The Golden Notebook

There are two things that struck me about this book: 1) how difficult it is to read despite fascinating topics written with a crisp and clear style; 2) how incredibly modern it is: it hasn't aged one bit.
Lessing is part intellectual, rational, logical and part raw emotion tapping into the depth of the soul. While it is not always evident, it comes in waves through different notebooks, the different perspectives weaving in and out of each other.
My favourite parts were definitely the nostalgic scenes of Mashopi which hold the foundation of the book: relationships between men and women, social inequality - notably racism and feminism - and capitalism, the very themes that we still struggle with today.
A tough read but a masterful novel.

In life I might have asked Anna what she was thinking and she would dodge the question. In this narrative she answers in full, and that answer is as illuminating as it is satisfying in scene after scene. The downside was the mounting frustration I had with her poor choice in men, like a male friend watching his close female friend make all the wrong moves. Why must they all be married??

I was half in love with Anna myself, and also a sympathizer with her predicament. Writing 'seriously' or feeling the need to do so, inhibits simply writing for market. To pour yourself, a part of your soul, onto the page requires feeling a passion for the subject and often going against the grain of what society wants or expects to read. There's little show more welcome for that sort of thing in today's market, and only a modicum of appreciation. The only salve is to observe what lasts and what falls away, for those lucky writers who get into print at all.

But Anna has a deeper problem. She doesn't like the emotions she thrives on in order to produce her writing. Having experienced the process once when writing her first novel, she is loathe to confront her own hypocricies and contradictions. To keep herself writing, she produces four diaries: four, in order to sufficiently separate the selves that are in conflict and contradicting one another. She writes about herself as a writer, about her politics, about stories created from her experience, and a kind of diary. Interspersed with these entries are the scenes Lessing allows us from Anna's life, a life which she struggles to control as events slip away from her, as she is faced with her own limitations, fears, phobias and guilts. Somewhere on the other side of her internal desert is the solution she instinctively knows she needs.

The edition I read includes an introduction by Lessing in which she describes letters sent her in which her readers described that part of the novel which stood out to them as being the whole, and yet none (or very few) did perceive the actual whole, which ironically is the unity towards which Anna strives, the importance of that golden notebook which brings everything together. show less

Published in 1962, this book is a character study of Anna Wulf, a divorced writer with a young daughter living in London in the 1950s. She keeps five notebooks. The black notebook documents her time in Southern Rhodesia before and during WWII, which inspired her successful first novel. The red notebook recounts her membership in the Communist Party, and her growing disillusion with it. The yellow notebook is an attempt to write a second novel based on a failed relationship. The blue is her personal diary. The titular golden notebook is Anna’s attempt to bring the other four together into one cohesive whole.

Excerpts from the notebooks are interspersed with segments called Free Women, which relate the lives of Anna, her friend Molly, show more their families, and relationship partners. It is a mix of autobiography, news clippings of the time period, and novels within a novel. It is written in a looping style, alternating segments from the different colored notebooks. Anna is attempting to compartmentalize her life. She is on the edge of mental instability and suffers from writer’s block.

I liked parts of this book and found other parts annoying. Anna’s mental struggles are moving. I especially appreciated her discussions with her therapist. The writing is elegant. There are several keen observations about human nature. Certain sections of the notebooks are engaging and memorable. I can understand why this is considered a literary classic, but…

I did not care for the repetition, which is part and parcel of the looping structure. I got tired of spending so much time in the head of a person that keeps engaging in self-destructive behavior. It appears to celebrate female independence, but the protagonist keeps getting involved in a series of unhealthy relationships. It would have helped if there had been something to lighten the mood. Parts of it have not aged well (e.g., the conversation about “real men.”) It eventually becomes unpleasant, and I was ready for it to end well before it did. show less

The Golden Notebook is the final book on this iteration of my reading list and–unfortunately–was not a case of saving the best for last. It landed on my list as part of TIME magazine's All-TIME 100 as A Book With A Color In Its Title; in hindsight, I would reclassify it as A Book At The Bottom Of Your To-Read List.

Doris Lessing's novel is structurally complex, consisting of six parts, each of which (save one) begins with the continuing story of Anna Wulf, a divorced novelist raising her pre-teen daughter in London, and her friend Molly Jacobs, a divorced actress raising her twenty-year-old son. Within these parts are the contents of four colored notebooks (black, red, yellow, blue), Anna's memoir, political ramblings, fictional show more musings and diary, respectively. Further complicating the reader's comprehension is the backward revelation of much of Anna's story, where the notebooks reveal fictionalized events in her life prior to Anna as narrator disclosing their "real" counterparts. Add to this the climax of the novel—the simultaneous mental breakdowns of fictional-Anna and her Sybil-like male flat mate, and you have a confused collection of stories about a promiscuous former communist living an intellectually vacuous life off the royalties of her one and only novel.

