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The Golden Notebook

3.72 of 5 stars 3.72 · rating details · 6,923 ratings · 651 reviews

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 p...more

Paperback, 576 pages

Published 2007 by Harper (first published 1962)

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Nov 18, 2012 Petra X rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: crap-authors-and-books-i-loathed

Given up because although it was well written and the characters developed well early on, I just have no interest at all in the upper middle class who have angst and money instead of housework and jobs. Who pontificate about sex and politics and other people's affairs when the rest of the country were out working and thinking of who was cooking dinner that night and whether or not tuppence on the tax each week was going to make school trips a bit difficult. Just not what I want to read about rig...more

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Mar 27, 2011 Fenixbird SandS is currently reading it · review of another edition Recommends it for: women, men, relationship-interested

Recommended to Fenixbird by: NY Times Book Review

Shelves: nobel-prize-winners, controversial-innovative, disabilities-fiction, cultural-awareness, womens-issues, rights-of-passage

Setting 1950's London. "Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. Yo...more Setting 1950's London. "Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.' "
— Doris Lessing Introduction (The Golden Notebook)

Just starting this book...which was written after her wonderful look (from a mid-life crisis talented woman's viewpoint) The Summer Before the Dark." On the cover of my dated paperback copy (1968), her book earlier work, The Golden Notebook, is promoted.

Quoting NY Times Reporters on author Doris Lessing's recent Nobel literature prize: "Ms. Lessing’s strongest legacy may be that she inspired a generation of feminists with her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook.” In its citation, the Swedish Academy said: “The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship.”

Ms. Lessing wrote candidly about the inner lives of women and rejected the notion that they should limit their lives to marriage and children. “The Golden Notebook,” published in 1962, tracked the story of Anna Wulf, a woman who wanted to live freely and was, in some ways, Ms. Lessing’s alter ego.

Because she frankly described anger and aggression in women, she was attacked as “unfeminine.” In response Ms. Lessing wrote, “Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.”

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Oct 04, 2010 Weinz rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Weinz by: Jessica Treat

And thus ends my summer of "I am WOMAN". Having read only female writers for the last four months (with a momentary departure for Dostoevsky) I feel I have rid myself of the phalocentricities of my normal reading. An egotistical misogynist cleansing.

**warning, teeny tiny spoilers... but not really... but kinda**

This novel is similar to other revolutionary books of the past (On the Road is the first one that comes to mind) I think that we have progressed beyond its original shock value. Its orig...more And thus ends my summer of "I am WOMAN". Having read only female writers for the last four months (with a momentary departure for Dostoevsky) I feel I have rid myself of the phalocentricities of my normal reading. An egotistical misogynist cleansing.

**warning, teeny tiny spoilers... but not really... but kinda**

This novel is similar to other revolutionary books of the past (On the Road is the first one that comes to mind) I think that we have progressed beyond its original shock value. Its original revolutionary ideas and message have been used, reproduced and regurgitated onto film in abundance. At one time I can see Lessing's message in this novel as something revolutionary. A voice, until then, unheard of. Whereas now, it has the tired message of the past. A message that's significance has lessened or become obsolete.

At times in the novel I relished in Anna's words, in her emotions and her ideas only to watch this strong intelligent woman make the same "stupid woman" mistakes over and over with the same outcome every time. Is this indicative of the same struggle a lot self-reliant women go through? She values herself as an independent woman but routinely followed the same destructive path with men as her emotional crutch. Consistently picking the men that would keep her exactly where she was and never taking a step further into the unknown. She fell into a stagnant comfort zone of complacency.

As a divorced mom to three I have gone through my own journey in discovering what it really means to be a woman in our time; an independent free thinking woman of our time. I understand the conflicting feelings of feminism and vulnerability mixed with autonomy and doubt. Because of this it was painful to see Anna, a witty intelligent woman depend so much on the validation of men. Relying on the attention of men that, inherently she knows, are emotionally and physically unavailable. Anna's process of introspection is one I'm familiar with and use daily, her notebooks. The book itself was philosophical through journal writings and personal ramblings that comes to its own conclusions and absolutions by the end. Which is probably another reason I didn't not connect with the way this book concluded. I understood the reasoning behind Lessing's ending but disagreed.

Well written and worth the read.

Now back to the misanthropic readings I love so much. (less)

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Mar 02, 2010 K.D. Oliveros rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Shelves: 1001-core, nobel

This most is the influential and most talked-about 1962 novel of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, Doris Lessing. She was the 11th female who received the prize and the oldest (91 y/o) person ever to have won it.

Reading this 634-page dense novel was not a easy thing for me. There were times that I wanted to put it down and create a new shelf "Started But Not Finished" or probably "To Be Continued Someday." However, I have a promise to myself to finish all the books I started. So I k...more This most is the influential and most talked-about 1962 novel of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, Doris Lessing. She was the 11th female who received the prize and the oldest (91 y/o) person ever to have won it.

Reading this 634-page dense novel was not a easy thing for me. There were times that I wanted to put it down and create a new shelf "Started But Not Finished" or probably "To Be Continued Someday." However, I have a promise to myself to finish all the books I started. So I kept on reading. I made the right decision! I had an amazing time especially in the last 50 pages of the novel.

The format is a feat that is novel in itself: the main story inside the story is entitled Free Women and it is divided into several parts. Then each part is further divided into one of the 4 "notebooks" that the main protagonist, Anna Wulf, writes or has written: black (about her life in Africa), red (about her life as a communist in Britain), yellow (her scrapbook as a novelist) and blue (her diary). She even creates an alter-ego make-believe character, Ella present in the black notebook. Then there is the golden notebook which presents the theme "Breakdown." That notebook serves to be the synopsis of the 4 wherein the two main characters, Anna and her American lover Saul both wrote its entries as they share their love without hindrances and pretensions that explains the theme: breaking down the walls.

So, what is the story all about? Just like most appreciated novels, it depends on how you look at it. I agree with what Ms. Lessing wrote in her 1971 Introduction:

... that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when it is plan and shape and intention is not understood, because the moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn't anything more to be got out of it.

And when a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author - then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside...

