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The Golden Notebook
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The Golden Notebook
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The Golden Notebook
Audiobook27 hours

The Golden Notebook

Written by Doris Lessing

Narrated by Juliet Stevenson

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, it was brought to a wider public by the Nobel Prize award to Doris Lessing in 2007. Authoress Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive ‘golden notebook’ which draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook: sources of her creative inspiration in a black book, communism in a red book, the breakdown of her marriage in a yellow book, and day-to-day emotions and dreams in a blue book. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s. In this authentic, taboo-breaking novel, Lessing brings the plight of women’s lives, from obscurity behind closed doors, into broad daylight. The Golden Notebook resonates with the concerns and experiences of a great many women and is a true modern classic, thoroughly deserving of its reputation as a feminist bible. A notoriously long and complex work, it is given a new life by this – its first unabridged recording.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 1, 2010
ISBN9789629549404
Unavailable
The Golden Notebook
Author

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.

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Rating: 3.7030488241463417 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing First let me say that I cheated a bit and listened to this 27 hour audiobook and that part was a mistake. It made the divisions in the story more difficult to understand and I ended up going back and getting the ebook to make sense of it afterword.
    The book hit me much like Madame Bovary did back when I read it first but I understand the problem now and can honestly say that I see why it is considered a feminist classic and how it contributed to the body of work that eventually won Doris Lessing the Nobel Prize in Literature.
    The book is incredibly problematic in many ways right from the start. The point of the book though, is the introspection into the four notebooks where the main character looks at all the ways in which the bubble of her life as an upper middle class white heterosexual in the society of England just afte WWII is problematic. While I'm sure problematic would not be the word Lessing would have used at the time, this is where we've come in looking at books and feminism and all the intersections of life. As part of this, there is also a diversity problem throughout. Nevertheless, we do get to see some people who still have representation issues and though the characters aren't treated well, it's a part of the book that the main character spends time writing in the notebooks about her treatment of them, her feelings about it, and sometimes debating other tactics. None of this makes her noble, but it definitely makes the book ahead of its time. For the record, it was originally published in 1962, which is a year before The Feminine Mystique. Along with the aforementioned notes about people, she also takes a long and introspective look at her life, her role in society, the way society treats her and the things expected of her by everyone.
    Like I said, it was a book ahead of its time. It's problematic in many aspects right from the start but the point is looking at her life. For me, that makes the nature of the problems a part of the plot and not an afterthought or something the writer neglected to care about. The whole point is seeing for yourself if you are a racist or sexist or hetero-sexist.
    Some minor spoilers ahead.
    To elaborate on what I was getting at above, this book is great in that it so well explains that plight of women in several walks of life during it's time. The part that bothers me is intricate to what makes it great. It's so true.
    Yes, it gets quite complicated and it may be difficult to understand what I mean by that in a review and I did think at first that maybe it was just me and I just really identified with the women the story is about. But it's not. I know that because I also get the ebook, as I mentioned above, which has two introductions that were written by the author, one in 1993 and the other in 1971. She has received enough fanmail and letters stated this that I know I'm not alone in that.
    What I mean by the "plight of women" is that there are things that we all know happened back in the time that this book was made that we like to gloss over. We watch old movies where men say things that we would not consider a compliment if said now and the women laugh and then we laugh as if it's okay because those aren't real women anyway, right? Well, many of those very things had to be a part of the culture, it only makes sense when it pops up in, literally everything made in the time. Let's go ahead and add in the feeling that there is a requirement to have sex with a guy who buys you dinner now, let alone in a time before the Women's Liberation movement.
    So yeah, what made me squirm as I read the story wasn't that I didn't like it as a masterful piece of work with a beautiful prose that just makes you feel what the characters feel, but the idea of living and breathing in that world terrifies me. A lot. Like, A LOT. It's not Hunger Games level, but it's not necessarily far off either.
    I grew up knowing that there were lots of women around me that felt like they had to just be happy with the man they married despite affairs and poor treatment because they were unemployable and he was a decent provider for their kids. And just like with some of the men here, it was her kids, not their kids together. These guys don't feel anything for their children, they aren't a part of their lives. Having kids was a favor they did for the women they kept all but chained to the house. Now, don't get me wrong, house-wives are great. It's the idea of a man looking at his housewife as if she exists as a burden to him and having children with her solely to give her life meaning because he won't "let" her do that by any other means or because she feels bound by society to make that the meaning of her life that I have a problem with.
