope it will continue for quite a long time. Will he?won't he? run for president? I'm not making any bets at this time. The name of the game seems to be Wait and See. But, in the meantime, I'd like to put in a word for another Nobel Prize winner announced yesterday. Doris Lessing, at 88 the oldest Nobel Prize winner yet, has become this year's Nobel Laureate in Literature. She was less than awed at her win, saying in typical wry fashion: "I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

It might actually have been a surprise however, if what she told Harvey Blume just last month in a Boston Globe interview centering on her latest novel, The Cleft, was true. To his question: "Why do you think you haven't won a Nobel Prize" She replied: "There is something hidden here. At a big evening party in Sweden, back when my Swedish publisher was alive, a little gray chap from the Nobel Committee sat down beside me and said: 'You'll never win the Nobel Prize. We don't like you.' It was so graceless. What was I to say? I didn't say anything. I've never found out why they don't like me."

Maybe they didn't like her because she has always been totally impossible to categorize. Is she a political writer? A science fiction writer? A feminist writer? She's written novels, stories, non-fiction, poetry, even opera libretti. Her subjects range from the collapse of social and political systems, environmental degradation and disaster, family dynamics, the catastrophes of war and colonisation (science fiction provides a great medium to write about these contemporary topics) to one of her favorite subjects: cats. Her books are taught in feminist studies all over the country, as they also are in science fiction curricula. I don't know if Poly Sci courses have started teaching her works; if they haven't yet they will eventually.

If you are a feminist of a certain age, you've been reading Lessing for many years, with mixed reactions, I'm willing to believe. If you aren't familiar with her amazing opus, here's some links to catch you up: A Doris Lessing Retrospective, NYT Featured Author, Doris Lessing, (1999) Salon Interview (1997) Bio-Bibliography from the Nobel Prize site (2007) You might want to start with her latest, The Cleft,mentioned above, in which it sounds like she picks up on the many various threads of her earlier work, weaving them together into a book I will either love or hate. I seem to have only those two reactions to her work. And, in fact, my partner reacted to her book previous to the current one with these words: "It's time for Doris Lessing to stop writing now. She's become unreadable." Clearly, the Nobel Prize committee didn't agree with her
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