For me it is about: sex war, communism in Europe in the 50's and mental illness. In the first, it is said to have influenced the Women's Liberation during the post WWII era. In the second, I had a heyday learning about the spread of Communism in Europe in the 50's. Here is where I knew that there was a C.P. (communist party) in Great Britain during to years (or maybe up to now). Although communism is becoming thing of a past or shall I say, it is changing its face, it is nice to know what happened during those years. In the third, the novel can just be seen as populated by insane characters. The insanity here is not the mental institution type. It is about passion to survive, to be happy and to continuously hope despite the odds.

One nice short quote for those who still have valentine hangover: "Love's the same the world over."

I will always remember this book. This is my constant companion as a search for cure for my two completely torn ligaments due to the badminton accident that happened to me in the evening of February 23, 2010. As I lay in the surgeon's operating table tomorrow, I will keep in mind the beauty of this book - especially on insanity.(less)

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Feb 17, 2008 Sherry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classicscorner

There are so many things to talk about in this book, that I almost have brain freeze and don't talk about anything. I have to say, though, that I've never read anything that I remember having so much to do with the idealistic beginnings of the Communist Party. It's almost like people were even afraid to write fiction about it or they would be blackballed.

There were two introductions in my edition, one from the seventies, and one from the nineties. I read them after I had finished and found them...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Stela rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone

Recommended to Stela by: Llosa (!)

Shelves: neo-modernism, reviews

While living under Ceausescu's regime, in those days that even today I'm not able to remember without a combination of sadness and irritation, I used to be very angry with Western Socialist and Communist Parties that dared continue to exist in spite of the big revelations of the Gulags and the murders and the terror. I was thinking then that the persistence of such organizations could be explained either by a naive and blind idealism nurtured under the wing of a comfortable capitalist democracy...more While living under Ceausescu's regime, in those days that even today I'm not able to remember without a combination of sadness and irritation, I used to be very angry with Western Socialist and Communist Parties that dared continue to exist in spite of the big revelations of the Gulags and the murders and the terror. I was thinking then that the persistence of such organizations could be explained either by a naive and blind idealism nurtured under the wing of a comfortable capitalist democracy or by a pragmatic acknowledgment of such horrors (errors happen!), since to protest against them would signify to deny the success of this ideology - that is, the famous phrase, "The Party is never wrong" had the same power outside the communist countries it had inside them. Both my assumptions were, unfortunately, true, and are widely illustrated in this remarkable novel: in a particularly significant scene, Michael, learning that three friends of him were hanged in Czechoslovakia "... explained, with much political subtlety, why it was impossible that the Party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into 'objectively' anti-revolutionary positions."
Of course, the political idealism isn't the only myth desecrated by Doris Lessing: page after page she proves to us that there is no such thing as liberated woman, free spirit, true love...
Using an ingenious narrative technique, the author uses, apparently, two different voices: an impersonal, omniscient one while telling the story of two "Free Women" - Anna and Molly, but also while explaining or describing the notebooks, and Anna's voice for the four notebooks (black, blue, yellow and red) and also for the fifth, the golden one.
Seeing herself as a "woman of parts", Anna keeps four notebooks that compartmentalize her life in four sections, in a desperate attempt to find a refugee in one of them whenever she feels like failing another.
The black notebook is the portrait of successful-Anna: she had published a novel, Frontiers of War, very well received by the public. Here she keeps a summary of the novel and also the description of some events in her life that inspired it. She records propositions she received to make films TV series, etc., based on her story, that she usually refuses. Some amusing reviews from Soviet papers are also gathered in this notebook, mainly complaining about the lack of revolutionary life in her novel in a parody of the wooden language of socialist countries. The final entry is about a dream she dreamt about a TV film in which she doesn't recognize her story anymore. So the author-Anna ceased to exist, estranged from her work the moment it was finished.
The red notebook shows (of course) the communist-Anna. It begins with her decision to adhere to the Communist Party even if her enthusiasm is somehow shattered by the events in the Eastern Europe: "...while most of the criticisms of the Soviet Union are true, there must be a body of people biding their time there, waiting to reverse the present process back to real socialism." This is an Anna who fights hard to conserve her illusions, despite the evidence of dishonesty, cruelty, terror, an Anna who lies herself (like many others) that Stalin and other communist leaders didn't know about all the murders and abuses because to accept this would mean to admit that there is no such thing as decent democracy (We thought this of Ceausescu, too, for a while, and we were living the dream!). Finally she has to accept the reality, and she leaves the Party because: "... the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience." Therefore, communist-Anna is also an illusion.
The yellow notebook reveals the in-love-Anna who tries to give a sense to her feeling translating it into art. Her story becomes Ella's story, a love-story destined to end just from the beginning because she chose not to see that her relationship with Peter ̸̸ Michael was barren and limited. However, the dénouement leaves Ella ̸ Anna disoriented and not even literature can offer the cathartic liberation: "Literature is analysis after the event.(...) The physical quality of life, that's living, and not the analysis afterwards, or the moments of discord or premonition." So the attempt to ennoble and free Anna by objectifying her feelings failes: "I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not."
Finally, the blue notebook, the hidden-Anna is a diary in which the same problem arises: Anna's true identity and her possible salvation. But the other Annas crowd this notebook as they crowded the others, and the same stories are reanalyzed and the same answers not found. No wonder the last entry talks about a dream of multiple Annas, all menaced to disappear forever.
Like firmly and noisily shut doors, every notebook ̸ chapter of Anna's life closes with a black line: the end of another illusion. And this is where I agree with Llosa - this is no feminist book even if feminist groups tried to appropriate it as such - this is, in fact, a very pessimistic novel about failure on every level: social, sentimental, political.
The golden notebook is the last attempt towards freedom. And freedom seems to be order, and order is Art. "I was faced with the burden of re-creating order out of the chaos that my life had become."
And now the five sections under the title "Free Women" make sense: the impersonal narrative voice could be the writer-Anna's auctorial voice and the narrative structure could be meant to illustrate the complicated relationship between author, narrator and character when the character is the author and the limits between art and life (within the story, though, don't forget this!) are blurred, and the creation is a two-way street from the author creating the character to... the other way around.
As someone says: "There are the two women you are, Anna. Write down: The two women were alone in the London flat.'" There are in fact, at least, three.
(less)

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Aug 20, 2012 Jamie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Jamie by: Gina P.