    Part of what makes this so clear is that the book itself isn't about a housewife, it's about a serial mistress. She doesn't want to be married. I don't want to spoil all the details of why and her circumstances, but this gives us the window through which we get to see these men. Married men in pursuit of her as their girl on the side and then we get to walk through her thought process and whether or not she wants to sleep with them and whether or not she does in spite of desire but out of obligation. All of these things leave her in positions that I would loathe finding myself in as well as most of the other women in the book. Before I get accused of making the distinction, though I don't think it should be necessary, I do understand that this is her circle and the people she finds herself around. I'm sure there were plenty of perfectly happy marriages with men who didn't sleep around. This book isn't about those marriages or those men.
    What makes it a truly interesting book despite all the things that terrify me is that what makes the plot move along is Anna's introspection that is brought on by her notebooks. She has written a successful book and is compartmentalising in an effort to find adequate inspiration for a new book. Her introspection makes her take a second look at everything, even the most menial, repetitive, or normal things. For example, she mentions washing up several times a day while on her period and changing out her tampons. She doesn't just mention it but thinks on how it makes her feel, how it effects what happens throughout the day that she has to take this extra precaution.
    The commentary on communism is an interesting one that I've never really heard before. It makes sense to see it in the beginning as something hopeful on that level but I love that it is also broken down into people and how people can so easily break a concept like communism. My dad once said (and he was probably quoting but he's my original source) that communism is a great idea until you add people to it. I remember working to figure out what that meant and realizing that it does sound like it should create a better world, then later realizing that some greedy people will always come along and destroy it all. This, of course, was well after the Cold War ended and that cat was out of the bag. I'm sure I was watching something that mentioned something about it.
    Due to her experience in Africa and the nature of her first novel, Anna does also get introspective about racism and even colonialism. The plot of that first novel would be considered very problematic these days and she realizes it in the book and spends some time on why and how and what she could have done differently but that it would not have sold that way. No one would have believed it or wanted to see it if she had told the real truth.
    I found her dreams toward the end with the projectionist interesting. I had a similar, though different, experience recounting events in my life as I had started to become better versed in feminism these last few years and started to see all the little ways that I had bought into internalized misogyny. I had been a girl who said that I wasn't like other girls because I genuinely didn't like many other girls at the time. The list of faux pas from back then goes on, but the introspection was an important part of it. It's a little jarring when you sit down to it, at least it was for me and I appreciate that it was equally so for Anna.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Op zich is de structuur van dit boek: een doorlopend verhaal, doorsneden door fragmenten van de 4 notitieboekjes die de hoofdpersoon bijhoudt, best een leuke vondst. De afwisseling van dialogen, introspectie en externe beschrijving maken het geheel redelijk goed volgbaar. En de thema's: de door Lessing zelf zo vermaledijde "sex war", het ambigue engagement binnen de Communistische Partij, en de moeilijke strijd van het hoofdpersonage voor haar mentale gezondheid, zijn zeker de moeite. Maar toch: het geheel overtuigt me niet en af en toe zat ik te denken: wat langdradig. Lessing weet alleszins de moeilijke verhouding tussen mannen en vrouwen en de problematische omgang van individuen met de werkelijkheid goed in de verf te zetten, maar ze doet dat op een te gekunstelde, te geconstrueerde manier.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I found this book initially very difficult to read. The first notebook went on and on. I remember thinking to myself that I couldn't possibly read it. However, as it is considered a 'must read' I forced myself to persist and I am really glad I did. Still current and insightful all these years later.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Anna the novelist writes in four notebooks, one of which (yellow) is a novel about a novelist, Ella.I think many people find this book self-absorbed or over-analytical. That seems to me the story that is being told: a woman who has essentially divorced herself from her own creativity cannot stop sifting through her life for meaning. Each notebook looks futilely for a different kind of meaning.I like the black notebook best, which I doubt is uncommon. It's ostensibly about money and the profession of writing, although everyone ends up associating it with Africa, the setting of Anna's first novel. There's interesting stuff going on in the black notebook — the stories about Zimbabwe are very compelling, and yet Anna dislikes them intensely because of the nostalgic feeling. It's sort of like reading Conrad with a postscript at the end letting you know that he's well aware of all that "dark continent" cultural undertone he's tapping into and he finds it sickening. And then there's Anna's attitude about the publishing business, here shifted onto the TV/movie adaptation business. Again, it's compelling — the hostility is bare in an almost-awkward way.If The Golden Notebook were being written today, I'd expect the blue notebook to come in 140-character installments. Obsessive diary-writing is one cultural phenomenon that we have definitely not left in the 20th century :)