While this schizophrenic structure is probably intended to give the reader the feeling of sharing Anna's breakdown, I found it numbingly over-complicated. Tellingly, Lessing often felt her first-person narrator needed to identify herself by name (e.g. "I, Anna...") so the reader could distinguish between Anna's "real" and fictive narration. The scenes at the beginning of each part are mostly dialogue paired with intrusive adverbs ("he said angrily") using an anonymous narration, no character point-of-view that often doesn't provide sufficient information to understand why particular statements are made. While the novel also suffers repetitive dream sequences and abstruse conversations between Anna and her psychoanalyst, my main objection is that Anna is simply an unlikeable character whose convictions vacillate in reaction to every sentence spoken to her. Compounding my dislike is her annoying role as analytical observer, criticizing others with a false sophistication when she herself is so flawed.

My copy of The Golden Notebook is 623 pages long; on page 565, Anna finally admits she's had writer's block since her highly successful debut novel. To me, this novel reads like Lessing suffered the same problem and has just stitched together several discordant attempts at a novel similar to Anna's efforts in the fictive story. show less

A tough read this one, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s long and you are going to wish you were nearer the end than the beginning on many occasions. This is because it’s often tedious. There’s no real story that cohesively holds the whole thing together that is really of much interest.

It’s the life of Anna Wulf, a novelist. She spent some time in South Africa during WW2, was for many years a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and has published a novel which hasn’t done too badly. Although each of these in itself has the potential to be an engaging read, Lessing is too much of a realist for that. Instead you are bound and gagged and placed on the fringe of endless conversations Lessing uses to portray show more communism, attitudes towards women, sexuality, male-female relationships and so on which culminate (although that’s far too strong a word) in something that may be a nervous breakdown (again, too strong a phrase).

On top of this, having watered down potentially engaging topics through banality, Lessing has also decided to record each of these topics in different coloured notebooks and present extracts from each in series. As if that didn’t create enough dissonance, you also have a narrative that runs independent of these and which, if I’m honest, I can’t honestly remember anything about.

When you finally make it to the eponymous golden notebook, you have a grain of hope left that this might actually be a turning point, a pinnacle that has made the arduous climb worth it. It’s a false summit; all that is gold does not glister.

I get why this was an important novel, how novel the structure was and how important the topics were for the time. It scores highly simply because of these qualities. That doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it or that I’d recommend it. I didn’t, and I wouldn’t. show less

I admit it, I had thought this would be extremely hard-going. I’d read a couple of Lessing’s other novels and not been taken with them – and even if the first book of her sf quintet, Canopus in Argos Archives, Shikasta, felt to me like being beaten about the head by Ursula K Le Guin. The Golden Notebook, Lessing’s most celebrated novel, I expected to be a bit of a chore – especially given its 576 pages… So I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was an engrossing read. I’m only glad I read it after writing All That Outer Space Allows, as some structural elements of my novel might well have changed and in hindsight I’m not convinced they’d have been improvements. The Golden Notebook is a novel titled ‘Free Women’, show more about Anna Wulf, writer of a single successful novel based on her years in Africa during WWII, who is now living in London. She is also a communist. Between Sections of ‘Free Women’ are Wulf’s notebooks – black, red, yellow and blue. In the black notebook, she describes her time in Africa – on which her one published novel, ‘Frontiers of War’ (and which I kept on mis-thinking as Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War) was based – and later, her life in London. The red notebook details Wulf’s politics and her interactions with the Communist Party. The yellow notebook is a fictionalisation of Wulf’s own life, title ‘The Shadow of the Third’, in which Wulf’s part is played by a woman called Ella. And the blue notebook starts out as a diary, but at times is more of a scrapbook, filled with newspaper cuttings. The five narratives, despite covering similar ground, don’t actually confuse The Golden Notebook‘s story, they actually deepen it and successfully show different aspects of Wulf’s character – as a writer, as a communist, her sex life (especially her affairs, none of which last) and her relations with her friends. The more observant among you will have noticed that the title of Lessing’s novel refers to a notebook not yet mentioned. This only appears near the end, opens by describing Anna breaking free of her then-boyfriend, before becoming that boyfriend’s own novel (a précis is given only), since writing is the catalyst the two use to part amicably. I really liked The Golden Notebook, and I honestly hadn’t expected to. I can see how it might have shocked in 1962 – Lessing is very forthright about Wulf’s sex life – and the sharp criticism of the lives women were expected to live can’t have gone down too well. I expect the communism would be more of a turn-off to twenty-first century readers than the sexual politics. But The Golden Notebook does read like a book ahead of its time. Recommended. show less

Brilliant, complicated, original, occasionally hard going, but always worth it. This is one of the books that made women of my mother's generation see the world in a new way: fifty years on, it isn't quite as shocking and subversive any more — we're slowly getting used to seeing discussions of menstruation and female orgasms in print, and we're not quite as excited about Khrushchev and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU as our parents were. But most of what Lessing has to say about those things still matters, nonetheless.

I was much more engaged than I expected to be by the theme of mental breakdown that runs through the book: from the high praise the book always gets from my mental-health-professional friends, I was resigned to being show more confronted with a lot of unintelligible Freud/Jung/Lacan jargon, but it isn't like that at all. The description of Anna's tottering on the edge of sanity is alarmingly easy to identify with. I was very struck by the way that is woven in with the different levels of fiction in the novel, and by the implied relations of fiction to real life.

Definitely not just an historical document, but a book it's still worth reading half a century later. show less