The Golden Notebook: A Novel

I belong to a book group of highly literate, intelligent older women, some of whom are themselves writers and teachers, all with strong social and cultural concerns. Though a few of us had read some Doris Lessing years ago when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature we decided to read and discuss one of her works. It was my month to lead the discussion and I selected her most well known work, The Golden Notebook.After reading about sixty pages of this 640 page volume, I knew that I being the leader would probably be the only one of the dozen members of our group who would plow through to the end. Lessing is a fine writer, her descriptions make things come alive, her sensitivity to the terrible social injustices in Africa, the arrogance of the young, and the atrocities of the group think of Communism are extremely well portrayed, but the complete self absorption and lack of compassion or caring for any individual other than herself, becomes extremely tiring and truly boring, to the point that I wanted to shout--"Come on, get a life." I too, was a thinking adult in 1962 (the date of the books original publication), and yes, there was horrific social and racial injustice, terrible selfishness and stultifying patriarchal and cultural stratification, in many places there still is, but everyone else in this world is not all bad. Please, please, please show some humanity. Have you no sympathy, no empathy? Sexual liberation is one thing, but emotional balance is lacking. Love in this book is only gratification of one's own desire. Maybe this is the point of the novel. To show the basic self absorption of someone who is trying to buck the system. To show the evils of the world. After all, Lessing wrote that true art was to expose the depths of pain. Perhaps. But I believe there is something to be said for art that uncovers beauty in a broken world.In this work Anna, the protagonist, wrote her different colored Notebooks to demonstrate the fragmentation of her life. But her inability to get beyond herself did not hold my interest or empathy and though I agree that Lessing is extremely talented and obviously dedicated to creating literature to depict the way she knows the world, I am saddened that hers is one of cynicism despair. In this novel the gift of golden notebook at the end seems contrived and unconvincing. If life to Lessing means nihilistic terror into nothingness, she has captured it in her art.

I had read the golden notebook years ago and thought it was a wonderful story. Now about 40 years later my insight into the story is vastly different. The story was fragmented more than I remember and difficult to read. I think it’s interesting that I actually remembered a large part of the story. I recommend this book if the reader is looking for a challenge. Also, it made me realize how being a woman is much simpler in 2020 than in the 1970s.

I finished this book several weeks ago. I understand it was important when it was published in the 1960's. Feminists greeted its frank description of menstruation and sexual intercourse as great leaps forward in the process of liberation. This male thought it was TMI. If that's liberty no wonder so few people want it.I was impressed however by Lessing's description of the failure of Communism. I appreciated the disillusionment and despair so many true believers felt as they ignored horror stories from Stalinist Russia. It was heartbreaking. They hoped that our Original Fallen State could be overcome with better organization and motivation.There are many Americans who still believe "education" can overcome drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and suicide. Their optimism is not very different from that of communist sympathizers. They deny the reality of concupiscence, that innate tendency to sin which corrupts every human endeavor. The effort itself is corrupt.The book ends when Anna Wulf gives up her quest to be an artiste and assumes her quotidian duty to mother her daughter. She surrenders her individuality and becomes a person at last. It would be wonderful if she learned through the experience to be a person who writes.

Doris Lessing's real achievement in this book, I think, was simply in her matter-of-fact her handling of controversial matters (controversial in the period between World War II and the sixties, at any rate). She writes about the life of a divorced woman with a child, her relationships with that child, with her best (woman) friend, with her lovers, her comrades in the English CP, her body, the political world, etc., in ways that are remarkable for their straightforward candor. At the time a woman writing about her day-to-day life would be likely to either write in circumlocutions to avoid being indelicate or else be deliberately provocative. Lessing does neither of those: she simply tells the truth as she sees it. Which, in a repressed society, is itself a revolutionary act. That's not all there is to the book, not by a long shot, but that's what stood out for me on first reading.

I admire Doris Lessing's style and prose. With that, yes, I enjoyed the book. The detail, insight, frailties and humor are wonderful. I stopped short of five stars - my opinion only - because I would have preferred a shorter version. The author, however, makes no apology and rightfully so for it's length. I would recommend this book to young men and women who want to validate their own emotions and understanding of relationships, and to older women and men to better understand where their relationships have taken them. I am now ready to read more of Doris Lessing and her wonderful style.

A lot of info about the post war(WWII) European life of those middle class people involved in politics. Lots of discussions about politics of the time, attraction, sex, parenthood, friendships, jealousy, ambition. All the topics that Nora Ephron learned from as she was growing up. Valuable lessons; I'd have loved to read this book as an young teenager. Now, as an older woman, I've heard it all.