Shelves: 1001-books, read-in-2010, favorites, field-exam-reading-list, read-in-2012

I finished this one months ago and have put off reviewing it simply by virtue of my astonishment with it. Oddly enough, the first hundred pages were torture; I was about to give it up, but happened to be trapped on a 6-hour busride and had only this novel and a volume of a poet's letters with me at the time. Needless to say, the letters kept me amused for an hour or so, but I ended up pushing through my frustration with the novel, and from that afternoon on, could not put it down. I stayed up la...more I finished this one months ago and have put off reviewing it simply by virtue of my astonishment with it. Oddly enough, the first hundred pages were torture; I was about to give it up, but happened to be trapped on a 6-hour busride and had only this novel and a volume of a poet's letters with me at the time. Needless to say, the letters kept me amused for an hour or so, but I ended up pushing through my frustration with the novel, and from that afternoon on, could not put it down. I stayed up late; I got up early; I read it on the subway, on the commuter rail; in any sort of waiting area; I would be irritated with friends for interrupting my submersion in The Golden Notebook, and came out feeling more or less like Anna Wulf by the end--isolated, a bit uneasy & nerve-wrecked, jittery, perhaps obsessed with pasting the pages of the novel all over my bedroom walls.

By now the details are failing me--what color was the notebook of newspaper clippings? And I know the red one was her Communist journal, but I can't even recall the other colors at all now. What was the crazed American boyfriend's name? And her daughter? Does any of this even matter? Lessing's is a brilliant experiment; it may be one of the only truly fantastic psychoanalytic explorations of a character's mind that I've read. Certainly Lessing seems immersed in 60s/70s psychoanalysis, & I'm not even certain that she's resistant to it, particularly in the way Anna seems to believe a good orgasm might 'fix' some of her central issues. The notebooks so vividly perform the fracturing of her experience and her psyche; some are more compelling than others (I was very pulled in by the African diaries and the Commie ones, others, less so), but all are necessary.

Lessing's prose can be off-putting. It's often monotone, and frequently far too invested in minutiae (which is why I was so uninterested in the first hundred pages--the mini-events that precede the notebooks in each section of the novel make for awful page-turners, though even they make sense, I think, once you're through the first hurdle), but it's worth the effort. It really really, truly is; I wish I hadn't waited so long to write this review, because I feel I'm giving the novel short-shrift in hindsight, but it may have been the best novel I read this year. I'll probably pick it up again during my next break, and will re-review at that point with a defter hand.

2012 Update
Two years later, I've re-read this one at nearly the same season as before, in the inescapable nightsweats of late July and August in Boston's air-conditioning-less heat bubble. I think this must be the only proper time of year to read The Golden Notebook, even though in point of fact, the novel doesn't pay much mind to heat in the present events of its narrative. But I always associate the novel with the scene of young Anna and her compatriots at the Mashopi shooting pigeons and encountering millions of insects fucking. The collision of the animal grotesqueries with the awful cruelty of the characters with the waves of dry heat glimmering in their South African vacation-idyll - this is how I recall the novel, despite the fact that these notebooks take up not a great deal of the massive 700 pages.

The novel has both times taken me a great deal longer to work through than expected, I think in large part because of the absolute wretchedness of the Saul affair in the final 100 pages. Not because it's a bad read, but because Lessing's vision of the relationship is so horrific and abusive and seemingly inevitable or inescapable that it can only be taken in short gasps. So I sped through the first 500 or 600 pages in a few days and then spent nearly two weeks on the last 100.

I am still uncertain how to locate Lessing's understanding of personhood, as she seems to reject both the postmodern dismantling of ontology and the ideological trifles of the mid-century period that are invested in solidifying the subject through one manner (psychanalysis and its privileging of a kind of core ego that emerges in childhood and then bashes up against the dangerous world) or another (the communist understanding of the proletarian cog in the machine, who must retain a level of political and intellectual stasis or standardization in order to "be" what it truly is or should be). It's actually in the Saul affair that Anna and Saul each seem to be more in line with a sort of Joycean postmodernism ("I, I, I, I" rather than "I. I. I.") than with Anna's earlier mockery of such an idea. That's a tangent though, since I'd re-read the novel for my upcoming Lit Field Exams.

At any rate, I just want to spend years with this book. I'm sad it took two years for me to return to it, because it's not only an incredibly complicated and detailed portrait of a broken figure at the center of the 20th century's central conflicts but an absolute delight to read. Having read a few other Lessing novels, I've come to develop a very ardent appreciation for her prose style (which I'd said in my first review was "monotone" or at some level tedious), and this go-round savored every page. I was chilled by innumerable moments and very often moved to tears by Anna's sense of anxiety and desperation - but more importantly, her refusal to let these things irrevocably destroy her.

Required, not recommended, reading. It's tough, but it's well worth the effort. And as I've told friends, if you can get through the first 100 pages, which feel a bit like a chore on the first read, you'll be swept away by all the wonderful rest.(less)

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Apr 01, 2008 Lara rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Lara by: My two mothers

Shelves: women-gender

Like so many others in these days since the controversial awarding of the Nobel prize to Doris Lessing, I am reading 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 thousands of others at the fact that apparently all one must do to receive such honors is to treat women as if they were important and worth thinking about with the same rigor we examine male motives and intr...more Like so many others in these days since the controversial awarding of the Nobel prize to Doris Lessing, I am reading 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 thousands of others at the fact that apparently all one must do to receive such honors is to treat women as if they were important and worth thinking about with the same rigor we examine male motives and introspection. Yet she has habits that annoy me: she makes me wait for physical details – I learn twenty pages in to a conversation that this man is not the chiseled figure I’d wrought from her silence, but rather a stout one with a round face and obstinate brow. I struggle to situate the speakers in a physical plane. She moves them with their dialogue and not their space; is she still on the couch, or isn’t she? I long for setting. I know Lessing is remarkably diverse, writing everything from accidental feminism to science fiction, and yet to me I see the same 5 characters entering and exiting rooms with predictable comments. Perhaps this is what she intends – this may very well be the thrust of her point, these types, these thematic repetitions.

