Sherry Chandler

Doris Lessing, who looks like photos I’ve seen of my great-grandmother, doesn’t seem to be your ordinary run of Nobel Laureate (if there can be such a thing). Here awhile back, a friend sent a link to this item: Lessing not impressed by Nobel Prize.

LONDON - Doris Lessing pulled up in a black cab where a media horde was waiting Thursday in front of her leafy north London home. Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: “Oh Christ! … I couldn’t care less.”

Lessing later said she thought the cameras were there to film a television program. Vegetables peeked out from blue plastic bags she carried out of the cab.

“This has been going on for 30 years,” she said, as reporters helped her with the bags.

“I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?” Lessing said, making her way through the crowd. “It’s a royal flush.”

“I’m sure you’d like some uplifting remarks,” she added with a smile.

Now a second friend sends this link to an article from the Guardian:

The Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing has described the September 11 attacks as “neither as extraordinary nor as terrible” as people thought.

…

“September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible,” Lessing told the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

“Some Americans will think I’m crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think.
“They’re a very naive people, or they pretend to be. Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government.

“It killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was [attending]. People forget.”

Almost 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

More than 3,700 died and tens of thousands were injured in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.

…

“As for Bush, he’s a world calamity. Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars.”