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    “What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.”Anna Wulf is a divorced single mother, former communist and one time successful author living in London in the late 1950’s. Anna’s marriage had been brief and lacked any emotional intimacy but had produced a daughter for which she is thankful. Anna has had other relationships since her divorce, invariably with married men, which never last. Anna wrote a best-selling novel called 'Frontiers of War' based on her time in Colonial Africa during WWII and is centred around a group of young, white, idealists. The proceeds from the book has enabled Anna to buy a house in London for her daughter and herself with room for a tenant. When her daughter decides that she wants to go off to boarding school Anna's days lose their structure. Meanwhile, the proceeds from her novel, her main means of financial support, are drying up and unable to get past her crippling writer's block Anna fears that she is slowly sinking and losing her mind.Anna has only one close friend; Molly, a minor actress who like Anna is a single mother and a former Communist. Like Anna Molly is supporting herself and her son using the fickle income of an artist. Unlike Anna Molly is still in touch with her child's father but this only causes rancour as the two parents constantly bicker over how the child, a teenage boy, is being brought up. Anna is often the go-between for them, a further source of stress that she doesn't need.'The Golden Notebook' is quite conceptual in its writing style and is told with a shattered narrative making this quite a difficult read. We read the story of Anna in two main forms. The first is a fairly standard third-person novella called 'Free Women' which is divided into five parts. The second is a first-person narration by Anna that comes in the form of her notebooks – she has four of them. In the black notebook she writes about her writing life, in the red notebook about her political life, in the yellow notebook about her ‘emotional life’ and in the blue notebook about everyday events. Essentially, Anna’s note keeping is a form of self-therapy.Like Anna, at the time of writing, Lessing was also a divorced single mother, a disillusioned communist, and the writer of a best-selling first novel set in Colonial Africa during WWII (The Grass is Singing) meaning that this novel is largely autobiographical. Lessing is adamant that she did not set out to write a ‘feminist’ novel yet Anna and Molly are twowomen who enjoy a certain sense of liberty, certainly compared to previous generations, yet still feel trapped and do not enjoy the same freedoms as men. Both are single mothers whom married men see as likely mistresses rather than anything more permanent.After about 50 pages I was about ready to throw in the towel and give up, I felt that it was boring. But I persevered and even on completion I'm still unsure whether or not I made the right decision.I became quite invested in the story of 'Ella and Paul' (found in the black notebook) but had to remind myself that they are ‘fictional’ since they are characters in Anna's published novel. This in turn made me question what of 'Free Women' should I trust? Nor did I particularly enjoy the segments in the blue notebook where Anna slips into stream-of-consciousness. There are some very fine passages but I found it patchwork, complex and confusing. I also have to ask whether or not this novel has aged well or was it very much of its time? Not only has the political situation moved on but I like to think that female emancipation has too but then maybe I'm simply the wrong sex.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    At the center of The Golden Notebook is Anna. To understand The Golden Notebook is to understand the four sides of Anna. Author of four colored notebooks, Anna is a reviewer of her experiences and travels in Africa (black covered), a questioner of communism and her role in politics (appropriately red covered), an author writing a descriptive autobiographical novel (yellow covered), and a diarist expressing her undying love for an American author (blue covered). In an attempt to organize all aspects of her life, Anna strives to combine all four notebooks into one golden book called "Free Women." Drawing from her own life, Lessing knew she had to change some details in the Golden Notebook, but to this day, readers are left asking themselves, exactly how much of Golden Notebook was still the autobiographical truth?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The best book to listen to. Stevenson is enthralling. Lessing magnificent.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I don't really know what to think about this book, but I can tell you one thing - it's a book that refuses to be summed up by a one-sentence description. Instead, here's a list of some of what it's about: friendships between women, Communism, single motherhood, sexual mores, psychoanalysis, writing, suicide, marriage, British colonies in Africa, race, class and gender divides, British vs. American tendencies, insanity, independence, love, losing faith in a cause, losing faith in oneself, public vs. private faces. Oh, and apparently it is supposed to be some sort of feminist touchstone, although Lessing says she didn't write it with that intention and I didn't personally read it that way myself.I seesawed frequently between being intrigued and being bored. There's no doubt that Lessing's writing is engaging, but it didn't overcome the subject matter of some sections for me. I am not that interested in reading 50 pages on the future of Communism in the wake of realizations that Stalin was a monster. I'm not that interested in reading 3 pages of headlines that our main character, Anna, has clipped from newspapers and pasted into her journal. (Those 3 or 4 pages *felt* like 50 to me.) The structure of the novel was intriguing, although