Nonetheless, she is doing something in this novel that I find exciting beyond words. I could feel it coming, knowing before sitting down to read that the novel was a simple story divided up between the private, topical, diary-like notebooks of a central character. I could feel the arrival of the shift in voice as if it had knocked on the door of a scene, waiting to be let in. I stopped at the page I was at and leafed forward, looking for it – there is was, three pages later. I read quickly to get there, relieved that the story as it was crafting itself was not so much a narrative thread as it was an excuse for something else, for something, for lack of a better word, more novel. As Lessing herself writes, “...the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know...One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to try to make it a novel – the quality of philosophy,” (p. 58-9). I could feel the ideas coming, in the form of their own self-conscious doubt.

There is a voice we all have and yet we save. We have public voices, professional voices, voices of lewdness and drunken uninhibited voices, confessional voices, voices used only in bed, quite unrecognizable from those used to direct a taxi or place an order over the phone. We have different voices for when we are resentful or swollen with the false humility of pride. We have voices for children and for the elderly, for the sick or the dangerous or the insane. And sooner or later, other people hear these voices of ours. But there is one that is rarely heard – the diary voice. Already this is disingenuous, because I believe and you well know that, deep down, most diarists write in the hopes that their words will somehow be read, that the things they lack the courage to say aloud will somehow become known, that their undiscovered genius will come to light. Sometimes we make bargains – we agree with Fate to allow our words to find their way to the readers’ eyes posthumously, if need be. Who doesn’t feel misunderstood in her time? Or we find peace in the terrifying ritual of putting words to paper; for the guilty or the tragically unclear, the very act of forming the letters can feel like a death sentence and a liberation. Paper can be crumpled or burnt, marks erased, but writing can never be undone. Once we have written a thing, it seals our commitment even sounder than a spoken vow, for it was once concrete, a solid thing, more than disturbances of air and ear drums. There is a reason why we sign documents as solemn promises of acceptance and disallow many verbal agreements as utterly binding contractual faith. And yet the private performance of journaling brings forth a voice in people that has a bald truth to it, a naked and shivering inability to take an audience into account. Even our diary lies have more meat to them than the most gut-wrenching professional prose, which is always calculated on a certain level for effect.

The shift in Lessing’s work from the novel to the notebook has left me quiet and weeping. In such weakness we reveal such bravery, such moments when something of value is finally uttered between the craft of escapist (and, ultimately, dull,) storytelling.
“I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me:” she writes, as I cry. “- a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life.”
(less)

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Oct 11, 2007 Edan rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I just found out Doris Lessing won the Nobel, and now I feel compelled to explain my one star review of her most famous book.

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 apartment (though I can only imagine us at Kiki's place), to drink champagne and discuss the novel. Complain is really what we did--and then I went home with a champagne headache.

None of us liked this novel, and I...more

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Feb 14, 2008 Gerald rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When I read that Doris Lessing had won the Nobel prize, I decided I should reconsider having laid one of her books aside years ago. The news item said this was among her most celebrated works, so I assumed I'd find the gold I'd missed and delight in having found another literary mentor.

I didn't finish it. And I tried, in several sittings. The main character seems to loathe herself, and her personal relationships range from dysfunctional to downright vicious.

Her memories are fond and fuzzy, and t...more

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Mar 19, 2008 Ruth rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: aborted

I created a new Goodreads shelf, "aborted," specifically for this book (& any future ones that I stop reading). Apparently it's an important novel & has been very influential, but I found it terribly tedious. 126 pages in, I found myself sinking into a foul mood: the characters are minutely analyzed but still feel remote, & the central conflict at that point (the beginnings of the collapse of hope & a sense of purpose among a group of Communist Party members), which would normall...more

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Jun 12, 2007 Kimberly Willson - St. Clair rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Linda

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 and completely remakes herself through her writing. The reader goes through this experience with her, thus Art. When Madonna remakes herself, she goes it alone then looks for a reaction from the audience, thu...more

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Nov 28, 2011 Blake rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: modern-classics

Prior to reading this I gathered from various conversations with various people that it has a fierce power to divide opinion that is ironically characteristic of its narrator who places the different aspects of her life into separate notebooks that precede the conclusive and eponymous final book into which it all pours together. Its critics seem to simplify it and read too much into the feminist passages; whereas Lessing herself wrote as much for the mental healing and creative aspects.

The story...more Prior to reading this I gathered from various conversations with various people that it has a fierce power to divide opinion that is ironically characteristic of its narrator who places the different aspects of her life into separate notebooks that precede the conclusive and eponymous final book into which it all pours together. Its critics seem to simplify it and read too much into the feminist passages; whereas Lessing herself wrote as much for the mental healing and creative aspects.

The story is of a one-time writer in London, Anna Wulf, who finds herself struggling with abandonment and madness, against the backdrop of the 40s' & 50s' disillusion with communism and the daily fears of destruction that are companion to a dark and technologically advancing world. In this state she has found a way to attempt her own rescue through four separately coloured notebooks, each playing in and out of the book's structure that are interspersed with an omniscient narration of her life, with each dividing one aspect of her life off from the others to avoid a chaotic and formless dissolution. Finally, and out of the failure of these divisions, she begins the golden notebook that promises to save her.

This book is not light reading and it is not the kind of exciting prose that thrills you from one page to the next. What it is and secures easily is a darkly intense look at a woman's emotional and intellectual life, which digs at and stresses its reader as much as or more than it entertains. Lessing's kind of honesty is not pretty and it's not without fault, but it has a very unique face that forces confrontation with opposers and does battle well even where it falters.

