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The Summer Before the Dark
The Summer Before the Dark | Doris Lessing
14 posts | 4 read | 5 to read
In a single summer Kate Brown journeys from turkey to Spain, and from husband to lover to madness, shedding the protective parts of her personality in this coming-of-age story from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Grass is Singing. Reprint.
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Bertha_Mason

This silly bitch is about to marry an avowed fascist, in fucking 1977. The British are so fucking stupid.

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Bertha_Mason

"She knew now, she had to know at last, that all her life she had been held upright by an invisible fluid, the notice of other people. But the fluid had been drained away."

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Bertha_Mason

"She checked herself, as it were pleading with guilt, and with sorrow, to stay away till she had strength to withstand them."
Mood.

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Bertha_Mason

"There were some trees that did not look right. They were diseased? No, they were thick with dust."

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Bertha_Mason

"She woke to find herself assaulted simultaneously by a blaze of sunlight and by Jeffrey, who was making love like a ten-year-old who has been dared by his gang to climb a high wall, or like a Soviet factory worker overfulfilling a norm." ?

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Bertha_Mason

"The shriek of a passing car swallowed the talk, spat it out again: it was a near intelligibility, like windows paned with sheets of quartz instead of glass."

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Bertha_Mason

"The block of moonlight on the balcony soon shifted. She moved her chair out of it, in such a way that her legs and arms might lie in it but her head would stay in the shadow—exactly as if the moon were a sun."

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Bertha_Mason

"In a moment they, Jeffrey and she, would be outbidding in each other in that most common of middle-class verbal games: which of them had acquired more grace by being close to other people‘s sufferings."

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Bertha_Mason

"Ever since early June that sun-loud coast had been filling. It was now so loaded that one could easily imagine that if seen from the air the peninsula must seem pressed down and the waters rising around it—the blue of the Mediterranean on one side, the grey of the Atlantic on the other. Soon these millions would submerge with their coloured clothes, their umbrellas, their sunglasses; their hotels, nightclubs, and restaurants." ?

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Bertha_Mason

"It was Goethe, or rather Goethe as interpreted by his alter ego Thomas Mann, who said that the kiss was the essence of love. He had "wormed it" enough in his time, he said; but it was the kiss that was the thing."
Wormed it. ?

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Bertha_Mason

"She stood waiting, while people went past nodding and smiling. Dear Kate. Chère Katherine. Sweet Katya, Katinka, and Kitty. Darling Katy, my own Cationa. Lovely Katlyn, Caterline, Kit, and Catherine. Ekaterina my love, my angel Katy. Karen, I don‘t know what I shall do without you.
I shall miss you, Mrs. Brown."

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Bertha_Mason

"There were the public, or communal, events—wars, strikes, floods, earthquakes; what are felt as Acts of God. There was the feeling abroad, irrational or not, that these events, once high and rare (or had they ever been, was that just false memory?), were moving into the first place of everyone‘s experience, as if an air that had once been the climate of a distant and cataclysmic star had chosen to engulf our poor planet."
Tell me about it ?

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TrishB
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Not the tagged book!
#bookmail #Litsypenpals
Thank you lovely @Caroline2 for the lovely gifts and the bloody laugh out loud letter ❤️
I have looked everywhere for my owl book mark!! OMG so funny that I sent it back to you- I was beginning to think I‘d imagined it!
The London bookmark is lovely - we will meet up soon. 😁

TrishB And the book looks intriguing! 6y
Caroline2 Glad it all arrived ok! I confess, the book was totally a oh look at that beautiful cover buy!! (And my longing for summer already!!! 😎) 6y
MichelleScott_author I‘ve tried reading Doris Lessing before but found her too difficult. How do you like it? 6y
TrishB @Coffeeshopreviews I haven‘t read any since school! And I didn‘t really enjoy that one! 6y
120 likes4 comments
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Sweettartlaura
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Nothing soothes my soul so much as a visit to the bookstore. I picked up a couple books for #192019challenge, the last book I need for my other challenges, & a couple I can read during #Dewey‘s readathon. Yay😍📚

Marchpane That looks like a nice rabbit warren of a book shop 😍 7y
Sweettartlaura @Marchpane It is ❤️. If you ever find yourself in Tacoma, it‘s a must-see. 7y
38 likes2 comments