Found Object No.0034.26, New York City, Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing
Briefing for a Descent into Hell — Doris Lessing (1971)
first edition.
A Cambridge professor is found wandering the streets of London, stripped of his memory and identity. Confined to a psychiatric hospital, Charles Watkins embarks on an extraordinary inner voyage through shipwrecks, ancient civilizations, savage rituals, and cosmic landscapes. As doctors attempt to restore his sanity through increasingly powerful treatments, a disturbing question emerges: Is Watkins losing his mind, or has he discovered a reality the rest of us cannot see?
In this hallucinatory novel, Doris Lessing dismantles the boundaries between madness and revelation, asking whether the very institutions designed to heal us might also destroy the truths we carry within.
Lessing described the novel as "inner-space fiction," extending her exploration of consciousness beyond the psychological realism of The Golden Notebook. Published in 1971, it anticipated the increasingly mystical and speculative direction her later fiction would take.
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