The Golden Notebook (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (Textplus) (Contemporary Fiction)

by Doris Lessing

Beautiful, striking reissue of this classic Lessing novel. Widely regarded as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century Anna Wulf is a young novelist with writer's block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. In fear of madness, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook addresses her problems as a writer; the red her political life; the yellow her relationships and emotions; and the blue becomes a diary of everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook -- the Golden Notebook -- which is the key to her recovery and renaissance. Bold and illuminating, fusing sex, politics, madness and motherhood, The Golden Notebook is at once a wry and perceptive portrait of the intellectual and moral climate of the 1950s -- a society on the brink of feminism -- and a powerful and revealing account of a woman searching for her own personal and political identity.

• ISBN10: 006093140X
• ISBN13: 9780060931407
• Publish Date: 3 February 1999 (first published 17 April 1972)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 18 October 2011
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Inc
• Imprint: HarperPerennial
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 672
• Language: English

Reviews

[clementine]

Okay, I distinctly remember adding this to my to-read list because I wanted to read self-indulgently-long works written by women, so I suppose I got what I bargained for. But, well, my enjoyment of this was very uneven. There were sections that I really enjoyed, and the writing was beautiful. Anna's past in colonial Africa and her disillusionment with 1950s communism were very interesting. I also liked the novel-within-a-novel to a point. The exploration of compartmentalization and the fragmentation of self was fascinating and well-done. But there were long passages that were difficult to get through, particularly Anna's various relationships with men. There's a certain point where reading pages and pages and pages of a woman being completely passive and putting up with being treated poorly feels tedious. I normally think "this book is depressing" is a silly criticism, but I did feel that here, I guess because it felt not only depressing but never-ending. I think the novel successfully plays with the conventions of the genre and is structurally a well-realized execution of an ambitious concept, but it dragged in a lot of places for me.