We were neither of us at all clever, we were too happy. 3 1/2 stars. Another book where a five-star rating system is woefully inadequate. 3 1/2 stars doesn't even begin to explain all the thoughts I had while reading The Golden Notebook. There were parts that I loved. I must have collected several dozen quotes on women and human nature that just seemed so fresh and insightful. Quite unlike anything I'd read before. Then there were other parts that were so laborious I wondered how anyone had m

The Golden Notebook, Doris LessingThe Golden Notebook is a 1962 novel, by Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she records her life, and her attempt to tie them together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Anna and her friend, Molly Jacobs, as well as their children, ex-husbands and lovers—entitled Free Women— with excerpts from Anna's four notebooks, col...

*****WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE*****“I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.” I would say that Miss Lessing was very fetching when she was younger, but I don’t want to be accused of objectifying her. :-) Anna keeps four notebooks, each representing di...

This novel is not a novel in the classic sense of the term because, for Doris Lessing, literature must have a social scope: it is not only a matter of telling a story but of transmitting an experience. This novel, therefore, has a very particular structure. On the one hand, the gold notebook tells a story called "Free Women" which features two friends, Anna and Molly, living in London in the fifties and who have very similar lives: both are artists, communists and raise a child alone, which at t...

Given up because although it was well written and the characters developed well early on, I just have no interest at all in the upper middle class who have angst and money instead of housework and jobs. They pontificated about sex and politics and other people's affairs when the rest of the country were out working and thinking of who was cooking dinner that night and whether or not tuppence on the tax each week was going to make school trips a bit difficult. Just not what I want to read about r...

I am full of a deep, manic relief at being released from the reading of this book. I feel the need to skip, to jump joyfully into the air, to cry out to the world : I did it! I did it! And I never have to do it again! A few years ago I read Doris Lessing's debut novel The Grass is Singing, which I adored. It doesn't necessarily mean that I should therefore adore this, her much lauded, much revered, "feminist" (but don't let her hear you call it that) 1962 masterpiece. But I did hope. The thin...

“Art is the mirror of our betrayed ideals” page 385. Still under the effects of the inebriating The Brothers K, I thought the best way to overcome a book hungover was to get drunk again. Reckless and foolish, I know.My head still spinning around and my heart wrenched into a tight ball as I write these lines. “The Golden notebook” is not a kind book.It has challenged my patience and tolerance with its apparent non direction. I have even despised Anna, the narrator of the story, thinking her

If before this book you wanted to be a writer, if after you finished it you still wanted to be a writer, then all the power to you.What concerns us here is an English white heterosexual female, mother, author, communist. Upper-class, unmarried, unconsciously feminist. Neurotic, classist, homophobic, probably racist, there aren’t enough interactions with people of color to tell, but it seems likely considering the upbringing, the upbringing of the English society attuned to her personal attribute...

“I see I am falling into the self-punishing, cynical tone again. Yet how comforting this tone is, like a sort of poultice on a wound.” — Doris Lessing, The Golden NotebookThis big book is well worth the effort. Having started my foray into Lessing’s work through her non-fiction, I was curious how her intellect would feature in her fiction writing. This definitely wasn’t a light read; the subject matter was pretty serious- life, feminism, politics, Africa and so on. The story revolves around Ann

Lessing herself came to view The Golden Notebook as a failure, and I think she was right. What she meant was that the innovation and experimentation she intended as the novel’s central point and raison d’être was misunderstood by readers with an infernally stubborn insistence on wanting to figure out its theme, meaning, intent, and relevance to their own lives. Readers invested - and continue to invest - it with whatever agenda they bring to it in the first place, and interpret it conventionally...

(The spoilers are no spoiler. They just go into some of my intellectual queries which have little to do with book.)Another of those books that would have been better if it was shorter. The book has several divisions and each division has a section of a short novella 'Free Women' (by omniscient narrator) and sections of diaries Anna, the protagonist, keeps.Now, as a matter of principle I do not ... don't laugh, I'm perfectly capable of having principles, so, I was saying As a matter of principle,...

"'In what way are you different? Are you saying there haven’t been artist-women before? There haven’t been women who were independent? There haven’t been women who insisted on sexual freedom! I tell you, there are a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and become conscious of them.''They didn’t look at themselves as I do. They didn’t feel as I do. How could they? I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a...

Like every really, really good book I read, this one left me somewhat at a loss for words. Nonetheless, I'll try to do it some justice if I can.I hesitated to read this book for a long time because of the description it always gets: Anna, a writer, keeps four different notebooks, one about her experiences in Africa, one about the Communist Party, one of autobiographical fiction, and one that's a diary. At the end of her psychic chain and in love with an American writer, she decides to combine th...

It's about contradictions, I first told a friend as we discussed this book: The same person who orders a diet coke, has ice cream for dessert; someone orders fat-free salad dressing with a side order of french fries. Take Beyonce's new single Hold Up: supposedly this woman (who we'll pretend is not Beyonce) is known as the "baddest woman in the game" and yet she's "up in [this guy's] sheets" while he repeatedly cheats on her, but never mind that, she'll still hold him down, even while she's trea...

I was discussing Flaubert the other day with notgettingenough, and remarked on how surprisingly different all his books are. Salammbô, as I say in my review, is completely different from Madame Bovary. La Tentation de Saint Antoine, which I'm currently reading, is completely different from both of them. But apart from Madame Bovary, firmly established as one of the most famous novels of all time, Flaubert's books are not widely read these days. You get the impression that people wish he'd done m...

"It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative." Maybe 50 or 100 pages into the novel, I knew (and felt it as a physical sensation, a shiver going down my spine) that Doris Lessing had written the perfect description of the compartmentalised psyche of the modern world. The myth of my times! I don't share each political view she demonstrated in the red notebook, but I can certainly see myself writing a politi...

I created a new Goodreads shelf, "aborted," specifically for this book (& any future ones that I stop reading). Apparently it's an important novel & has been very influential, but I found it terribly tedious. 126 pages in, I found myself sinking into a foul mood: the characters are minutely analyzed but still feel remote, & the central conflict at that point (the beginnings of the collapse of hope & a sense of purpose among a group of Communist Party members), which would normally fascinate me,

Dear class: Welcome to an exclusive Goodreads seminar on Doris Lessing’s classic 1962 novel The Golden Notebook! Let’s start with a quiz, shall we? 1. What’s the best reason for reading this book?A) It’s a feminist classic, and still speaks to feminists – male and female – today.B) It’s a seminal contemporary novel, and its challenging structure – there’s a traditional novel about a London writer named Anna Wulf, interspersed with four notebooks that individually address Anna’s various interests...

You’re afraid it’ll be like if you organized your recipes by emotion. All color coding and modernism. You’re intimidated. It sounds hard. But people never mention how horny Doris Lessing is. "There’s something about a man with a whacking great erection," she says, "that it’s hard to resist." Woman is horny. Have you read Adore? Holy shit, it’s literally the plot of Motherlover by Lonely Island.I mean it’s Anna Wulf says that about the erections, not Lessing. Same thing, but we’ll get to that. An...

I read the Golden Notebook at the height of the journaling movement of the 1970's, Ira Progroff and his intensive journal-writing workshops, consciousness-raising, his whole approach to the examined self, the examined life. The feminist project was in full bloom, as well. I was also deely in love with the The Diaries of Anais Nin, her minute examination of emotion and interactions with others, the exploration of self, probably the greatest single factor in my decision to become a writer. The Gol...