The final notebook (the golden notebook) contains a notorious fracture that is unprecedented in the foregoing chapters and threatens to overthrow everything we thought we knew, but I think Lessing has done something strong here by not focussing on the postmodern playfulness and instead resting her notes on the instrument rather than the air. For all the daringness of this one trick, she has already ensured that everything the reader needs to take from this book is not capable of collapse.(less)

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Dec 17, 2011 Stacy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Stacy by: Nora Ephron

Shelves: classics, british-lit, feminist

A single mother and writer living in London in the 1950's, middle-aged Anna Wulf keeps four notebooks:

- Black: Her memories of living as an expatriate in colonial Africa in her 20's.

-Red: A chronicle of her political activity, and eventual
disillusionment with the Communist party.

-Yellow: A novel that closely mirrors her own life, especially her love affairs.

-Blue: A personal diary of her life experiences and emotions.

This 600+ page novel is historically significant (as a feminist work) and comp...more

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Feb 18, 2008 Tempest rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the beginning, I read ravenously. At the mid-section, I faltered.

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 frigid.

Anna lives independently. She has published a novel, and lives off of the royalties. She is not married and is a single mother. She is a figure of feminine independence in a society of masculine dominance....more In the beginning, I read ravenously. At the mid-section, I faltered.

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 frigid.

Anna lives independently. She has published a novel, and lives off of the royalties. She is not married and is a single mother. She is a figure of feminine independence in a society of masculine dominance. Yet, by not accepting the social convention of marriage, she is set up to be emotionally ravished time and again. Each relationship she pursues is doomed from the beginning. This speaks less of Anna as a feminist and more to Anna being scared of permanence.

Anna keeps four notebooks that the reader skips amongst. One records her involvement and eventual breakage with the communist party, another records her early experiences in Africa. The last two are diaries; one a fictional account of her life, the other a truthful narrative. In this way, Doris Lessing does away with linear time. The reader weaves between present and past effortlessly. The past informs the present, and the present illuminates the past.

Towards the end of the book, the pages again flip effortlessly. The plots merge into the present, are filtered through insanity to prevent banality. The Golden Notebook ends on a musing of emotional ties, of sanity retained by necessity.

Lessing writes an introduction in which she says that she was not intending to make a feminist novel nor a political one. She wrote what she needed to write and it was the readers that inflected the novel with meaning. I found The Golden Notebook to be interesting both in theory and delivery, but did not think it succinct enough to be truly grappling. The ideas raised by Lessing are intriguing and worth rumination, and the plot is more-or-less engaging. But I was left unsatisfied, wanting something a little more. Perhaps this is because the bravery of writing such a book has dissipated into countless other books positing similar theories and asking similar questions. But, alas, I'm a product of my times. Those diluted copy-cat plots have made their mark upon me. (less)

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Oct 17, 2007 Mimi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Even though I read this book over 30 years ago, I remember how affected I was by its writer protagonist, and her various notebooks. I was a single mom, working and going to junior college, and Lessing's book was one I read in my first "Feminist Lit" course. It inspired me to try writing in various journals: I named one "Rage & Anger," another one "Dreams & Visions," and another "Magic & Madness." There were others, but I eventually went back to one journal when all those spirals were...more

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Barbara Gershenbaum Mimi
I'm with you ...
I have never been here before so I hope it's ok to write an opinion that is at odds with most of the other posts that came before...more Mimi
I'm with you ...
I have never been here before so I hope it's ok to write an opinion that is at odds with most of the other posts that came before Mimi's. So many of you have raised so many terrific questions that go beyond the scope of TGN I find myself not knowing where to start. So I think I'll address the book first: TGN was not Lessing's first book. She had published at least 5 novels and many SS before she wrote TGN. I too read it in a class and was grateful that I had a Lessing scholar teaching the class. I think I would have drowned very quickly if I had not been taught how to read contemporary fiction.

ONe of the major points about Lessing's work adn TGN in particular is that you don't get it in one reading ... it's too complicated, too multi-layered, addresses not only the politics between men adn women and women and women but politics of countries on the verge of blowing up into civil wars ... (remember the scene with the grasshoppers? ... that was there for a reason and if you go back and look at it you will see that it's not about grasshoppers (the metaphor) but about Communism, survival, safety, repopulation, nature welcome and not) [oh geesh I'm preaching ... sorry ... I just have very passionate feelings about this book and Doris Lessing as an icon and someone who broke literary and social ground with all of her writing.)

Just one more thing and then I will go away ...
well two really ... TGN is a frame story ... which is another layer that makes it so difficult ... you are really reading 2 novels at the same time; and believe it or not she wrote all three notebooks simutaneously ... imagine keeping track of all of that in a straight line?

I cried when I heard she won the Nobel. I was afraid she might not live long enough to receive what should have been hers years ago. She took it on the chin when the committee removed her name because of her science fiction series ... but someone there had his head on straight.

I hope this makes some kind of sense ... Mimi I too began different journals and became very sensitive to what I was reading by any writer.

Thanks for getting this far those of you who did.

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Jul 24, 2008 05:31am

Mimi Dear Barbara,
Thanks so much for your insightful response! I was a little surprised to see your comment, as I've only listed 3 books (so far) with Good...more
Jul 24, 2008 12:42pm

Nov 18, 2008 Abeer Hoque rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: i-recommend

I still don't think I got my head around the wrapping conceit that Ms. Lessing used for this book, but I do know that it's the first time I finished a book and started it all over again. I'm halfway through the second read and it's as psychologically brilliant as the first read through. Her introduction alone is worth your time. Of course, it's arrogant to assume that the present has the monopoly on philosophical progress, but I am yet in awe as to how some things (about our consciousness and ne...more

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Mar 05, 2008 Jim rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary

In spite of all the efforts to include issues like the development of the Communist Party in the UK and the liberation of Africa, this still feels like 636 pages of kvetching about men. The basic problem seems to be that married men keep going back to their wives and promiscuous, insensitive men are promiscuous and insensitive.

This book is interesting because it is the signature work of a Nobel Prize winner not because it provides a lot of pleasure. It starts with a successful investment banker...more

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Jun 23, 2008 Eric Muhr rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is too often read as a feminist polemic, or as an exploration of madness, or as an overtly political story (mostly communist). That's not the point. The central character, Anna, an artist with a block, demonstrates through her attempts to keep life compartmentalized (her means of getting at the truth of existence) and a resulting breakdown that madness may be the only path to sanity. After all, nothing less than a complete breakdown is strong enough to tear down our artificial walls an...more

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Jan 03, 2008 Kecia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: All women

Shelves: nobel_laureates, times_100_best, 1001-books

Within a few hours of the announcement that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize I put in my request at the library. Ten weeks later I got my turn. Started reading Christmas day...sneaking away from the family to read the two introductions...oh the brilliance recorded there!

