A survivor's memoir

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The Memoirs of a Survivor is a dystopian novel by the English Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing .

The book was first published in 1974 by Octagon under the title The Memoirs of a Survivor , the German translation ( Rudolf Hermstein ) followed in 1979. It was made into a film in 1981 with Julie Christie and Nigel Hawthorne in the leading roles and directed by David Gladwell .

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The story takes place in a near future when social life has collapsed due to an unspecified catastrophe. Families have broken up and survivors have formed loose groups to ensure that basic needs are met.

The narrator, an elderly lady living alone, whose name the reader does not find out, is also the main character of the novel. She takes in Emily Cartwright, a teenage girl. Emily is burdened by traumatic experiences, but the narrator does not ask further about the origin of these.

Emily is accompanied by Hugo, a strange mixture of cat and dog. Because of the general food shortage, the animal is constantly in danger of being hunted and killed. Emily joins one of the youth gangs roaming the city and falls in love with their leader, Gerald.

In the narrator's apartment there is a wall with wallpaper, through which she can meditate and overcome space and time and mentally enter other worlds. More and more often she makes use of this possibility and learns in many visions of Emily's sad childhood under the supervision of a strict mother and a father who cares little about the family.

At the end of the novel, the protagonists - now a strange family joined together by circumstances - overcome the spatial and temporal barriers of the wall and set off on their way to a better world.

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