Womanhood, in an earlier age

The Summer Before the Dark - Doris Lessing (Knopf, 1973)

Huh. As a non-yet-married third wave feminist without children, I found this book totally foreign. Maybe forty years is a surprisingly long time, or maybe I just haven't made it to the place where I can fully understand how a middle aged woman can have such trouble figuring out her "self" as an identity separate from how she is seen by others.

Kate's husband and children all go off for a long summer. She gets a job as a translator for some NGO that throws conferences and channels all the energies she spent running a household into that. And then with her free months she falls into an affair with a younger man and travels. Except one after another they are afflicted with some sort of illness that is explicitly considered existential as well as physical.

Throughout the course of the novel, Kate has a recurring dream, in which she is trying to rescue a seal. It's crucial that she let the dream run its course, and it has that metaphorical quality dreams do. But whole swaths of the novel felt the same way to me -- I'd be reaching out, trying to grasp the meaning behind what was going on in the moment, but it kept slipping through my fingers. And I was hugely annoyed to not be able to tell whether or not this was Lessing's intention, or if I was just too far away from Kate's existence to be able to understand it.