I admit I didn't entirely get it until near the end - I have no idea if a reader is supposed to have picked up on it before that. My attention was held by the relationships between Anna and the major players in her life - her friend Molly and Molly's ex-husband, Richard, and their son, Tommy. Anna's relationship with her daughter, Janet, had some moments and expressions of emotions that any parent will recognize. Anna's relationships with men and her reflections thereupon were like the rest - sometimes interesting, sometimes so much tedious navel-gazing and justification.Recommended for: anyone who wanted confirmation that bohemians are just as miserable as anyone else, people who think eating your vegetables before getting dessert makes dessert more rewarding, people with more patience for abstract whining and over-analyzing than me. Quote: "She seems to me so fragile that I want to put out my hand to save her from a wrong step, or a careless movement; and at the same time so strong that she is immortal. I feel what I felt with sleeping Michael, a need to laugh out in triumph, because of this marvelous, precarious immortal human being, in spite of the weight of death."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Some bits were fascinating - but I found others dull and some very irritating
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It's difficult to capture the complexity of a 568-page elaborately structured novel in a few paragraphs. Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing's fifth novel was a departure from the realism common in 1962 when it was published. Anna and Molly were best friends sharing the common bonds of divorce and single parenthood. Both flirted with Communism and became disillusioned. The core of the book, "Free Women," is presented in five segments interspersed with lengthy entries from Anna's four journals. The 'free' in the title is ironic because the women are failed feminists who are still controlled by the need of men in their lives. Free women are not so free after all!This is a soul-searching book. Anna is obsessed with self-analysis in order to create calm out of the chaos of her life. She spends much time undergoing psychoanalysis by the perceptive "Dr. Sugar" who tries to make sense of the dreams that are replacing the words that have begun to fail her. Bad news for an author, even one with writer's block. It seems that compartmentalizing her life experiences in separate notebooks is part of the problem, not the solution.The four notebooks of different colors represent the disintegration leading Anna towards the mental breakdown that just might give her "a new kind of strength". One of the strengths of the book is the sense of hope lurking in the background of darkness and depression, although the reader has to dig deeply to find it.The Golden Notebook is not an easy book to read because of its fragmented style. The fragmentation of narrative reflected both the crises in Anna's life and the changes in society during the mid-1950s. There is much to ponder in this book for the careful reader who wants to learn more about the effects of communism in England and the awakening of women's struggles to be equal with men. Anna may be complex but she's not unique. She is an intelligent, creative person with self-destructive tendencies, which might describe many of us. Whether or not you relate to Anna, you will find that Lessing has created a deep and memorable character to represent the postwar upheaval that led up to the craziness of the 1960s.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Big thick book. Bigger than I usually read, but I was committed after not very many pages. About the novel, about politics, about women and men. The structure was fascinating, the way the different parts of the book talked about one another. I read Lessing's introduction maybe three times and found it deeper each reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    More of a 4.5 really, because of a few issues. However, I'm still fairly certain this is a masterpiece. Review to follow.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Anna the novelist writes in four notebooks, one of which (yellow) is a novel about a novelist, Ella.I think many people find this book self-absorbed or over-analytical. That seems to me the story that is being told: a woman who has essentially divorced herself from her own creativity cannot stop sifting through her life for meaning. Each notebook looks futilely for a different kind of meaning.I like the black notebook best, which I doubt is uncommon. It's ostensibly about money and the profession of writing, although everyone ends up associating it with Africa, the setting of Anna's first novel. There's interesting stuff going on in the black notebook — the stories about Zimbabwe are very compelling, and yet Anna dislikes them intensely because of the nostalgic feeling. It's sort of like reading Conrad with a postscript at the end letting you know that he's well aware of all that "dark continent" cultural undertone he's tapping into and he finds it sickening. And then there's Anna's attitude about the publishing business, here shifted onto the TV/movie adaptation business. Again, it's compelling — the hostility is bare in an almost-awkward way.If The Golden Notebook were being written today, I'd expect the blue notebook to come in 140-character installments. Obsessive diary-writing is one cultural phenomenon that we have definitely not left in the 20th century :)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wonderfully shattered narrative.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I gave this book a three, but that was because I couldn't decide whether to give it 1 or 5. I loved the whole premise of a British communist "free woman" with South African past. I absolutely loved the Mashopi Hotel story line. I loved the idea of different note books to reflect different personalities. However, it was soooo long! I couldn't put it down in the beginning but in the end I couldn't wait for it to finish. I found in the end of the book a lot of passages were repetitive and didn't carry too much extra information. In the end, I'm glad I've read it but I don't think I will re-read it or recommend it to anyone

