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

by Doris Lessing

The landmark novel of the Sixties – a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal.

In 1950s London, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer’s block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook – the golden notebook – that finally pulls these wayward strands of her life together.

Widely regarded as Doris Lessing’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, ‘The Golden Notebook’ is wry and perceptive, bold and indispensable.

• ISBN13: 9780007498772
• Publish Date: 17 January 2013 (first published 17 April 1972)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 576
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

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.