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| The Golden Notebook: A Novel (P.S.) | 
| Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (29 reviews)
Sales Rank: 16723
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 688
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.7 x 1.6
ISBN: 0061582484
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780061582486
ASIN: 0061582484
Publication Date: October 1, 2008
Release Date: October 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.
Amazon.com Review
Much to its author's chagrin, The Golden Notebook instantly became a staple of the feminist movement when it was published in 1962. Doris Lessing's novel deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, a sometime-Communist and a deeply leftist writer living in postwar London with her small daughter. Anna is battling writer's block, and, it often seems, the damaging chaos of life itself. The elements that made the book remarkable when it first appeared--extremely candid sexual and psychological descriptions of its characters and a fractured, postmodern structure--are no longer shocking. Nevertheless, The Golden Notebook has retained a great deal of power, chiefly due to its often brutal honesty and the sheer variation and sweep of its prose. This largely autobiographical work comprises Anna's four notebooks: "a black notebook which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary." In a brilliant act of verisimilitude, Lessing alternates between these notebooks instead of presenting each one whole, also weaving in a novel called Free Women, which views Anna's life from the omniscient narrator's point of view. As the novel draws to a close, Anna, in the midst of a breakdown, abandons her dependence on compartmentalization and writes the single golden notebook of the title. In tracking Anna's psychological movements--her recollections of her years in Africa, her relationship with her best friend, Molly, her travails with men, her disillusionment with the Party, the tidal pull of motherhood--Lessing pinpoints the pulse of a generation of women who were waiting to see what their postwar hopes would bring them. What arrived was unprecedented freedom, but with that freedom came unprecedented confusion. Lessing herself said in a 1994 interview: "I say fiction is better than telling the truth. Because the point about life is that it's a mess, isn't it? It hasn't got any shape except for you're born and you die." The Golden Notebook suffers from certain weaknesses, among them giving rather simplistic, overblown illustrations to the phrase "a good man is hard to find" in the form of an endless parade of weak, selfish men. But it still has the capacity to fill emotional voids with the great rushes of feeling it details. Perhaps this is because it embodies one of Anna's own revelations: "I've been forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguiseable private emotion. Even in translation there is no mistaking these lightning flashes of genuine personal feeling." It seems that Lessing, like Anna when she decides to abandon her notebooks for the single, golden one, attempted to put all of herself in one book. --Melanie Rehak
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| Customer Reviews: Read 24 more reviews...
 Complex, courageous, reactionary, jarring November 24, 2008
This is a difficult book to review in a short essay. First published in 1962, The Golden Notebook is both a path-breaking work that anticipated many of the concerns of feminists while also mirroring some of the attitudes that still hold women back. The narrator of the novel is Anna, an ex-communist who struggles with psychosis (described though not named), a seemingly endless procession of meaningless sexual liaisons with men, and is mother to a pre-pubescent daughter. Anna's life is filled with turmoil: doubt, self-recrimination, rage against the universally feckless men who use, betray, and leave her, are joined to Anna's abiding concern about the fate of common people and the global threat of nuclear war. She is not mindless--far from it. She is aware that she must not repress her emotions, but is run ragged by the intensity of her experiences.
It is easy to see the appeal in all this. Less appealing is her attitude towards homosexuals (the word used), who are mentioned in three parts of the book, always as predators upon and haters of women. She is concerned to get her homosexual renter out of her flat because she worries about a bad influence on her daughter...who is fond of the young man. Anna wants to be sure that her daughter will get "a real man" when she grows up. If you wonder what a real man is, it seems to be someone with whom a woman has vaginal orgasms. Yes, that's explicit in Lessing, as she is also explicit that clitoral orgasms are inferior. You can see the author as reflecting the biases of her time...yet, in her multiple Introductions to the novel, she neither recants nor apologizes for her homophobic attitudes. Does this square with the hopes of feminism for a gender-liberated world?
It's complex, because the author is admirable for showing so much that is difficult and not self-flattering. If she wanted to write fluff for the mass market, she could have...but chose instead to provide insight into someone's contradictions and lived struggle. All in all, this long (more than 600 pages) novel is worth reading, albeit in a critical way. The techniques she employs are interesting and creative, if sometimes confusing; she alternates between her immediate voice as Anna, and the various characters Anna creates in her notebooks. It is not always easy to know just what perspective is being shown, after a few dozen pages in one voice or another.