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It took me a little while, but once this book started clicking for me (thanks largely to Juliet Stevenson’s narration of the audiobook), I couldn’t get enough of it.This is not an easy book, but keeping track of the different notebooks and storylines is so worth it. Beautiful and very quotable. It deal with a lot: feminism, communism, Africa, mental health, marriage, friendship, and more. The format of the book can be a bit challenging, but I really connected with it. This quote speaks to me, as a 40-year-old reader who probably wouldn’t have appreciated this book nearly as much when I was younger: ‘Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.’I gave the book 4 stars.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Over the years, I have read bits and pieces by Doris Lessing. I liked those works – a lot. But something held me back from a full on committal to her novels. Then I read an article about her work, which praised The Golden Notebook as her masterpiece. I had tried to read it three decades or so ago, and I could not get into it. This was one of my earliest deployments of “The Rule of 50.” About Twenty years ago, I tried again, but I got no further. About a month ago, I decided to try once more. Unfortunately, my copy of the book had disappeared. I bought another copy, and the new one had an introduction by Doris. This detailed look into her life, her writings, and her philosophy open wide the doors of understanding. This time I was determined to read the entire The Golden Notebook.Doris May Lessing had an amazingly interesting and widely varying life. She was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer, and short story writer. She was born October 22, 1919 in Kermanshah, Iran, and she died in London November 17, 2013. The introduction to my newest copy of the book has an extensive introduction to the novel. I do not recall whether or not my original copy had the Intro, but I found it to be most helpful in digging through the layers to an understanding of her, her life, and her worksAs my readers can imagine from the introduction, this novel will be a challenge; however, readers interested in writers, philosophy, politics, and fiction will be rewarded with an amazing experience. The story revolves around four journals Doris kept from a young age. The journals were green, blue, red, and black. Each deals with a different aspect of her life – politics, a memoir, her written work, and a diary. She then took these four books and wove into them a story of two women. Anna is a character who seems a lot like Doris. Anna is a writer, and she is telling the story of Ella, who seems a whole lot like Anna and Doris.Some of her paragraphs go on for well over two or even three pages. If you delve into this wonderful and amazing novel, take some serious concentration pills, a pencil, and note book paper. Here is a sample of a conversation between Anna and Saul, her then current love interest. Lessing wrote, “‘you can’t go on like this, you’ve got to start writing again.’ // ‘Obviously if I could, I would.’ // ‘No, Anna, that’s not good enough. Why don’t you write that short story you’ve just told me about? No, I don’t want all that hokum you usually give me—tell me in one simple sentence, why not. You can call in Christmas cracker mottoes if you like, but while I was walking about I was thinking that you could simplify it in your mind, boil it all down to something, then you could take a good long look at it and beat it.’ // I began to laugh, but he said: ‘No, Anna, you’re going to really crack up unless you do.’ // ‘Very well then. I can’t write that story or any other story, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me.’ // ‘Who? Do you know?’ // ‘Of course I know. It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F.L.N. Or Mr. Mathlong. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren’t you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?’” (609). I also noticed some references to other characters and story-lines. I has pleased to read of a character who reminded me of Martha Quest, the title character in her first of four novels in the Children of Violence series. Reach beyond what you usually read, and stretch you reading skills with The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. 5 stars--Jim, 2/8/17
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I admit it, I had thought this would be extremely hard-going. I’d read a couple of Lessing’s other novels and not been taken with them – and even if the first book of her sf quintet, Canopus in Argos Archives, Shikasta, felt to me like being beaten about the head by Ursula K Le Guin. The Golden Notebook, Lessing’s most celebrated novel, I expected to be a bit of a chore – especially given its 576 pages… So I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was an engrossing read. I’m only glad I read it after writing All That Outer Space Allows, as some structural elements of my novel might well have changed and in hindsight I’m not convinced they’d have been improvements. The Golden Notebook is a novel titled ‘Free Women’, about Anna Wulf, writer of a single successful novel based on her years in Africa during WWII, who is now living in London. She is also a communist. Between Sections of ‘Free Women’ are Wulf’s notebooks – black, red, yellow and blue. In the black notebook, she describes her time in Africa – on which her one published novel, ‘Frontiers of War’ (and which I kept on mis-thinking as Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War) was based – and later, her life in London. The red notebook details Wulf’s politics and her interactions with the Communist Party. The yellow notebook is a fictionalisation of Wulf’s own