Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3566 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-18
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Synopsis
The 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. Fearing the onset 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.

Customer Reviews

Call me a philisitne ...
Call me a philistine, but I cannot understand why this monumental and self-indulgent book, first published in 1962, is said to be one the great classics of the 20th century.

It charts the life of Anna Wulf, a writer. Although every page is very well written and the many characters are well individualized, I have found this quite a difficult read. The chapters in this massive tome are enormously long, with few natural breaks: at times there are whole pages between paragraphs.

And the structure of the book is, I think, excessively complex. Anna is a divorcee with a little daughter; her friend Molly is a divorcee with a grown-up son. Their story is told in five instalments. Both women are ex-communists; both believe themselves to be `Free Women'.

The tile `Free Women' is certainly an ironical title as far as Anna is concerned, since her `freedom' brings her the most painful turmoil of emotions. After having been aware for a long time about the darker, crueller, more dishonest side of communism, she has, with a great psychological effort, `freed' herself from membership of the Party, but the wrench has left her in an aching vacuum, as well as haunted by the terrors and threats to human existence that are conveyed in the daily newspapers from which she obsessively collects clippings.

Worse: she feels `free' to engage in new sexual relationships with a series of men, but she is tormented in each of these relationships, to which she gives herself with more commitment than is felt by the men. She becomes increasingly damaged, veering backwards and forwards from love to hate, self-lacerating, driven towards total disintegration.

Between each instalment called `Free Women' are the contents of four notebooks which Anna is keeping: one black, one red, one yellow, one blue, each kept for a different purpose.

The black notebook relates to a successful book which Anna has already written and published, and which fictionalized her experiences in war-time Rhodesia. That book was about Communism, racism, and dominant-submissive relationships in a group of air force pilots stationed there.

The red notebook is about Anna's post-war experiences as a member of the Communist Party back in Britain. She was fully aware of the unacceptable side of Stalinist communism, even while she remained a member. Anyone who was a communist or a fellow-traveller in the forties and fifties will recognize the atmosphere.

Anna is struggling with a writer's block, but is trying to write another novel, dealing with the more painful parts of her life. The yellow notebook is part of this novel (and notes thereon) which describes the relationship of Ella (who is really Anna), a divorcee, with a doctor called Paul. (Sometimes the same characters, like Anna's ex-husband, are called by different names in the different parts of the book. In addition, the Paul in the yellow notebook is not the same person as the Paul in the black notebook.) Here (and later in the blue notebook) Doris Lessing records ever more minutely the relationship between the woman and the man: they vary often from moment to moment, from one conversational exchange to the next. These are very well done and at enormous length, but ultimately they are as exhausting for this reader as they must have been to the characters.

In the blue notebook Anna records her real life, part of which is the material for the yellow notebook. Most painful is the relationship with her last lover, Saul Green, an American ex-communist, who was himself a horrendously fractured personality: the schizophrenia of each of them reinforces that of the other.

And the new golden notebook at the end, which, the blurb says, `brings the strands of her life together and holds the key to her recovery'? Personally, I can't see any difference between the madness of that book and the madness which pervaded the end of the blue note book; and as for any recovery .... well, perhaps exhausted as I was, I'm afraid I just didn't get it. Dense of me, no doubt. But was I glad I had come to the end!

I have enjoyed some of Doris Lessing's books (The Sweetest Dream, The Grandmothers, The Good Terrorist) a great deal more than this one.

Many books, many levels.
Not too much to add to the praise above, but for an interesting - and in my mind heighly accurate - take on the book's structure and form read N. Katherine Hayles superb "Chaos Bound". She looks at the manner in which chaos and order are portrayed in the Notebook within the context of post-structuralism, post-modernism and chaos theory. As for Lessing's work: magnificent

Only connect ...
As Doris Lessing discusses in her own introduction (new for this edition), her best-known and best-selling novel has been viewed as being "about" various things: the battle of the sexes and man's inhumanity to woman; mental health; the difficulties facing left-wing politics following the failure and collapse of communism. As she herself points out, there is a definite irony in this, given that her central theme and premise was the need to see things as a whole and avoid compartmentalising different aspects of our lives (love life, family life, political life, work life etc. etc.). This remains a startling idea: what Lessing is essentially saying is that it is just this sort of compartmentalising that allows an otherwise kind character to be a shameless racist (there is a prominent example in the Black Notebook), or an operative of a totalitarian regime to commit acts of genocide then go home to a peaceful family dinner.

At the novel's opening, the life of Lessing's central character - (ex-)novelist Anna Wulf - seems hopelessly fragmented. Afflicted by writer's block, Anna pours the narrative of the various traumas of her life into four quite separate compartments: the Black Notebook relates to her "work life" as a writer; the Red Notebook her "political life" as a lapsed and disillusioned member of the British Communist party; the Yellow Notebook her (lightly fictionalised) love life; and the Blue Notebook her everyday existence. In all four areas, things grow increasingly desperate until Anna's mental health seems in serious question. However, it is only after what amounts to a "breakdown" followed by re-synthesis of her life as a whole in the eponymous Golden Notebook that Anna can really achieve mental and moral wellbeing.

It is a startlingly honest book, particularly for its time, and it is easy to empathise with Anna's plight. Lessing writes beautifully (particularly in the dark-hued and intensely nostalgic African sections of the Black Notebook), and throws off ideas and philosophical digressions like fireworks.

The book has undoubtedly dated a little, particularly in the ever-thorny area of sexuality and gender politics. As noted by another reviewer below, Anna's attitude to her gay lodgers is a tad dubious: it's fair enough to criticise them for being bitchy and misogynistic (they are!), but surely not for failing to be "Real Men"? Similarly, Anna not infrequently expresses (via her fictional alter ego in the Yellow Notebook) a somewhat unreconstructed craving to be sexually "Swept Away" by a "Real Man" (whatever one of those is) - while she clearly doesn't mean some sort of macho schmuck, this does jar a little nowadays. In part this is connected to Lessing's fascination at the time with a rather mystical version of Jungian psychoanalytical theory, with its ideas of "animus and anima": this was very trendy at the time (it crops up in the writing of Robertson Davies and Iris Murdoch, for instance) but seems less relevant nowadays. It is also worth remembering that Lessing was writing in the very early Sixties, well before the days of Shere Hite and Nancy Friday, and that her views on sex and sexuality were in fact very progressive and unexpectedly honest for the book's era. The novel's central theme (the need to live life as a whole) remains startling and compelling, and overall there is no question that this is a five-star read.