false 24100 36 Much to its author's chagrin, <I>The Golden Notebook</I> 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, <I>The Golden Notebook</I> has retained a great deal of power, chiefly due to its often brutal honesty and the sheer variation and sweep of its prose.<p> 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 <I>Free Women</I>, 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.<p> 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." <p> <I>The Golden Notebook</I> 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. <I>--Melanie Rehak</I> 99441 book 1962 The Golden Notebook total:1826|5:571|4:546|3:396|2:200|1:113| 1826 6740 3925 324 0 4 true false Sun Jan 25 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Oct 14 14:54:39 -0700 2007 Thu Nov 05 00:32:11 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 3 false false Tue Feb 12 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Dec 13 05:37:17 -0800 2007 Sun Feb 17 08:23:26 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 3 false false Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Mon Mar 03 16:54:25 -0800 2008 Tue Apr 01 02:39:30 -0700 2008 The Golden Notebook. I read another novel of hers last month, The Sweetest Dream, and I have to admit, I am not wild about her prose. I enjoy it – I smile bitterly along with thou...more...]]> 4 4 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Feb 26 08:16:23 -0800 2008 Thu Apr 24 07:09:11 -0700 2008 more...]]> 1 2 false false Wed Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2005 Tue Jul 10 15:16:39 -0700 2007 Thu Oct 11 09:20:01 -0700 2007
My gal pals and I read this over the course of a humid Iowa City summer, as part of a short lived and ill-conceived book club. We met once a week in a different ap...more...]]> 2 3 false false Sat Dec 15 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Thu Feb 14 09:11:44 -0800 2008 Thu Feb 14 09:21:33 -0800 2008
I...more...]]> 1 4 false false Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Jan 27 18:13:25 -0800 2008 Wed Mar 19 13:57:41 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 1979 Tue Jun 12 09:34:01 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 12 09:35:05 -0700 2007 The other great Sufi writer, Doris Lessing, makes more sense to my world view in regards to how she breaks the atom so to speak in The Golden Notebook. This book changed my life the first time around in graduate school at American because the main character disintegrates through her writing an...more...]]> 4 2 false false Sat Feb 07 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Thu Jan 08 20:20:30 -0800 2009 Sat Feb 07 11:51:53 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 1 false false Mon Feb 18 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Fri Feb 08 11:57:44 -0800 2008 Mon Feb 18 10:37:36 -0800 2008
I began to tire of the endless procession of married men and the affairs the main character, Anna, had with them. The men seemed to sing the same tune, of wives important to them socially but sexually and emotionally f...more...]]> 5 2 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1974 Wed Oct 17 21:28:36 -0700 2007 Wed Oct 17 21:42:24 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 1 false false Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Feb 29 23:13:15 -0800 2008 Tue Nov 18 12:01:25 -0800 2008 more...]]> 2 1 false false Tue Mar 04 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Wed Mar 05 16:59:35 -0800 2008 Wed Mar 05 17:17:10 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Mon Jun 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 03 08:17:39 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 23 20:59:02 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 2 false false Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Thu Dec 27 11:23:59 -0800 2007 Thu Jan 03 07:29:04 -0800 2008
The the disapp...more...]]> 5 1 false false Mon Dec 22 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Nov 10 04:36:59 -0800 2008 Mon Dec 22 08:40:51 -0800 2008 more...]]> 2 0 false false Wed Jan 07 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Jun 07 02:19:37 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 07 02:27:17 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Dec 20 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 16 18:30:01 -0800 2008 Sun Dec 21 08:06:44 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Sun Nov 09 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Oct 18 17:42:51 -0700 2008 Sun Nov 09 16:36:18 -0800 2008 more...]]> 0 1 false false Mon Jan 28 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Jan 07 06:43:32 -0800 2008 Mon Jan 07 06:43:32 -0800 2008 if i had read this book some other time, perhaps with a group or w...more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=103142