This novel has been touted as having been very influential for the cohort of women who were Lessing's contemporaries; how it should be evaluated now, after the passage of time and ongoing struggles for gender equality (and human rights in general), is the reader's task.
 Satisfied customer October 14, 2008
I bought a book. I received the book that I ordered. It arrived promptly, by mail, in excellent condition.
Topic is 6 stars, writing is 4 stars [T][29] September 15, 2008
Interestingly, most of the eye-popping concepts of Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying" (1973) seem to be touched upon by this 1962 publication.
Four notebooks are the concentration of this novel. After meeting Anna and Molly outside of the notebooks and their review of their respective children and former spouses, we go through the colorful journals: black notebook (African experience in youth); red notebook (years in communism and falling out); yellow notebook (about heroine Ella who is a mixture of Anna and Molly); and the personal diary kept in the blue notebook. Each has its own story, own style and own purpose.
The greatest theme throughout the book is inequality: blacks in Africa; women everywhere; rich bourgeoisie against working people - Communism's core. Molly and Anna are born privileged but female. They have a bone to pick in spite of their economic advantage. They are active participants in Communism. This revolution was important to their characters as well as the author because, as the yellow notebook's fictional man tells its protagonist Ella, "My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution - they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men."
And amid the revolutions is universally acceptable incognizance. "If we had ears that could hear, . . .the air would be full of screams, groans, grunts and gasps. But, as it is, there reigns over the sunbathed veld the silence of peace." Stories in the books list many inequitable and inappropriate stories of people being fired, humiliated and even murdered for gross misperceptions by their peers.
Anna is a 21st century woman living in the mid-20th century. Free sex and being a single mother are but two characteristics. She works and supports her family and succeeds in a man's world of writing literature. Lessing's personal life followed this unique path - something which makes this novel and writer extremely educating and provocative.
Long winded at times, this book delves deeply into the psyche of Anna - more than perhaps I would have cared. But, the writing cleanly handles these introspections without arduous tasks placed upon the reader. Like a valuable Persian rug - this is a well woven fabric without sophisticated materials - and will endure. This book touches upon the feminist topic like few others had before it, and perhaps is one of the best fictional works to approach this endearing topic of English literature.
 Book Club Selection May 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My book club chose this book. Otherwise I don't think I would have made it through the entire 600 plus pages. The story was depressing and the main character seemed depressed and jumping into bed with whomever she happed to meet. The story jumped between people and the notebooks the author (main character) was keeping. Was not an enjoyable book.
The Golden Notebook May 12, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I belong to a book group of highly literate, intelligent older women, some of whom are themselves writers and teachers, all with strong social and cultural concerns. Though a few of us had read some Doris Lessing years ago when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature we decided to read and discuss one of her works. It was my month to lead the discussion and I selected her most well known work, The Golden Notebook.
After reading about sixty pages of this 640 page volume, I knew that I being the leader would probably be the only one of the dozen members of our group who would plow through to the end. Lessing is a fine writer, her descriptions make things come alive, her sensitivity to the terrible social injustices in Africa, the arrogance of the young, and the atrocities of the group think of Communism are extremely well portrayed, but the complete self absorption and lack of compassion or caring for any individual other than herself, becomes extremely tiring and truly boring, to the point that I wanted to shout--"Come on, get a life." I too, was a thinking adult in 1962 (the date of the books original publication), and yes, there was horrific social and racial injustice, terrible selfishness and stultifying patriarchal and cultural stratification, in many places there still is, but everyone else in this world is not all bad. Please, please, please show some humanity. Have you no sympathy, no empathy? Sexual liberation is one thing, but emotional balance is lacking. Love in this book is only gratification of one's own desire. Maybe this is the point of the novel. To show the basic self absorption of someone who is trying to buck the system. To show the evils of the world. After all, Lessing wrote that true art was to expose the depths of pain. Perhaps. But I believe there is something to be said for art that uncovers beauty in a broken world.
In this work Anna, the protagonist, wrote her different colored Notebooks to demonstrate the fragmentation of her life. But her inability to get beyond herself did not hold my interest or empathy and though I agree that Lessing is extremely talented and obviously dedicated to creating literature to depict the way she knows the world, I am saddened that hers is one of cynicism despair. In this novel the gift of golden notebook at the end seems contrived and unconvincing. If life to Lessing means nihilistic terror into nothingness, she has captured it in her art.
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