As good as Ancient Evenings. But with Marxism and Feminism thrown in. ( )

(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. ( )

Beautifully written but over-long and rather heavy going. ( )

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!)

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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. ( )

1041 The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing (read 21 Jan 1970) This is another book listed by Time as a Notable Book of the Sixties [the complete list is in my review of The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn here on LibraryThing]. Set This House on Fire [which I read 31 Aug 1969 and did NOT like] was a veritable masterpiece compared to this trash. This book is just nothing. it doesn't have anything. Boring, scatological, inane, disorganized--it is just junk. Notable? Ugh. I must be awful stupid. The book got worse and worse. The part on the "I"--Anna Wulf--and Saul Green took the cake. Stupid, ignorant, asinine people--how can anyone care anything about such impossible moronic people? ( )

I was a bit disappointed in this novel. Many of my college professors recommended it, and I guess I had really high expectations as a result. Very engrossing, but in the end, just a big let down. ( )

Crec que no ha envellit gaire bé. ( )

Changed my life.

While this book seems scattered, and the end doesn't seem to justify the means, it is an interesting read that has given me much to think about. ( )

I can definitely see why this book received so much literary attention when it was published in 1962. The topics: communism, feminism, and mental illness.

Anna Wulf is the central character, and to quote Doris Lessing, Anna keeps four notebooks: Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue "because as she recognizes, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness.....of breakdown"
In the Black Notebook she records memories of her past experiences.
In the Blue Notebbok she discusses current issues and concerns. She confesses (mostly whines) about her various love affairs (usually with married men).
In the Red Notebook she documents her association with the communist party, and philosophizes about the current political climate.
And the Yellow Notebook is dedicated to fictional accounts of a woman named Ella who like Anna is a writer, and like Anna is constantly dealing with relationship issues and disappointments.

The reader watches Anna struggle with her lofty ideals and her identity as a woman. She is deeply disappointed that life didn't go according to plan. She acknowledges that association with the communist party belittles the individual accomplishment. And in Anna's case, it causes her to lose all self-esteem. She harbors the communist sentiments of disdain for planning for the future, saving money, and even making money, as though it were something to be ashamed of. And as the novel progresses, Anna becomes more and more frantic. She fears she is going mad, and the notebooks become like mental diarrhea...spouting blather, to a point where each of the notebooks abruptly come to an end. And out of the chaos comes one new notebook...."the Golden Notebook".

Doris Lessing's goal was to write a novel that described the intellectual and moral climate of London in the 1950's.....from an intellectual woman's point of view. Through Anna, Doris certainly captured the essence of the post war political atmosphere, and the breakdown of moral values, but how typical (of it's time) was it? Anna Wulf was mentally unstable, living an unconventional lifestyle, and seemed to consistently attract men who were unreliable, parasitic losers. Anna had a hard time recognizing the truth so the reader is left to wonder....was this really the intellectual and moral climate in the 1950's or was it just one unhappy, bitter, mentally unstable woman's distorted perception. Whatever the case, my conclusion is: Unique! Brilliant! A book I will read again someday. ( )

An incredible book -- a book that should have earned her the Nobel Prize in Literature long before now when she was finally awarded the prize. ( )

Lessing addresses women's lives as they were engaged in the larger world, with one another and with the process of writing. She does not claim it as a feminist treatise, but I understand why it was hailed so at first publication. It was fresh. One couldn't put her hands on many political novels that honored the lives and relations of women. Lessing was pioneering and relevant and remains so. I secretly thanked her for writing this book when I saw her in 2004 and got the distinct impression that she wondered what all the fuss was still about. ( )

The Golden Notebook is a thought-provoking, if occasionally meandering, page-turner set mainly in England in the 1950s. It is primarily about Anna Wulf, writer of one successful novel, and her fight with writers’ block as she struggles to put the absolute truth (and only the truth) into words. While I did find the pace of my reading slow down in the last 1/5th or so of the book, it was absolutely worth pushing through and finishing.

Despite characters that are mostly unlikable, or at the least, unsympathetic, I found the book to be engrossing. The utilization of the story-within-a-story narrative is expertly done. As the stories develop and come together, I came to more than one realization. The first was that there were even more levels than merely stories-within-a-story. The second was that perhaps none of it had been the truth the whole time, and that perhaps Anna was right when she recognized that the truth is something that automatically becomes untrue once you’ve written it down.

Coming to that second realization (that it was likely that nothing in the previous 600+ pages was “true” per se) would normally make a reader feel that the endeavor had been a colossal waste of time, or at the least feel cheated. However, TGN is so well-done that despite this, you still feel fulfilled and rewarded for having read it. Maybe everything that Anna has told us is untrue, but those details are of little consequence when compared to the experience of TGN as a whole—and it is something you have to experience; you will never get an honest feel for this book by reading reviews or synopses.

Notwithstanding my general praise of TGN as a creative work, the feminist in me finds the general mood of unhappiness in the book problematic. Anna and her friend Molly are “free women” (i.e. they are independent and do as they please) yet neither seems terribly happy with her life. Anna jumps from relationship to relationship (and frequently, married man to married man) and never seems happy; she bemoans the lack of faithful men she’s been able to find, yet never does anything to break out of it. And internally she’s falling apart, as evidenced in the multiple notebooks she keeps. I might describe Molly as content, but we don’t have access to her internal workings as we do with Anna. This gloom may be simply something used to capture the mood of what a electively single woman faced at that time, but I still find it disconcerting.

Nevertheless, the voracious reader (and hopeful one-day writer) in me feels like TGN is just SO good, calling it a novel is almost an insult. This book is a work of master craftsmanship. I recommend it to any smart, voracious reader, and to all writers and would-be writers. ( )

Kafka said "a book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." This book is an ice-axe. It's about "modern women", in the fifties, and about their relationships with men, and lack thereof. Also, it's about the communist party, and ambigous feelings towards it. On the one hand, the main characters are attracted to the CP, otoh, they know what's happening in Russia and they are appalled by it. These feelings are similar to what lefty students felt in the seventies.

Lessing writes about two women, friends, sharing a house. One, Anna, has written a succesful novel and is writing stories, one of which is about two women, friends, sharing a house. One of these, Ella, has written a novel. So it's a novel in a novel in a novel. I wouldn't be surprised if the character in Ella's novel also wrote a novel, etc.
If you read the novel carefully, you get to see the similarities and the differences between the Anna story and the Ella story. I take it that you can retrieve some of the Doris story - i.e. the autobiographic component of the novel - by applying the Ella-Anna relationship to the Anna-Doris relationship. But that's just my theory.

Anyway, although the book was written in 1962, it's certainly worthwhile. I don't think that the next generations of readers will recognize the context and the themes, so it may become less popular in the future. ( )

my second reading. continues to amaze and inform. a timeless classic.

A breath-taking, overwhelming, everlastingly signficant and important portrait of 'free and independent' women's struggles - however, it would be against Lessing's wish to simplify it as a feminist pioneering book so we want to be careful about it. It is a book written by an author who couldn't help with her front-line left-wing, intellectual, and cold-war upbringing who indulged all of this into this too clever, thorough, highly analytical and intellectual book. I found myself wanting to highlight almost every sentence Lessing produced - reading it is also a most self-indulgent experience! ( )

Lessing herself has referred to this book as 'narcissistic'; it is also disillusioned, depressed and lacking in grace and wisdom. To wade through stacks of slapdash, tired self-centered nonsense only to find a few tiny good bits along the way is just not worth it. Disappointing, mindnumbing. ( )

extremely self-indulgent... ( )

Un libro fascinante