Books: Ghosts and Portents

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The Memoirs of a Survivor is an extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility in an unprecedented time that places unbearable demands upon people. It is also a panicked intuition turned into a tentative myth. To ask it to have a conclusion, or even an ending, is to ask too much. The future is less a theme than an obsession for Mrs. Lessing. With all the force and all the limitations of one possessed, she has written a visionary's history of the future—that nightmare from which she is trying to awaken.

∙ Melvin Maddocks