The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition [Paperback]

Doris Lessing (Author)

Book Description

Series: Perennial Classics | Publication Date: February 3, 1999

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

Review

"No ordinary work of fiction...The technique, in a word, is brilliant." -- -- Saturday Review

"The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." -- Elizabeth Hardwick, New York Times Book Review

"No ordinary work of fiction...The technique, in a word, is brilliant." -- -- Saturday Review

"The most absorbing and exciting piece of new fiction I have read in a decades; it moves with the beat of our time, and it is true." -- -- Irving Howe, New Republic

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (February 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006093140X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060931407
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #286,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 102 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All the Amazing Notes, March 27, 2001

By 

Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition (Paperback)

The Golden Notebook is Lessing's most well known of her works and with good reason. It is an incredibly complex and layered work that addresses such ideas as authorship of one's life, the political climate of the 60s and the power relation between the sexes. It would be naïve to consider this novel as just a feminist polemic. I know many people have read it only this way or not read it because they assume it is only this. Lessing articulates this point well in her introduction. The novel inhabits many worlds of thought. It just so happens that at the time of its publication it was a very poignant work for feminism. More than any book I know it has the deepest and longest meditation on what it means to split your identity into categories because you can not conceive of yourself as whole in the present climate of society and in viewing your own interactions with people. This obsession with constructing a comprehensive sense of identity leads to an infinite fictionalisation of the protagonist's life. Consider the following passage "I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: `Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a `young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph." She can't attach her own vision of herself to the reality of her life. The two are separated by the ideologies of society which influence her own vision of who she should be.

This novel also captures the political climate of the era, a state of post-war disillusionment with the available models political ideology. They recognise the need for some kind of change, but are unable to envision a model that will work. Opinion is split into infinite personal categories of what government should become. Unfortunately, for all these good things which this novel intelligently discusses, it also has its own shortcomings that the reader should be aware of. Its representation of homosexuality is very limited. It has the unfortunate tendency to envision homosexuality as an idea of being rather than an actual state of being. No doubt, this was influenced at the time it was written by the meaning of being `a gay' as being strongly attached to one's political position. The state of being a homosexual is inextricably attached to the misogynist vision of what femininity should be when it is actually something a bit more complex than that. Though Lessing is able to see through many misconceptions of her era such as the hypocritical actions of people who claimed to be fighting against racism while reinforcing racial divisions, the novel falls a bit short in other areas. Nevertheless, this doesn't prevent it from being a very powerful and enjoyable novel to read.

67 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An interesting mess of a novel, June 23, 2005

By 

A.J. (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition (Paperback)

Intellectual energy is always a healthy attribute for a writer of fiction. Doris Lessing, an incredibly prolific author who has covered many different genres, has plenty; but her early novel "The Golden Notebook" too often sacrifices coherence and focus for ineffective artistic experimentation. That it doesn't have much of a plot is not a deficiency, because many great modern novels have discarded the notion of a necessity for a conventional plot; rather, its narrative power is diminished by Lessing's apparent indecisiveness about the kind of tale she wishes to tell. In one section she writes synopses of about two dozen short stories in quick succession, and we have to wonder why we're looking at blueprints instead of the finished product.

Summarily, "The Golden Notebook" is a work of fiction about the erratic process of writing fiction, and it problematically attempts to intertwine several novels into one. The main story is that of Lessing's alter ego Anna Wulf, who compiles her memoirs, blending the real with the fictional, into four color-coded notebooks of which the contents are revealed in an alternating fashion. Anna, a rising literary star who has published an acclaimed novel called "Frontiers of War" based loosely on her experiences and her circle of friends in Rhodesia where she lived during World War II, now resides in England with her young daughter Janet, drawing income from gradually dwindling royalties while being courted by philistine film producers who propose to adapt and warp her novel for the screen.

Love and sexuality play major roles throughout the multiple narratives, but "The Golden Notebook" is neither sentimental enough to be a romantic novel nor cynical enough to be a satire. Anna's relationships with a string of men, from her ex-husband Max, a German refugee whom she met in Africa, to an aimless American expatriate named Saul, are the basis of her fictional life; she has created an alter ego of her own named Ella, a struggling novelist who has numerous affairs almost exclusively with married men, to be used possibly as the heroine of a new novel. She can be maternal as well, not just to her daughter but also to her older friend Molly's son Tommy, a restless and discontented youth who is forced to endure the physical aftermath of a botched suicide attempt.

A central feature of "The Golden Notebook" is the changing course of Anna's political outlook which begins in Rhodesia. Her abhorrence of the "color bar"--the racist policies of white European colonists towards blacks--in southern Africa and her observations of the poverty of the workers steered her towards Communism. As it turns out, the British Communists with whom she associates are a muddled and disorganized group, inveterate liars and prevaricators with utopian delusions; but Anna's eventual decision to leave them arises more from her disenchantment with their attitude that art should be used only for political purposes and not to express personal ideas or emotions. This is anathema to a creative writer such as Anna, as it should be; "The Golden Notebook" is Lessing's defiant response to that dictum.

Were I to describe "The Golden Notebook" accurately as remarkably original, uniquely structured, overflowing with a multitude of literary thoughts, and driven by fascinating impulses, you might think it a book worth reading; but in fact I hesitate to recommend it to anybody but an avowed Lessing fan. When Saul asks Anna why she keeps four separate notebooks, she answers that "...it's been necessary to split [her]self up," and therein lies the trouble--the reader is made to suffer for Anna's narrative schizophrenia. I am unsure whether "The Golden Notebook," so energetic but so disjointed, is too much or not enough of whatever it is that it wants to be, but it is definitely not the correct amount.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Complex and Intense: Lessing's Ulysses, January 8, 2008

By 

J. E. Robinson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Golden Notebook : Perennial Classics edition (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing's most complex work. It is generally hailed as a pioneering novel on male-female relationships and places her among the great writers of novels. It uses overlapping stories, each slightly similar to the prior, starting with a fictional writer Anna Wulf, her story, and the stories she writes.

Doris Lessing (1919 - ) is the 2007 Nobel Prize winner in literature. She has a score of novels and many other works. The three novels including The Golden Notebook (1957), her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950), and The Summer Before The Dark (1973) are considered to be her representative works. I read those three.

In many ways the novel is incoherent, and it takes some patience to read all 634 pages. I had to take one break after page 200. It was all a bit too intense. She uses a complex narrative technique to outline three or four different main stories featuring different sets of characters. Some characters or similar characters appear in many pieces, i.e.: a character Ellen in one story is similar to Anna in another. There must be at least 100 stories, some very short.

The central protagonist is a writer, Anna Wulf, and she draws on five notebooks for her story about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, The chaotic and disjointed form of the novel is supposed to reflect Anna's mind. As pointed out by other critics, there is no "single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience."

As I post this review, I have read three of Lessing's novels from three different time periods in her career and have taken out another four from a library which I am in the process of reading. This is her main work - of her 30 or 40 longer works - and it contains the strong feminine perspectives, dialogues, analysis, and commentary that is associated with Lessing. One could say that these are the trademark writing styles of Lessing. I bought this novel and it has an excellent introduction by Lessing.

Having read The Grass is Singing (1950), her very first novel, I found that the present novel is far more complex. The Golden Notebook is a series of stories within a story and it is 600 pages long.

I liked the book and would recommend it. It is not a simple read. It took me a week to read it and I could not read it in one go. The Summer Before the Dark is a much easier read and can be read in an evening or so and contains some similar ideas. But to get a full appreciation of Lessing, one must read the present novel.

I have never read anything similar, and the novel must place Lessing among the geat writers of novels.