Four Gated City (105 page)
*
This book is what the Germans call a
Bildungsroman
. This kind of novel has been out of fashion for some time: which does not mean that there is anything wrong with this kind of novel.
*
Finally, I’d like to thank Miss Juliet O’Hea of Curtis Brown who has been my agent for nearly twenty years. When publishing firms are bought and sold like pounds of sugar, and are tiny parts of great empires, agents can make up for it. Juliet O’Hea stands by her authors when she dislikes their politics, is sad about their lack of
religion, and considers that they would be more usefully occupied in writing something else than novel-series which drag on for a couple of decades. She backs us when we aren’t writing profitably, and are not behaving profitably either … in short, she’s a gem of an agent: Juliet, my grateful thanks.
DORIS LESSING
N
OVELS
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers
:
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
If the Old Could
…
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
“C
ANOPUS IN
A
RGOS
: A
RCHIVES” SERIES
Re: Colonized Planet s-Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for
Planet Eight
Documents Relating to the Sentimental
Agents in the Volyen Empire
“C
HILDREN OF
V
IOLENCE” SERIES
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
S
HORT
S
TORIES
This Mas the Old Chiefs Country
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Temptation of Jack Orkney and
Other Stories
Stories
African Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches
O
PERA
The Making of the Representative for
Planet Eight (Music by Philip Glass)
P
OETRY
Fourteen Poems
N
ONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Particularly Cats…And Rufus
African Laughter
The Doris Lessmg Reader
MORE PRAISE FOR THE FOUR-GATED CITY:
“This most exemplary of modern women… who has noticed and remarked on everything, who has entertained and ultimately refused almost every illusion that tempts the contemporary intelligence … seeks now, in pre-historic recesses and unconscious memory, a new sustaining myth Her intelligence is formidable, her integrity monumental and her operating methods wholly uncompromising. She has not spared herself and will not spare the reader—She has done her job and what a staggering job it is.”
—John Leonard,
New York Times
“Every conversation and action has the kind of resonance most novelists presumably only dream about—She has great style of a sort all her own and her intense concentration can have its own astounding images… a clairvoyant vision of contaminated countryside shining like a poisoned mouse; or an image of the city in accelerated time, its buildings rising and crumbling like the plumes of a fountain.”
—
Christian Science Monitor
“One of the most remarkable feats in contemporary fiction
Certain to be argued about, read and reread frequently in the years to come. The Four-Gated City demands total assimilation into our life if we are to be the inheritors of tomorrow.”
—
Chicago Daily News
“Lessing has dared to look at our world as it is One can only hint at the complexity of The Four-Gated City.”
—
The New Leader
“A magnificence in intensity and subtlety far beyond its rivals.”
—
Atlanta Journal
“A unifying presence vibrates … the strong will of the author, applying herself to every possible explanation of life from Communism to spiritualism, not knowing where her modish contemporaries are looking and not caring.”
-
Life
“This extraordinary novel… appeals to the mind, the imagination, and the heart. It is Doris Lessing writing at the peak of her considerable literary powers, spinning a parable of our times and of the near future that is as frightening as it is intensely dramatic.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“An astonishing grasp of every nuance of modern existence and an extraordinary ability to get it all down without compromising its complexity." „
—
Commonweal
“I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that that was the most important thing I could ever do.”
—Barbara Kingsolver
The Four-Gated City was first published in the United Kingdom by MacGibbon & Kee Limited in 1969. First U.S. edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1969.
THE FOUR-GATED CITY. Copyright © 1969 by Doris Lessing.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04794-6
First HarperPerennial edition published 1995.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lessing, Doris May, 1919-
The four-gated city: a novel / Doris Lessing.—1st ed.
p. cm. — (Children of violence)
ISBN 0-06-097667-5
I. Title. II. Series: Lessing, Doris May, 1919-Children of violence.
| [PR6023.E833F6 1995) | |
| 823.914—dc20 | 95-31487 |
07 08 09 10 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
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