DISCOVERIES

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Time Bites

Views and Reviews

Doris Lessing

HarperCollins: 376 pp., $27.95

“WOMEN writers did not, and occasionally even now do not, have an easy time of it,” Doris Lessing writes in an essay on Virginia Woolf. “We all wish our idols and exemplars were perfect; a pity she was such a wasp, such a snob -- and all the rest of it, but love has to be warts and all.”

In this invaluable collection of “views and reviews,” you will get Doris Lessing warts and all. Just like my imperious grandmother, Lessing is wry and amusing -- until she gets shrill, and then she’s just loud.

Many of the reviews and essays in “Time Bites” -- on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” for example, which boils down to how very different Austen’s world was from ours (“This tale is set firmly in its place and time, detail by certain detail, fact by verifiable fact”) -- are simply overstated, overly authoritative, and lacking in any sort of doubt or humility. One feels, as in her essays on Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, that she has simply traveled too far from the text.

When Woolf, for example, felt compelled, as she often did, to include an author’s entire culture in her judgment, she was careful to return frequently to the work. Lessing all too often moves from hearsay to rumor to opinion.

That being said, Lessing’s extraordinary outspokenness is often refreshing and invigorating. Side by side with the reviews, the essays -- “My Room,” for example, and “A Book That Changed Me” and “Old” -- are not as laced with the “waspishness” that Lessing claims brought Woolf down a notch or two. (Lessing’s reviews are nothing if not “waspish.”)

Lessing is very funny indeed on Bohemianism, tender on the subject of Islam and Sufism (“It was easier in the ancient world, perhaps, when culture was more unified than it ever has been since, to grasp a concept of something hidden, but ever-present, central but many-featured”) and full of rage on the subject of unauthorized biographies (particularly biographies of herself). On the subject of the United States and its citizens in the aftermath of Sept. 11, she has this to say: “Everything is taken to extremes.” Ah, the withering heights of fame and old age.

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On the Ice

An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica

Gretchen Legler

Milkweed Editions: 188 pp., $15.95 paper

PARISHIONERS at the Chapel of the Snows in McMurdo Station on Ross Island, at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, refer to themselves as “the Frozen Chosen.” This is the kind of humor that reigns at McMurdo, recorded with a light hand and pure admiration by Gretchen Legler.

When she arrives in late August to begin her six-month stay at McMurdo, the temperature is 70 degrees below zero. One hundred and fifty scientists, technicians, cooks and drill operators live there in the winter -- a population that expands to more than 1,000 in the “warmer” months.

Legler, a journalist and professor of creative writing at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, visits the huts that Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton lived in, early in the last century. She sits in an Antarctic ice cave so blue that it “burns violet” and makes her cry. She records the various sounds the wind makes, and she falls in love with a woman who shows her nacreous clouds -- stunning, colorful wisps of vapor.

Whereas the Navy discouraged female visitors to Antarctica until the 1970s, now almost half of the people who live and work at McMurdo Station are female. “How do you get a date with a woman in Antarctica?” goes a commonly told joke. “Answer: Be one.”

“Many a good Antarctic career has been started on a failed relationship,” says a veteran supply boss. Legler, who learns to live on Antarctic time (as one scientist remarks, “It’s dead easy to think big twenty-four hours a day”), is generous with stories from her own life: a sister who committed suicide in her early 20s, austere parents, a father incapable of intimacy, and her own failed relationships -- broken by her inability to trust anyone to love her most unlovable parts. It’s a drop-dead gorgeous book, guaranteed to ignite the spirit of adventure in the most gelid couch potato.