The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition (Perennial Classics) (original 1962; edition 1999)

“Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals” page 385.

Still under the effects of the inebriating The Brothers K, I thought the best way to overcome a book hungover was to get drunk again. Reckless and foolish, I know.
My head still spinning around and my heart wrenched into a tight ball as I write these lines. “The Golden notebook” is not a kind book.
It has challenged my patience and tolerance with its apparent non direction. I have even despised Anna, the narrator of the story, thinking her naive, selfish and snobbish.
But being a woman who dwells in constant contradiction, I have irrevocably fallen under the spell of Lessing Anna’s radical voice. A woman, writer and mother who says the unsayable, thinks the unthinkable and puts it all down in her notebooks in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.
Four Notebooks pouring with self contempt, full of disillusionment, tolls for searching clues in her past in order to reconcile her unbearably miserable present.

The black recalls Anna’s youth in wartime Rhodesia, her initial involvement with the Communist Party and how her early experiences served as material for her later successful novel. Also a retrospective insight in which Anna can’t neither recognize herself nor her ingenuous expectations on women’s independence and liberation.

”What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing so well the complexities behind them?” page 115.

The red portrays her political doubts with shocking power and blistering honesty, threading radical exploration of communism together with Anna’s growing need for truth-seeking rather than political ideology.
I found her growing estrangement with The Party especially poignant when she starts feeling dubious about ends justifying means and the cynicism of some “comrades”.

”Yet why do I have a home at all? Because I wrote a book I am ashamed of, and it made a lot of money. Luck, luck, that’s all. And I hate all that – ‘my’ home, ‘my’ possessions, ‘my’ rights. And yet come to the point where I’m uncomfortable, I fall back on it like everyone else. Mine. Property. Possessions.” page 356

The yellow notebook was the one that struck me the most but at the same time also shined out with unexpected recognition. Anna’s futile effort to write as a third person, naming her creation Ella, in an attempt to distance herself from the inadequacy and constant failures of her relationships with men reminded me strongly of D.H. Lawrence’s reflections on sexuality, morality and motherhood.
Anna’s reaffirmed feelings of independence reacting against the vanity, egoism and insecurities of her usually married male partners contrast with her constant displays of traditional female behavior (expecting to stop being the mistress to become the wife). It all sounded so real and sincere to me that I felt Anna’s sufferings and sorrows as my own.

“I am unhappy because I have lost some kind of independence, some freedom; but my being ‘free’ has nothing to do with writing a novel; it has to do with my attitude towards a man, and that has been proved dishonest, because I am in pieces.” page 283.

Finally, the blue notebook appears as an accurate account of everyday life where intertwined switches of mood, rambling thoughts and semi-deranged descriptions of dreams become a crude testimony of existential doubts.

”But-isn’t there something wrong with the fact that my sleep is more satisfying, exciting, enjoyable than anything that happens to me awake?” page 217.

Defragmented pieces of unconsciousness create the most truthful and frightening image of a woman who questions the different versions of herself to find her long lost wholeness.
Doris Lessing addresses the conflicts between the maternal and erotic life, of the difficulties to conduct a career, or at least to try to, while raising a child, of the letdown that comes along with exploration of political ideologies, of the hardships of facing a mental breakdown, of the frustration of being a liberated woman but still be dependant on a masculine presence in her life. And she does it all looking at the reader straight in the eye, without blinking.
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t see Lessing as some sort of personal feminist hero, I don’t think that is the point. But then, as now, being in my early thirties, this novel has helped to steer me towards knowing which questions to ask and which answers are better left unsought.
Everything. Life, love, death, the myriad beings buried deep inside me. Everything has become Golden clear. Because there has to be a crack in everything so that the light gets in.
The failures and inadequacies of my past.
The bleakness of my upcoming future.
The beauty and the futility of it all, so worth the effort. ( )

This was a must-read during my later years in college when feminism was just getting started. Not just in Women's Studies courses (which were JUST getting started) but friends would press it upon you. So I read it, but I don't recall liking it that much. Maybe this is another one I should take another look at. ( )

Given up because although it was well written and the characters developed well early on, I just have no interest at all in the upper middle class who have angst and money instead of housework and jobs. Who pontificate about sex and politics and other people's affairs when the rest of the country were out working and thinking of who was cooking dinner that night and whether or not tuppence on the tax each week was going to make school trips a bit difficult. Just not what I want to read about right now.

Two stars because generally I really like Lessing and I love her writing. ( )

I love Doris Lessing, but I admit that when I first read the Golden Notebook (about..40 years ago) I found it slow going and fascinating both. I've always thought Lessing was a great writer who now and then had editors who fell asleep during paragraphs or something.
It's a pivotal book in the women's history shelf, if only to get a glimpse of how it was back in the day. ( )

My wife was unsure about this because 'the author is too obviously a communist'. My reading of this brilliant novel is quite different. Yes of course only someone with direct experience could write from such an insider perspective, but the perspective of the novel is deeply sceptical about communism as indeed about many other things. Don't read if you don't like women (or wimmin); but otherwise don't miss it! ( )