life, title ‘The Shadow of the Third’, in which Wulf’s part is played by a woman called Ella. And the blue notebook starts out as a diary, but at times is more of a scrapbook, filled with newspaper cuttings. The five narratives, despite covering similar ground, don’t actually confuse The Golden Notebook‘s story, they actually deepen it and successfully show different aspects of Wulf’s character – as a writer, as a communist, her sex life (especially her affairs, none of which last) and her relations with her friends. The more observant among you will have noticed that the title of Lessing’s novel refers to a notebook not yet mentioned. This only appears near the end, opens by describing Anna breaking free of her then-boyfriend, before becoming that boyfriend’s own novel (a précis is given only), since writing is the catalyst the two use to part amicably. I really liked The Golden Notebook, and I honestly hadn’t expected to. I can see how it might have shocked in 1962 – Lessing is very forthright about Wulf’s sex life – and the sharp criticism of the lives women were expected to live can’t have gone down too well. I expect the communism would be more of a turn-off to twenty-first century readers than the sexual politics. But The Golden Notebook does read like a book ahead of its time. Recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this when I was a young woman and was profoundly influenced by it. I had a paperback edition which disappeared long ago, much to my chagrin, and I am very glad to have a digital copy of it. It is much how I felt when I was in romantic relationships, and it is profoundly political. You can't help but admire this deep and complex book.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Op zich is de structuur van dit boek: een doorlopend verhaal, doorsneden door fragmenten van de 4 notitieboekjes die de hoofdpersoon bijhoudt, best een leuke vondst. De afwisseling van dialogen, introspectie en externe beschrijving maken het geheel redelijk goed volgbaar. En de thema's: de door Lessing zelf zo vermaledijde "sex war", het ambigue engagement binnen de Communistische Partij, en de moeilijke strijd van het hoofdpersonage voor haar mentale gezondheid, zijn zeker de moeite. Maar toch: het geheel overtuigt me niet en af en toe zat ik te denken: wat langdradig. Lessing weet alleszins de moeilijke verhouding tussen mannen en vrouwen en de problematische omgang van individuen met de werkelijkheid goed in de verf te zetten, maar ze doet dat op een te gekunstelde, te geconstrueerde manier.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the most magnificent
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is an immense, dense novel about a lot of things: identity, sexuality, feminism, communism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism. At times, the various notebooks become entangled, and the nature of the story is challenging to suss out. Also, after awhile, I got tired of Anna's sex life falling into a tired pattern. The novel was interesting in some spots and rather fusty in others.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals” page 385.Still under the effects of the inebriating The Brothers K, I thought the best way to overcome a book hungover was to get drunk again. Reckless and foolish, I know.My head still spinning around and my heart wrenched into a tight ball as I write these lines. “The Golden notebook” is not a kind book.It has challenged my patience and tolerance with its apparent non direction. I have even despised Anna, the narrator of the story, thinking her naive, selfish and snobbish.But being a woman who dwells in constant contradiction, I have irrevocably fallen under the spell of Lessing Anna’s radical voice. A woman, writer and mother who says the unsayable, thinks the unthinkable and puts it all down in her notebooks in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.Four Notebooks pouring with self contempt, full of disillusionment, tolls for searching clues in her past in order to reconcile her unbearably miserable present.The black recalls Anna’s youth in wartime Rhodesia, her initial involvement with the Communist Party and how her early experiences served as material for her later successful novel. Also a retrospective insight in which Anna can’t neither recognize herself nor her ingenuous expectations on women’s independence and liberation.”What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing so well the complexities behind them?” page 115.The red portrays her political doubts with shocking power and blistering honesty, threading radical exploration of communism together with Anna’s growing need for truth-seeking rather than political ideology.I found her growing estrangement with The Party especially poignant when she starts feeling dubious about ends justifying means and the cynicism of some “comrades”.”Yet why do I have a home at all? Because I wrote a book I am ashamed of, and it made a lot of money. Luck, luck, that’s all. And I hate all that – ‘my’ home, ‘my’ possessions, ‘my’ rights. And yet come to the point where I’m uncomfortable, I fall back on it like everyone else. Mine. Property. Possessions.” page 356The yellow notebook was the one that struck me the most but at the same time also shined out with unexpected recognition. Anna’s futile effort to write as a third person, naming her creation Ella, in an attempt to distance herself from the inadequacy and constant failures of her relationships with men reminded me strongly of D.H. Lawrence’s reflections on sexuality, morality and motherhood.Anna’s reaffirmed feelings of independence reacting against the vanity, egoism and insecurities of her usually married male partners contrast with her constant displays of traditional female behavior (expecting to stop being the mistress to become the wife). It all sounded so real and sincere to me that I felt Anna’s sufferings and sorrows as my own.