For the first 50 pages or so I was on the verge of giving up with The Golden Notebook - it just seemed so dull and dated, without a clear narrative or an engaging prose style. But I'm glad I persevered. To some extent, this is a novel to be enjoyed in retrospect. A lot of the early "work" (on behalf of both Lessing and the reader) is done to set up a series of reinterpretations of it which follow.The novel is structured into third person narration sections called "Free Women": it is the late 1950s and old friends Anna and Molly, both middle aged single parents with a history in the Communist Party, have lengthy "intellectual" discussions with each other about the current states of their lives. In later sections some dramatic action does occur, in a stagey sort of way.But the real meat of the book is in the Notebooks which come between these sections. They've been written by Anna over a long period and provide lengthy glosses, reinterpretations and bits of background to the "current" events of the Free Women sections. It is in the fragmented and self-referential stories which emerge (slowly, over the course of the novel) in the notebooks that the structure and cleverness of The Golden Notebook reveals itself.Lessing explicitly places herself in the tradition Thomas Mann and the big discursive novel of ideas. Her language is often dated and stagy, the dialogue is more in the form of political debate than naturalistic speech and (with the exception of the flashback to Africa), there is little sensuality (you don't get a sense of place, images and sense impressions are few and far between - it really is very cerebral). But her structure is clever, and she uses it very well to construct an impression of Anna's fractured state of mind, and the fractured state of the world she's living in.

Doris Lessing died in November last year, aged 94, with more than 50 published novels and a Nobel Prize for Literature to her name. And at that time I hadn’t read anything she’d written. (Actually, now I’ve typed it I’m beginning to think I might have read one of her novels for a tutorial at University. But as I can’t say for sure – let alone name the book – it doesn’t really count*.) So where better to start, I reasoned, than with her seminal 1962 novel The Golden Notebook?The central character is best-selling novelist Anna Wulf. The events of Anna’s ‘real’ life and those of her actress friend, Molly, are told in sections entitled “Free Women”. These script-like narratives are interrupted by extracts from four notebooks that Anna uses to record her life. The Black Notebook records her experiences in Rhodesia before and during WWII, on which her best-selling novel is loosely based, and also her rejection of proposals to film the book. The Red Notebook records her experiences as a member of the Communist Party and her sensitivity to international conflicts. The Yellow Notebook is a fictionalised account of the recent breakdown of Anna’s relationship with her married lover. The Blue Notebook is Anna’s personal diary/journal.In the preface to my edition Lessing notes that the most important theme in the novel is fragmentation. Anna notebooks are her attempt to separate her life into compartments – writing, politics, love, and emotions. Inevitably she is unsuccessful. Events ‘leak’ from one notebook to another; they overlap and interact. Her continuing attempts to order and segregate are both a symptom and a symbol of her mental breakdown that progresses as the novel unfolds.After reading Anna’s notebooks Molly’s son, Tommy, blinds himself in a failed suicide attempt. He becomes an ominous presence, all-knowing and judging, like some twenty-something Tiresius. Anna’s own decline accelerates as she begins a sexual relationship with her new lodger, a schizophrenic American called Saul. Her disintegration is played out against the wider fragmentation in the book. Men and women, spouse and lover, black and white, gay and straight, conventional and bohemian, capitalism and communism, communism itself, nation and citizen, the family and the individual – art and life, even: everything is at odds, splitting and splintering into opposing factions.The final section of the novel sees Anna reject her four notebooks in favour of a single notebook, the Golden Notebook of the title. The Golden Notebook would seem to represent her attempt to conquer her illness – to literally “pull herself together” – but her decline continues. Saul’s departure and the anticipated return of her daughter from boarding school do hold out the promise of future healing, though.I’ll admit, I found it a hard novel to get into but once I’d tuned into the voices of the various sections, I was hooked – until I reached the final, Golden Notebook, section, that is. The title made me think it would be a reworking what had gone before in the four notebook sections, drawing together their disparate strands and making Anna whole again, somehow. Perhaps that was too simplistic an expectation, but I can’t help but feel it would been more satisfying than Anna’s acceleration into madness, which became a bit...err...(dare I say) boring.*Reading through a list of her works, Martha Quest seems to ring a bell. But the point still stands.For more reviews visit whatcathyread.wordpress.com

A goldmine for those theorists, but Lessing suggests we just read it for the sake of it. And it moves seamlessly from one subject to another. A rare thing. Some quite brilliant passages and also boring tedious ones. Must have been shocking reading in 1962 and is still cringe full today.

Don’t buy this edition ( published 1972) . It’s font size is very small and the pages are bound nearly to the edge. You have to physically hold it open to be able to read it so it’s uncomfortable. There are 575 pages.I don’t criticise the seller, it was sent quickly in good condition. The book won the Nobel prize for literature so it should be good. But I don’t think I can get through it! I am reading it with a group and will be interested to hear how the others are doing.

I have been intending to read more Doris Lessing for - well, years really! There are always so many other good reads and so little time! I started this book, became hooked, but was still reading another which I had to finish also. Returned to the Notebook, found I could not remember all the characters so began again. Now they are all firmly in my head. And off I go again. Words and realisations resonate, she passes subtle messages of encouragement or chastisement which are thought-provoking. I love her writing style, I have seen her speak on the media and can, when I read her work, hear her speak again. Her influence goes on. Thank you Doris Lessing.