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

by Doris Lessing

[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.