Love, Again: Novel, A by Lessing, DorisDoris Lessing's 1997 novel Love, Again is the story of 65-year-old Englishwoman Sarah Durham's encounters with love--being loved, desiring love, falling in love, being the object of desire--as she produces a musical/play--an entertainment--about a mulatto woman named Julie Vairon who, her time at the other end of the same century, was the subject and object of impossible love. A beautiful woman who attracts the desire and love of Frenchmen whose nobility or social status out-caste her and render her an outcaste, she nevertheless manages to live on her own terms--that is, with the support of the men who have loved her. Julie Vairon occupies a place apart in a forest near a river full of the magic and beauty of the natural world. She realizes the magic of her own womanly ways and creates the poetry and music that will haunt Sarah Durham and the men and women who will come together almost a century later to create a tone poem of her life on stage in her village in France and, less successfully, in England.
Julie has magic that swirls round the international cast who perform her life story and becomes the vehicle by which Sarah Durham travels deep into the truth of love and desire and need--the selfishness and emptiness and hurt that drive us toward and away from each other.
Love and our grasp of it are fleeting things. In those rare moments we break through our isolate to embrace another in those fleeting moments, there is magic.
The thing is to know it.
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