The the disappointment. The first 100 - 150 pages did not engage me...but by about page 200 things began to click. The story began to emerge. The brilliance was suddenly golden. I found a novel dazzling in its scope.

Anna Wulf i...more

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Dec 22, 2008 tish rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I want to add a review before I forget too much, but there is just so much in this book that I'm finding it difficult to summarize. I think it is a brilliant examination of a very particular time in history, and those observations reveal conflict and change and the possibility of something new. The structure of the novel is really interesting and allows Lessing to discuss so many different subjects from the personal to local politics to a changing social order. I have particular questions about...more

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Aug 12, 2011 Siri added it · review of another edition

It's not that I mind reading about feminism, not at all, but this book really didn't do it for me: Not old enough to be an interesting historical insight, but not recent enough to feel relevant in this day and age. It's a bit like having to sit through a dinner with your grandparents, listening to them prattling about how fantastic the post-war years were, cementing to themselves a hegemony that was never as rosy as they remember it.

But digressions aside, The Golden Notebook touches on many subj...more

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Apr 14, 2013 Edwin Lang rated it 5 of 5 stars

I found this a wonderful book: I found the ending and everything and ever development very satisfying.

I was aghast to read in the Preface (which I read after reading the book) that most reviewers had seen the story as primarily one that depicted sex wars. Perhaps a prerequisite to reading the Golden Notebook was to have read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex first. And it was sobering to recall (as I learned, coincidentally while reading the book) that in Canada, in 1973, our Supreme Court –...more I found this a wonderful book: I found the ending and everything and ever development very satisfying.

I was aghast to read in the Preface (which I read after reading the book) that most reviewers had seen the story as primarily one that depicted sex wars. Perhaps a prerequisite to reading the Golden Notebook was to have read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex first. And it was sobering to recall (as I learned, coincidentally while reading the book) that in Canada, in 1973, our Supreme Court – our highest court of law - ruled that women do not have right to a share to property after being married 25 years.

I liked the story, and could appreciate the angst of someone like Anna Wulf, who had succeeded and then seemed to have lost her way. To be so lost seems such a (fragile) gift in our society where individuality counts: that we allow people to go crazy, on their own terms, in the hope that something great might emerge from it, as it frequently done. Today we have become worried about the crazy individualistic psychopaths in our midst preying on the innocents. But I see it as a diversion: one could imagine a Doris Lessing, probably outwardly crazy (and cranky), cranking out this masterpiece.

After finishing the book and thinking over what I thought and how I might rate it, I laughed to think of a sequel that I had wished Doris Lessing had attempted to write: imagine her daughter, exposed to her mother’s free sprit, coming face-to-face with the hippie movement: in 1966 for example Janet would be 21 and probably in University. “Hipster” apparently was coined in the 1940’s and I am sure Anna had been an original, but I would have loved to see Anna’s reaction to her daughter becoming a hippie.

I wish perhaps Ms Lessing might have introduced a good man in the story – we are out there you know! – but perhaps that would have been disruptive to the overall story and damaged its coherence.

I think also that if I had been a Richard this book would have been not only disturbing but nearly incomprehensible. Ms Lessing made one comment (among many, on all topics, of course) that made me stop: she had a character say, a businessman knows only how to do one thing, make money. When you look around at the state of our societies, the growing gap between the very wealthy and not-so-wealthy, countries that are increasingly (insolvent) - sinking in debt, unable to maintain essential infrastructure, seemingly stymied at every turn – and that individuals and companies alike are storing, perhaps mimicking the cartoon Uncle Scrooge, their monies in off-shore vaults, one wonders if making money is really enough, and if perhaps we put too much value on that skill. For example, for all the in-depth coverage and excellent writing found in something like The Economist there is something almost autistic about it.

As I am reading more I have come to appreciate artists in a way I had not done before: I like my authors to be honest, and do not like those that use their books as a platform for example to say it’s all the white man’s fault. I consider Doris Lessing an honest writer, and one who was able to look at society in all its complexity and intrigue. It was interesting I thought, that she mentioned that Anna Wulf, as a practice, submerges herself in newspapers, journals and the like, opening herself again and again, in faith, that society, humanity, is a complex beast, and needs to be understood, and in spite of everything, believing that we are in fact inching the boulder up the mountain, although it seems such an unrewarding, herculean and seemingly prone-to-failure task.

Edwin
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Jan 19, 2013 Holly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Anna Wulf has writer's block. It's 1957, and everything is "cracking up." Lacking a revolution, she's afraid that no one believes in anything. She's written one best selling book based on her past, which she now dislikes; now she records her thoughts in notebooks:

Black: Lengthy flashbacks in first person of her youth in Africa; this echos and refers to her best selling novel and portrays Anna as a young adult
Blue: First person rough version of personal events, a sort of diary and portrays Anna t...more Anna Wulf has writer's block. It's 1957, and everything is "cracking up." Lacking a revolution, she's afraid that no one believes in anything. She's written one best selling book based on her past, which she now dislikes; now she records her thoughts in notebooks:

Black: Lengthy flashbacks in first person of her youth in Africa; this echos and refers to her best selling novel and portrays Anna as a young adult
Blue: First person rough version of personal events, a sort of diary and portrays Anna today; we meet Saul
Red: Views on political events, Communism
Yellow: a draft for a novel about love and sex and how they link to a bigger idea re: aesthetic vision (naivity as freedom, as truth)

Largely this is a book about fragmentation (p241), and this is the genius of it. Realism in literature was a form admired for its structure - realism attempts to portray the world as grasped in its entirety, allowing for moral cohesion. Realism compartmentalizes the world, putting each thing into its place, and this is the block Anna faces as she tries to write something that is true. "I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered w/ an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life" (p59). To compartmentalize makes novelty a threat and doesn't allow for other possibilities - it also leaves out all other perspectives thereby becoming inherently isolated/elite/exclusionary/blind. She knows that people remember things/events (and that she wrote) from nostalgia, and that this is inherently immoral because the longing for the past distorts the truth. She worries that wartime gives people license to refuse to "fit conflicting things together to make a whole" - which one cannot do if they are to live in a time of terrible things. She believes most strongly in the human; realizes that when you write lists of words to describe someone, you find you don't know them at all, that opposite words can also describe them, that lists of words cannot describe someone you understand; and comes to find that words are false, and this from a novelist! Anna's struggle shows the reader the flaws in realism...and, potentially, the beauty or inevitability of modernism.

