Doris Lessing's latest work being introduced in Korea

Doris Lessing, the greatest living British writer, has published her book, The Fifth Child, in Minumsa's [World Literature Collection].
"The Fifth Child" is a 1988 work by Lessing, which is being introduced in Korea for the first time, and has already been evaluated as a "classic work" overseas.
In an interview with the New York Times after the publication of this work, Lessing shared two pieces of writing that inspired The Fifth Child.
It was an article from an archaeologist who said that genes from the Ice Age were passed down to us and influenced us, and a magazine article about a mother who complained that her happy family was destroyed by an evil fourth daughter born after giving birth to three normal children.
These two pieces of writing naturally blended together to form the plot of “The Fifth Child.”


Are Humans Incapable of Escape from the Dominion of Their Genes? - Lessing's Perspective on the Sociobiological Debate

In 1960s London, two very normal people, Harriet and David, meet, fall in love, and start a family.
They are a rare sight these days, as people around them make fun of them.
They reject things like promiscuous premarital sex, divorce or extramarital affairs, birth control, and drugs, and they build happy families in the traditional sense.
The elements of such a happy family include a large Victorian house where children can run and play freely and where the scattered nuclear family can come together, but above all, it includes the maternal love of bearing and loving children, the responsibility of being the head of the household, and the parental duty to be willing to help when the children need it.
However, [the fifth child] Ben is controlled by a strange gene beyond Harriet and David's control, causing their lives to deviate from the path they had planned.
Ben destroys their [ideal] family.
One abnormal child completely destroys their home and all the ideals that were the foundation of that home.
As Harriet ponders why a child like Ben was born, she wonders if it is God's punishment for their desire to live happily ever after, or if it is the result of a cosmic evolution that goes back to the very beginning.


But racing doesn't attempt to provide an answer to that question.
Rather, by releasing Ben and his gang somewhere underground in the big city, he foretells a future that Harriet, David, and even we don't want to acknowledge.
At the end of the century, when even humans are being cloned through genetic engineering, Lessing's "The Fifth Child" poses challenging and sharp questions to us, who are trapped in the paradigm of this era, about the origins and value of [humanity].


From the commentary on the work

It is almost impossible to summarize Lessing's vast oeuvre.
Her narrative techniques and novel forms range from socialist realism, bildungsroman, and modernist techniques to fable, folktale, romance, and science fiction.
Her interests also encompass major 20th-century intellectual issues, including psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and sociobiology, as well as mysticism such as Sufism.