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Loading... The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition (Perennial Classics)by Doris Lessing
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. As good as Ancient Evenings. But with Marxism and Feminism thrown in. (  ) iaingbrown | Nov 16, 2009 |  (Sometimes ex-) Communist women sleeping with married men, complaining, being depressed, not working, being lazy, crying, doing nothing....for 600 FREAKIN PAGES. I completely disagree with Lessing's thoughts about novels (which she outlines in the book) that they should be philosophy and not about life. Well she obviously went into this novel with a Great Message that resulted in manipulated, flat, annoying characters. Here's my message to novelists with a Message: write an essay. Your fiction is stifling. (  )2  maryjanemanolos | Nov 7, 2009 | Beautifully written but over-long and rather heavy going. (  ) JuneTodd | Sep 7, 2009 | The Golden Notebook is divided into many parts, each one long and so detailed that by the time you revisit each of the notebooks, it's hard to keep track of what they're about and what happened previously. (If it weren't for introductions from Lessing from 1974 and 1993, I would've been really clueless! Normally, I skip introductions so they don't cloud my experience of the book, but thank goodness I read them this time!) Each section begins with "Free Women," which chronicles the life of writer Anna Wulf (the author of the notebooks) and her interactions with her best friend, Molly; Molly's ex-husband, Richard; their adult son, Tommy; Richard's new wife, Marion; and to a lesser extent, Anna's daughter, Janet. It opens in 1957 England. Much of the story has to do with Richard cheating on his alcoholic wife and Tommy's confusion about what to do with his life. Should he follow in Molly's and Anna's footsteps by finding a cause and fighting for it (in their case, they joined the Communist Party in their youth), or should he enter the world of capitalism and take a job in his father's company? After each "Free Women" section comes the notebooks. Anna keeps a black notebook to chronicle her early years in the Community Party in Africa and the novel she wrote about her experiences there (her only well-known work). Her disillusionment with the Party is detailed in a red notebook, while a novel based partly on her life is contained in the yellow notebook. A blue notebook also is kept--a personal diary broken up by newspaper clippings related to the Communist Party that chronicles her descent into madness. Before the final "Free Women" section is the Golden Notebook, in which all of her other notebooks are pulled together, blurring the lines of truth and fiction--and she ends up writing partial stories in it with her lover, who takes ownership of the notebook in the end. (Like I'd ever give up one of my gazillion notebooks to a man! Or any person, for that matter!) more ( ) annaeccentric | Jul 15, 2009 | I realize this is a canon of feminist literature and that it apparently shook the earth when it first appeared. It's day has long since past. It should, perhaps, be studied as a product of its time. For entertainment it is tiresome at best with unbelievable and annoying characters. Though it might once have been considered cutting edge and shocking to the point of practically being banned, it is difficult to want to read this in any context today. It should be relegated to required reading for a women's studies course for addled feminists, if there are any left. ( ) varielle | Jun 22, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 006093140X, Paperback)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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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