From wikipedia: "...oppositions are inherent to modernism: it is in its broadest cultural sense the assessment of the past as different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more complex, and that the old "final authorities" (God, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny."

The four notebooks, according to some critics, represent the four directions (i.e. opposing directions, opposites, divergence). These are echoed or mirrored in the four FREE WOMEN sections. The fifth notebook, the golden notebook, and the fifth part, makes a circle. Anna decides to put all of herself in one notebook, the golden one. Symbolically, Saul has already written in it, and he gives her the first sentence for her new novel, "The two women were alone in the London flat" and we find we've been reading it all along.

This is a complex book; I have slivers of paper stuck in various pages throughout where I found what I thought was an important truth/insight, something I believed might get me closer to understanding. I think everyone who reads this book and loves it has found something in it that also obessess them - for me, it was the ideas of personality and what makes people different, the question of aloneness, the discussion of love/sex/relationships, whether people change, whether phases and growth are signs of changing or just aging, why we desire to bucket people, to pinhole them, why that helps us understand and feel better about our relationship and belonging.

My book club didn't like it - you might say hate - mostly becasue of the fragmentation and the difficultly in putting it all together into a whole - they prefer neater packages, and this is very intensely theoretical; maybe reading this book is too intensely personal - I look forward to reading it again a decade or so from now and referring to my 30-somethings opinions.(less)

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Sep 30, 2012 Kiran Watwani rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm not sure if I like this book. I didn't enjoy it, meaning I wasn't entertained by it in the slightest way. But I am glad I read it. Glad of the questions which kept me going till the end in hope of finding an answer. I was depressed by it for the most part, but compelled to read it in the way some women almost enjoy being miserable and punishing ourselves, and of course figuring ourselves out. The book's centre is Anna who is like some of us women who are contradictory creatures, who pity our...more

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Aug 04, 2012 Κατερίνα Μαλακατέ rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

http://www.diavazontas.blogspot.gr/20...

Η Άννα φοβάται μήπως τρελαθεί, η Άννα φοβάται ή και εύχεται πως δεν θα ξαναγράψει ποτέ, η Άννα ψάχνει την ταυτότητά της, ως μάνα, ως συγγραφέας, ως σύντροφος, ως πολιτικό ον. Κι όλα αυτά σε ένα βιβλίο γραμμένο στο τέλος της δεκαετίας του 50, σε μια εποχή που ο φεμινισμός, τουλάχιστον στην Ελλάδα, έμοιαζε με βρισιά. Πάντοτε συμπαθούσα την γιαγιά Ντόρις Λέσινγκ, τα βιβλία της που είχα διαβάσει ως τώρα τα εκτιμούσα, το Νόμπελ δεν το καταλάβαινα. Όμως τούτο εδ...more
http://www.diavazontas.blogspot.gr/20...

Η Άννα φοβάται μήπως τρελαθεί, η Άννα φοβάται ή και εύχεται πως δεν θα ξαναγράψει ποτέ, η Άννα ψάχνει την ταυτότητά της, ως μάνα, ως συγγραφέας, ως σύντροφος, ως πολιτικό ον. Κι όλα αυτά σε ένα βιβλίο γραμμένο στο τέλος της δεκαετίας του 50, σε μια εποχή που ο φεμινισμός, τουλάχιστον στην Ελλάδα, έμοιαζε με βρισιά. Πάντοτε συμπαθούσα την γιαγιά Ντόρις Λέσινγκ, τα βιβλία της που είχα διαβάσει ως τώρα τα εκτιμούσα, το Νόμπελ δεν το καταλάβαινα. Όμως τούτο εδώ είναι τόσο διαφορετικό, τόσο αρχετυπικό στη θεματολογία, τον τρόπο της γραφής, στο συναίσθημα που δημιουργεί, που αξίζει όλα τα Νόμπελ τούτου του άδικου λογοτεχνικού κόσμου.
Η Άννα είναι μια γυναίκα που έχει γράψει ένα μυθιστόρημα που έγινε best seller κι έκτοτε ζει από τα συγγραφικά δικαιώματα. Επίσης είναι μια γυναίκα χωρισμένη, που μεγαλώνει μόνη της ένα παιδί, κομμουνίστρια, που δεν θέλει να γράψει ξανά. Κι όμως κρατά 4 διαφορετικά ημερολόγια, το μαύρο για τη συγγραφική ζωή της, το κόκκινο για τα πολιτικά, το κίτρινο για τα συναισθηματικά και το μπλε για τις λεπτομέρειες της καθημερινότητας. Ένα σωρό θέματα θίγονται στις κοντά 600 σελίδες του βιβλίου, πρώτα το απαρντχάιντ, κι έπειτα ο κομμουνισμός, η θλίψη των αριστερών για τις ελπίδες που διαψεύστηκαν, το Κόμμα, μα πάνω από όλα η γυναικεία μοναξιά. Η Άννα είναι η γυναίκα ερωμένη, αυτή που γαμάνε οι άντρες με τη δική της συναίνεση για να απαλύνουν τα βάρη του γάμου τους∙ που την αφήνουν μετά. Στον αντίποδα γνωρίζουμε κι ένα σωρό από τις γυναίκες που φορτώνονται τα παιδιά στο γάμο, που τους συμπεριφέρονται οι σύζυγοι σαν κατοικίδια, υπηρέτριες και νταντάδες. Μόνο.
Ο τρόπος γραφής της Λέσινγκ είναι ριζοσπαστικός, τα 4 ημερολόγια, λειτουργούν παράλληλα με τη βασική ιστορία της Άννας, πολλά πράγματα τα μαθαίνουμε από το alter ego της, την ηρωίδα των ημερολογίων της, την Ella, που είναι και δεν είναι η Άννα. Ο ρυθμός άλλοτε είναι καταιγιστικός, κι άλλοτε πάλι απελπιστικά αργός. Όμως είμαι σίγουρη πως στις καταστάσεις που περιγράφονται δε θα βρεθεί ούτε μια γυναίκα, 60 χρόνια μετά την πρώτη έκδοση, που να μην αναγνωρίσει σημάδια του εαυτού της.(less)