“I am unhappy because I have lost some kind of independence, some freedom; but my being ‘free’ has nothing to do with writing a novel; it has to do with my attitude towards a man, and that has been proved dishonest, because I am in pieces.” page 283.Finally, the blue notebook appears as an accurate account of everyday life where intertwined switches of mood, rambling thoughts and semi-deranged descriptions of dreams become a crude testimony of existential doubts.”But-isn’t there something wrong with the fact that my sleep is more satisfying, exciting, enjoyable than anything that happens to me awake?” page 217.Defragmented pieces of unconsciousness create the most truthful and frightening image of a woman who questions the different versions of herself to find her long lost wholeness.Doris Lessing addresses the conflicts between the maternal and erotic life, of the difficulties to conduct a career, or at least to try to, while raising a child, of the letdown that comes along with exploration of political ideologies, of the hardships of facing a mental breakdown, of the frustration of being a liberated woman but still be dependant on a masculine presence in her life. And she does it all looking at the reader straight in the eye, without blinking.And don’t get me wrong, I don’t see Lessing as some sort of personal feminist hero, I don’t think that is the point. But then, as now, being in my early thirties, this novel has helped to steer me towards knowing which questions to ask and which answers are better left unsought.Everything. Life, love, death, the myriad beings buried deep inside me. Everything has become Golden clear. Because there has to be a crack in everything so that the light gets in.The failures and inadequacies of my past.The bleakness of my upcoming future.The beauty and the futility of it all, so worth the effort.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Golden Notebook - Doris LessingThis novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation; claimed Lessing herself in an essay written in 1971, nearly ten years after The Golden Notebook was published and which serves as a preface to the 1993 edition, but I can understand how it might have been interpreted as such back in the early 1960’s. It is like many of her early novels drawn from her own life experiences, so much so that it seems autobiographical in places. ‘“Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures and emotions - and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas - can’t be yours alone”Doris Lessing - essay1971The subject of the book is Anna Wulf who is a forty something woman living in Earls Court London with her young daughter, she is living on the royalties of a successful novel. She is divorced. She spent the first thirty years or so of her life in Africa (Zimbabwe or perhaps South Africa) where she was a member of the communist party. She is suffering from writers block and although she might not admit it; the need to find a man with whom she can have a loving relationship. She feels adrift and although she has a number of affairs she is lurching toward a severe depression. Her inability to start a new book has coincided with her rejection of the communist party (CP) which has been her ideological and social base for most of her adult life. In an attempt to break out of the downward spiral she starts to write about her feelings, history, day to day events together with an imaginary novel based on current experiences in four separate notebooks. Lessing uses Anna’s notebooks as the basic structure for her novel, linking them with a narrative story called Free Woman which charts Anna’s progress through this painful period of her life.The notebooks hold nothing back and if at times this reader thought he was wading through seas of menstrual blood then this is exactly what was important to Anna Wulf at the time. The notebooks present an intimate picture of Anna’s life and as she is a single parent coping with the social culture of the early 1960’s (where women are second class citizens and as such their sexual life is to be used and abused by men who are in a position to take advantage), she is not afraid to write about her own needs, both as a women and as a politically aware person. She goes to bed with men as and when it feels right for her to do so, there is no shame and no recriminations. She does not spare her vitriol on the men who cheat about their emotions, those that use their dominant position in society to get what they want and she meets or hears about quite a few of those, therefore it is not surprising that The Golden Notebook was/is seen as a cause celebre for women’s liberation both by women readers who felt the same way and by male critics who may have felt emasculated. However Lessing was writing a novel about one woman’s feelings at a certain point in her life, the book is very subjective it is not a clarion call for anything and although many of the men appear weak and unworthy much the same could be said for the women in Anna’s life. Lessing has claimed that her book has been misinterpreted that it’s main subject was the disintegration of Anna Wulf, her descent into near madness at a time when the things that were important to her were also falling apart; for example her inability to get past her writers block, the meltdown inside the British Communist party, her fears for a world under the shadow of the H-bomb and the future of her child as well as her need for love. The disintegration is represented by the four notebooks where the only way that Anna can cope is to compartmentalise her life, but they are not the answer as they lead to more fragmentation as issues and stories from her past appear and reappear in different forms. This is a book that will speak to many people, because of the rawness of it’s emotional content and Lessing may well be right in saying that when an author writes truthfully about herself then others will see their own lives partly reflected. I think that this is why the book does not quite hold together in the way that Lessing wished at the time, because readers were too busy identifying with the