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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780060931407
ISBN: 006093140X
Label: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 672
Publication Date: 1999-02-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Product Release Date: 1999-02-03
Studio: Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Much to its author's chagrin, The Golden Notebook instantly became a staple of the feminist movement when it was published in 1962. Doris Lessing's novel deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, a sometime-Communist and a deeply leftist writer living in postwar London with her small daughter. Anna is battling writer's block, and, it often seems, the damaging chaos of life itself. The elements that made the book remarkable when it first appeared--extremely candid sexual and psychological descriptions of its characters and a fractured, postmodern structure--are no longer shocking. Nevertheless, The Golden Notebook has retained a great deal of power, chiefly due to its often brutal honesty and the sheer variation and sweep of its prose.

This largely autobiographical work comprises Anna's four notebooks: "a black notebook which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary." In a brilliant act of verisimilitude, Lessing alternates between these notebooks instead of presenting each one whole, also weaving in a novel called Free Women, which views Anna's life from the omniscient narrator's point of view. As the novel draws to a close, Anna, in the midst of a breakdown, abandons her dependence on compartmentalization and writes the single golden notebook of the title.

In tracking Anna's psychological movements--her recollections of her years in Africa, her relationship with her best friend, Molly, her travails with men, her disillusionment with the Party, the tidal pull of motherhood--Lessing pinpoints the pulse of a generation of women who were waiting to see what their postwar hopes would bring them. What arrived was unprecedented freedom, but with that freedom came unprecedented confusion. Lessing herself said in a 1994 interview: "I say fiction is better than telling the truth. Because the point about life is that it's a mess, isn't it? It hasn't got any shape except for you're born and you die."

The Golden Notebook suffers from certain weaknesses, among them giving rather simplistic, overblown illustrations to the phrase "a good man is hard to find" in the form of an endless parade of weak, selfish men. But it still has the capacity to fill emotional voids with the great rushes of feeling it details. Perhaps this is because it embodies one of Anna's own revelations: "I've been forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguiseable private emotion. Even in translation there is no mistaking these lightning flashes of genuine personal feeling." It seems that Lessing, like Anna when she decides to abandon her notebooks for the single, golden one, attempted to put all of herself in one book. --Melanie Rehak

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Golden Notebook
Review: I belong to a book group of highly literate, intelligent older women, some of whom are themselves writers and teachers, all with strong social and cultural concerns. Though a few of us had read some Doris Lessing years ago when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature we decided to read and discuss one of her works. It was my month to lead the discussion and I selected her most well known work, The Golden Notebook.

After reading about sixty pages of this 640 page volume, I knew that I being the leader would probably be the only one of the dozen members of our group who would plow through to the end. Lessing is a fine writer, her descriptions make things come alive, her sensitivity to the terrible social injustices in Africa, the arrogance of the young, and the atrocities of the group think of Communism are extremely well portrayed, but the complete self absorption and lack of compassion or caring for any individual other than herself, becomes extremely tiring and truly boring, to the point that I wanted to shout--"Come on, get a life." I too, was a thinking adult in 1962 (the date of the books original publication), and yes, there was horrific social and racial injustice, terrible selfishness and stultifying patriarchal and cultural stratification, in many places there still is, but everyone else in this world is not all bad. Please, please, please show some humanity. Have you no sympathy, no empathy? Sexual liberation is one thing, but emotional balance is lacking. Love in this book is only gratification of one's own desire. Maybe this is the point of the novel. To show the basic self absorption of someone who is trying to buck the system. To show the evils of the world. After all, Lessing wrote that true art was to expose the depths of pain. Perhaps. But I believe there is something to be said for art that uncovers beauty in a broken world.

In this work Anna, the protagonist, wrote her different colored Notebooks to demonstrate the fragmentation of her life. But her inability to get beyond herself did not hold my interest or empathy and though I agree that Lessing is extremely talented and obviously dedicated to creating literature to depict the way she knows the world, I am saddened that hers is one of cynicism despair. In this novel the gift of golden notebook at the end seems contrived and unconvincing. If life to Lessing means nihilistic terror into nothingness, she has captured it in her art.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A book that transcends it's own time
Review: I am a long time fan of Doris Lessing. However, for me, this is her greatest work. It tackles a myriad of issues and is just as relevant today as it was then and would have been a hundred years before.

