Books : The Golden Notebook: A Novel (P.S.)
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780061582486
ISBN: 0061582484
Label: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 688
Publication Date: October 01, 2008
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Release Date: October 14, 2008
Sales Rank: 34211
Studio: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
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Product Description:
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 years. 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 relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.
Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Life is too short to spend it reading this tedious stuff unless you enjoy self-conscious, talky books in which nothing much happens.
Rating:  -
This is a difficult book to review in a short essay. First published in 1962, The Golden Notebook is both a path-breaking work that anticipated many of the concerns of feminists while also mirroring some of the attitudes that still hold women back. The narrator of the novel is Anna, an ex-communist who struggles with psychosis (described though not named), a seemingly endless procession of meaningless sexual liaisons with men, and is mother to a pre-pubescent daughter. Anna's life is filled with turmoil: doubt, self-recrimination, rage against the universally feckless men who use, betray, and leave her, are joined to Anna's abiding concern about the fate of common people and the global threat of nuclear war. She is not mindless--far from it. She is aware that she must not repress her emotions, but is run ragged by the intensity of her experiences.
It is easy to see the appeal in all this. Less appealing is her attitude towards homosexuals (the word used), who are mentioned in three parts of the book, always as predators upon and haters of women. She is concerned to get her homosexual renter out of her flat because she worries about a bad influence on her daughter...who is fond of the young man. Anna wants to be sure that her daughter will get "a real man" when she grows up. If you wonder what a real man is, it seems to be someone with whom a woman has vaginal orgasms. Yes, that's explicit in Lessing, as she is also explicit that clitoral orgasms are inferior. ... Read More
Rating:  -
I bought a book. I received the book that I ordered. It arrived promptly, by mail, in excellent condition.
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Interestingly, most of the eye-popping concepts of Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying" (1973) seem to be touched upon by this 1962 publication.
Four notebooks are the concentration of this novel. After meeting Anna and Molly outside of the notebooks and their review of their respective children and former spouses, we go through the colorful journals: black notebook (African experience in youth); red notebook (years in communism and falling out); yellow notebook (about heroine Ella who is a mixture of Anna and Molly); and the personal diary kept in the blue notebook. Each has its own story, own style and own purpose.
The greatest theme throughout the book is inequality: blacks in Africa; women everywhere; rich bourgeoisie against working people - Communism's core. Molly and Anna are born privileged but female. They have a bone to pick in spite of their economic advantage. They are active participants in Communism. This revolution was important to their characters as well as the author because, as the yellow notebook's fictional man tells its protagonist Ella, "My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution - they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men."
And amid the revolutions is universally acceptable incognizance. "If we had ears that could hear, . . .the air would be full of screams, groans, grunts and gasps. But, as it is, there reigns over the sunbathed ... Read More
Rating:  -
My book club chose this book. Otherwise I don't think I would have made it through the entire 600 plus pages. The story was depressing and the main character seemed depressed and jumping into bed with whomever she happed to meet. The story jumped between people and the notebooks the author (main character) was keeping. Was not an enjoyable book.
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