Doris Lessing racconta in modo perfetto e a volte spietato il mondo delle donne anziane, delle loro fragilità e della loro forza, di come affrontano la malattia, la vecchiaia, il non essere più autosufficienti. E lo fa mettendo a confronto con una donna matura, una donna indipendente, una che però inizia a sentire anche lei la solitudine e i primi attacchi di un corpo che inizia a tradire.
E' un libro vero, tra la dolcezza dell'amicizia sincera e la brutale verità di un corpo che invecchia e si ammala.
Mi sono resa conto solo alla fine che è un mondo completamente di donne, dove gli unici uomini rappresentati sono i dottori, distanti, o gli uomini del passato, mariti che molto spesso muoiono lasciando le mogli vedove. Perchè, come la Lessing sa bene, in percentuale, chi si prende cura degli anziani, le caregiver, sono per lo più donne. Il contrario sarebbe stato forzato e poco reale.
Non ricordavo che "Se gioventù sapesse" fosse il seguito, per quanto letto moltissimi anni fa lo riprenderò sicuramente in mano.
Doris Lessing
Il diario di Jane Somers
Feltrinelli
Euro 9,50
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Maudie and Janna are two women who couldn't be more different than that. Maudie is a ninety-year-old woman who lives alone, with a family who doesn't cares about her, is poor and arrange herself as much as she can. Janna is a forty-year-old rich woman and satisfied with her life, she is the vice director of a fashion magazine, she works a lot and she gives herself beautiful clothes, beautiful trips, beauty treatments, long restorative baths. In a normal world, two women like this would never cross. Instead, for some strange case of fate, Maudie and Janna meet and the younger one begins to take care of the older one and over time she also begins to love her, to become attached to her. Maudie is old and sick, Janna knows this very well. She also knows very well how proud and unpleasant she can be. Yet between the two there is a sincere feeling of friendship, of affection, between two women who want to decide on their life, but one of whom, although not recognizing it, needs help.
Doris Lessing tells in a perfect and sometimes ruthless way the world of elderly women, of their frailties and their strength, of how they deal with disease, old age, not being self-sufficient anymore. And it does so by comparing it with a mature woman, an independent woman, one who, however, also begins to feel loneliness and the first attacks of a body that begins to betray.
It is a book between the sweetness of sincere friendship and the brutal truth of a body that ages and falls ill.
I realized only at the end that it is a world entirely of women, where the only men represented are the doctors, distant, or the men of the past, husbands who very often die leaving their widowed wives. Because, as Lessing knows, in percentage terms, those who take care of the elderly, the caregivers, are mostly women. The opposite in the novel would have been forced and unreal.
I did not remember that "If the old could" was the sequel, as much as I read many years ago I will definitely take it back.
Doris Lessing
The diary of a good neighbour