characters and failing to see the bigger picture. This may be still true today as for many people times have not changed all that much, but this is not Lessing’s fault. It is certainly not her fault in the way that the book is structured, because its last fifty or so pages are a passionate account of one person’s mental breakdown. Lessing writes imaginatively, saving some of her best prose to describe Anna’s dreams as they become confused with her reality. This writing prefigures some of her writing in her later science fiction novels. It is very effective here. The Golden Notebook is the final notebook in which she writes about her affair with Saul Green, a man who's seems to be suffering from a multi personality disorder. Perhaps it is progress for Anna that she now has only one notebook and even more progress because she can give it away, but when Saul leaves as Anna knows he must taking some strength from their relationship, Anna is once again left with her problems. She still has work to do….A Book that is passionate and powerful and once again mines the authors own life story for much of it’s content. Perhaps it is too powerful for it’s own good, because it does not quite come together for me, but then again that is one of its major themes and so it may be Lessing being more clever than I think she is. Anyway this is an important book for what it says about a brave and independent woman battling against the culture of her times which threatens her very sanity. Plenty of us will find in those intimate details of Anna’s life much to think about and so 4.5 stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book explores the Communist Party, relationships, treatment of women in society and mental illness. Although there are amazing insights into membership in the Communist Party in the'50s and the male/female dynamic, the book seems disjointed, often hard to follow and, at times, somewhat boring. The author's feminist viewpoints are amazingly current considering they were written over 50 years ago. I expected the contents of the four notebooks to be more clearly defined bringing it all together into a cohesive "Golden Notebook". That didn't happen.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This was a must-read during my later years in college when feminism was just getting started. Not just in Women's Studies courses (which were JUST getting started) but friends would press it upon you. So I read it, but I don't recall liking it that much. Maybe this is another one I should take another look at.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I love Doris Lessing, but I admit that when I first read the Golden Notebook (about..40 years ago) I found it slow going and fascinating both. I've always thought Lessing was a great writer who now and then had editors who fell asleep during paragraphs or something.
    It's a pivotal book in the women's history shelf, if only to get a glimpse of how it was back in the day.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My wife was unsure about this because 'the author is too obviously a communist'. My reading of this brilliant novel is quite different. Yes of course only someone with direct experience could write from such an insider perspective, but the perspective of the novel is deeply sceptical about communism as indeed about many other things. Don't read if you don't like women (or wimmin); but otherwise don't miss it!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Brilliant, complicated, original, occasionally hard going, but always worth it. This is one of the books that made women of my mother's generation see the world in a new way: fifty years on, it isn't quite as shocking and subversive any more — we're slowly getting used to seeing discussions of menstruation and female orgasms in print, and we're not quite as excited about Khrushchev and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU as our parents were. But most of what Lessing has to say about those things still matters, nonetheless.I was much more engaged than I expected to be by the theme of mental breakdown that runs through the book: from the high praise the book always gets from my mental-health-professional friends, I was resigned to being confronted with a lot of unintelligible Freud/Jung/Lacan jargon, but it isn't like that at all. The description of Anna's tottering on the edge of sanity is alarmingly easy to identify with. I was very struck by the way that is woven in with the different levels of fiction in the novel, and by the implied relations of fiction to real life. Definitely not just an historical document, but a book it's still worth reading half a century later.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Have decided to give this 4 stars in the end; it's a book that I loved and hated at the same time, and yet it really speaks to me, so 4 stars it is...I really liked Lessing's writing; though I found the first part a bit hard to get into, I really got drawn in by the second part and very much enjoyed her style. I also really liked how the separate books discuss different aspects of Anna's life, and yet all come together and are intricately connected to eachother.I think Lessing touches upon some very important issues in this novel, and though it sometimes gets somewhat long-winding, I generally think she makes good points in her discussions. She discusses racism and inequality, feminism and relationships, capitalism and communism, and the emptiness of modern life with great detail and some great thoughts that leave you with something to ponder.What made me hate the book though, was the overall negativity: it seems like Lessing's world is a pretty hopeless place, where men and women are always fighting and happy marriages don't exist, and where capitalism is terrible, but communism really isn't that great either, and where prejudice and discrimination abounds. Though in some cases I agree with the points she makes, it gets rather depressing, and I think she often gets a bit too negative...