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Jul 28, 2012 Vibina Venugopal added it · review of another edition

The book first published in the year 1962, during the cold war era.. These were the times when the society was a chaos...Her Red book with her communist interest would have been an obvious choice to have been flirted with the revolutionary communists principles....But she puts forth the details of the member's trepidation and disappointment after witnessing the ugly side of the party...Her maternal instinct towards her children which was the crucial part that kept her alive,though it was alarmin...more The book first published in the year 1962, during the cold war era.. These were the times when the society was a chaos...Her Red book with her communist interest would have been an obvious choice to have been flirted with the revolutionary communists principles....But she puts forth the details of the member's trepidation and disappointment after witnessing the ugly side of the party...Her maternal instinct towards her children which was the crucial part that kept her alive,though it was alarming truth it depicts the crisis of any mid age single woman trying to cope up with no steady relationship and life in itself..The mood shifts are too often that I missed them mostly...I thought her to be daring to discuss about menstruation and orgasm in a period when these things were considered to be a taboo to be in kitty parties let alone in a book...I read in an article that this particular Lessing's work was more of a feminist genre, as I read I understood why ,here goes Anna's thoughts about an Englishman she says that none are real, Those who are real end up to be unfaithful and polygamous, but most men are unsatisfactory-rude to their wives, unable to give pleasure, bullying, selfish, indifferent to their children, eager to marry a younger secretary..But after a point I felt Anna to be irritating reading through her affairs with married men when she clearly knew how it would end up and her mood swing was so often that I ended up sighing....For me it was a let down by a strong character that of Anna still making the same mistake over and over again getting hurt every time...As I started reading the book it picked up pace well but in the middle I lost interest , had to try hard to keep myself reading but then again the reading caught up with the earlier speed and I was glad that I finished reading it...The golden notebook is the "breakdown" of all events from other books.......
To express the inner anger and aggression of Anna so bluntly must have been so unfeminine in those days still she was daring enough to portray her feelings with honesty...Lessing's writing I found it both philosophical yet practical at times...I found her alter ego Ella (one of the character of her novel who is also a writer) very interesting...Anna's life is too messy, too open, irritatingly honest to be loved , yet somehow I liked the freethinker in her .....For me her life in Africa as a writer appealed to me more than her life in Britain as a communist....
50's Europe with all its communism, sex and mental trauma one goes through have all been amazingly woven in her novel and kudos to her for penning an extremely feminine vantage to it..Writing as a book is achievement in itself considering the period when wrote...It is a kind of book I would love to discuss with my friends about Anna and her feelings...This book has made me to add her other work in my reading list...
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Jul 26, 2012 Amerynth rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, fiction, read-2012, depression

I was so disappointed in Doris Lessing's novel "The Golden Notebook"; having recently read and loved her debut novel "The Grass is Singing", I was looking forward to reading her most challenging and well-regarded work. However, I found the 600-page tome to be nothing but a chore, populated by unlikable, selfish characters.

The novel's central character is Anna, a writer, who has been scribbling notes about her life, her politics, her plans for novels and her past work in Africa. She is depressed...more

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Feb 19, 2012 Carmen Neke rated it 5 of 5 stars

El cuaderno dorado de Doris Lessing ha sido siempre un libro polémico, en primer lugar para su propia autora, que se rebela contra la etiqueta de “feminista” que se suele aplicar a esta obra. Nunca fue su intención, afirma, escribir un libro sobre la guerra entre los sexos. El tema de la creación literaria, en cambio, es fundamental en la novela. En el prólogo ya dijo la autora que la elección como personaje principal de una escritora con bloqueo literario fue algo muy consciente, y sospecho que...more

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Jun 02, 2011 Sarah rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I’ll be honest with you – when I read the last line of this book, I thought “Thank God I’m done with that.” The premise sounds intriguing. And it’s hailed as the greatest book to ever capture how women think. So I dove in excitedly. And was horribly disappointed. For the first section, I was overwhelmed with the creativity of it all. The notebooks were interesting and anything about Africa will keep my attention for a while. But after the first 100-150 pages, I found myself dragging my eyes alon...more

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About Doris Lessing

Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Oliv...more Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.

In 1937 she moved to Salisbury, where she worked as a telephone operator for a year. At nineteen, she married Frank Wisdom, and had two children. A few years later, feeling trapped in a persona that she feared would destroy her, she left her family, remaining in Salisbury. Soon she was drawn to the like-minded members of the Left Book Club, a group of Communists "who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read." Gottfried Lessing was a central member of the group; shortly after she joined, they married and had a son.

During the postwar years, Lessing became increasingly disillusioned with the Communist movement, which she left altogether in 1954. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year, she also published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer.

In June 1995 she received an Honorary Degree from Harvard University. Also in 1995, she visited South Africa to see her daughter and grandchildren, and to promote her autobiography. It was her first visit since being forcibly removed in 1956 for her political views. Ironically, she is welcomed now as a writer acclaimed for the very topics for which she was banished 40 years ago.

In 2001 she was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, one of Spain's most important distinctions, for her brilliant literary works in defense of freedom and Third World causes. She also received the David Cohen British Literature Prize.

She was on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(Extracted from the pamphlet: A Reader's Guide to The Golden Notebook & Under My Skin, HarperPerennial, 1995. Full text available on www.dorislessing.org).(less)

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“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” — 822 people liked it

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.” — 64 people liked it

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