What’s How I Finally Lost My Heart all about?:
How I Finally Lost My Heart is a story about a middle-aged woman who reflects on all the loves she has had in her life and recounts a particular experience detailing how she finally came to lose her heart.
What did I think?:
I was very excited to see another story by Doris Lessing in this collection after thoroughly enjoying the brilliant A Man and Two Women but this particular one left me feeling a bit confused, even though I couldn’t deny the beauty of the writing. It’s going to be a bit hard to talk about without quoting huge parts of the story which I don’t really like doing as I think it’s important to discover it all for yourself but I simply have to include the opening lines which really pulled me in, despite what I thought about the story as a whole:
“It would be easy to say that I picked up a knife, slit open my side, took my heart out, and threw it away, but unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as that. Not that I, like everyone else, had not often wanted to do it. No, it happened differently, and not as I expected.”
With that opening, how could you NOT read on? This is a first person narrative where the woman talking to us, speaks as she would do if there was no-one around to observe her and you can clearly tell from the start that her mind is quite a confused, disjointed space at this moment in her life. She is recounting to the reader the greatest loves of her life of which there have been only two, neither of these have been her husbands or the many affairs that she reports she has had. It seems that with both of these “serious loves,” the relationships ended badly and as a result, our anonymous narrator feels that her heart has become a stone that she carries around with her and is desperate to be rid of. How she finally gets rid of this stone is told to the reader in a bizarre fantasy sequence where she seems to exit her body and view her misery as if it is happening to someone else before she eventually gets a bit of closure.
It’s quite hard to describe and I don’t really want to ruin the story for anybody who is intrigued or Lessing fans who haven’t previously read it so I’ll leave the synopsis there. Personally, I don’t think I enjoyed this as much as A Man And Two Women and it left me in quite a confused, fragile mindset myself where I had to go back to the beginning and read it another couple of times before I accepted what was going on. Saying that, it was an exceptional piece of writing with some very vivid imagery and emotional anguish that affected me at times very deeply. I also appreciate a story that challenges me in this way and it definitely hasn’t put me off reading more Doris Lessing in the future. Have you read it? I’d love to know what you think!
Would I recommend it?:
Probably!
Star rating (out of 5):
NEXT SHORT STORY: The Graveless Doll Of Eric Mutis by Karen Russell from the collection Vampires In The Lemon Grove