I could see myself in her protagonist Anna Wulf when I read this book 20 years ago and, upon re-reading it recently, I find even more insights now.

Certainly, one of the greatest novels ever written. I was surprised to see several negative reviews on this page. My thought would be, a novel you cannot stomach in your youth will open wide vistas ten or twenty years later.

The negative reviewers probably just haven't reached the right time in their lives to grasp just how amazing this book is.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Great book indeed
Review: I admire Doris Lessing's style and prose. With that, yes, I enjoyed the book. The detail, insight, frailties and humor are wonderful. I stopped short of five stars - my opinion only - because I would have preferred a shorter version. The author, however, makes no apology and rightfully so for it's length. I would recommend this book to young men and women who want to validate their own emotions and understanding of relationships, and to older women and men to better understand where their relationships have taken them. I am now ready to read more of Doris Lessing and her wonderful style.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: original story
Review: Well, very well written, as it is a masterpiece but I didnÂ't know Doris was so homophobic, it deceived me. Furthermore, it seems all the problems re caused by menÂ's attitude, but arenÂ't her women characters too obssessive?

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Call me a philistine ...
Review: Call me a philistine, but I cannot understand why this monumental and self-indulgent book, first published in 1962, is said to be one the great classics of the 20th century.

It charts the life of Anna Wulf, a writer. Although every page is very well written and the many characters are well individualized, I have found this quite a difficult read. The chapters in this massive tome are enormously long, with few natural breaks: at times there are whole pages between paragraphs.

And the structure of the book is, I think, excessively complex. Anna is a divorcee with a little daughter; her friend Molly is a divorcee with a grown-up son. Their story is told in five instalments. Both women are ex-communists; both believe themselves to be `Free Women'.

The tile `Free Women' is certainly an ironical title as far as Anna is concerned, since her `freedom' brings her the most painful turmoil of emotions. After having been aware for a long time about the darker, crueller, more dishonest side of communism, she has, with a great psychological effort, `freed' herself from membership of the Party, but the wrench has left her in an aching vacuum, as well as haunted by the terrors and threats to human existence that are conveyed in the daily newspapers from which she obsessively collects clippings.

Worse: she feels `free' to engage in new sexual relationships with a series of men, but she is tormented in each of these relationships, to which she gives herself with more commitment than is felt by the men. She becomes increasingly damaged, veering backwards and forwards from love to hate, self-lacerating, driven towards total disintegration.

Between each instalment called `Free Women' are the contents of four notebooks which Anna is keeping: one black, one red, one yellow, one blue, each kept for a different purpose.

The black notebook relates to a successful book which Anna has already written and published, and which fictionalized her experiences in war-time Rhodesia. That book was about Communism, racism, and dominant-submissive relationships in a group of air force pilots stationed there.

The red notebook is about Anna's post-war experiences as a member of the Communist Party back in Britain. She was fully aware of the unacceptable side of Stalinist communism, even while she remained a member. Anyone who was a communist or a fellow-traveller in the forties and fifties will recognize the atmosphere.

Anna is struggling with a writer's block, but is trying to write another novel, dealing with the more painful parts of her life. The yellow notebook is part of this novel (and notes thereon) which describes the relationship of Ella (who is really Anna), a divorcee, with a doctor called Paul. (Sometimes the same characters, like Anna's ex-husband, are called by different names in the different parts of the book. In addition, the Paul in the yellow notebook is not the same person as the Paul in the black notebook.) Here (and later in the blue notebook) Doris Lessing records ever more minutely the relationship between the woman and the man: they vary often from moment to moment, from one conversational exchange to the next. These are very well done and at enormous length, but ultimately they are as exhausting for this reader as they must have been to the characters.

In the blue notebook Anna records her real life, part of which is the material for the yellow notebook. Most painful is the relationship with her last lover, Saul Green, an American ex-communist, who was himself a horrendously fractured personality: the schizophrenia of each of them reinforces that of the other.

And the new golden notebook at the end, which, the blurb says, `brings the strands of her life together and holds the key to her recovery'? Personally, I can't see any difference between the madness of that book and the madness which pervaded the end of the blue note book; and as for any recovery .... well, perhaps exhausted as I was, I'm afraid I just didn't get it. Dense of me, no doubt. But was I glad I had come to the end!

I have enjoyed some of Doris Lessing's books (The Sweetest Dream, The Grandmothers, The Good Terrorist) a great deal more than this one.

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