The Boring Notebook 2010-06-22

Reviewer: Judith C. Kinney

My sentiments are exactly those of "I just can't do it" and "Life is just too short," and at 71, my life is shorter than many. I made it to page 128, but it just seemed to be the same old, same old, page after dreary page. All the characters seemed much of a muchness.

Furthermore, I'm just not interested in Marxism, feminism, promiscuous sex, and indiscriminate drinking. I even skipped ahead a hundred pages and then another hundred to see if it got any different. It didn't seem to.

Worthy but wordy 2010-05-02

Reviewer: Cleopatrai

This was the first Doris Lessing book I read, and I read it when I was in college, but during one of the vacations. It wasn't required reading.
I did not realize at the time that this was a seminal feminist book, and I have read I think two or three more by the author since. I found it interesting but very definitely wordy. While the heroine is full of good intentions she seemed to me to be really more focussed on herself than anybody else, and the long descriptions of her affair were tedious.
In the end I felt that what she said could have been said far more concisely without losing any of its impact. Now Doris Lessing politics are not my politics and as she does tend to preach to the choir, there was a disconnect.

Beautiful Writing 2010-03-15

Reviewer: Jiang Xueqin

The conflicts and struggles of being a Communist, a woman, and a writer dominate Doris Lessing's semi-autobiographical novel "The Golden Notebook" because the writer herself is a woman Communist writer. The conceit at the heart of this 635-page novel --four notebooks written from four different perspectives focusing on different material, all coalescing into one golden notebook -- is gimmicky and annoying, and the book would have fared well under a precise eye and brutal hand (Lessing wrote the book in less than a year). But the writing compensates for the absence of editing, for the writing is splendidly variegated, as diverse and as beautiful, as pregnant and as prolific as a yellow meadow blending into a thick forest rising into hilly grassland.

The novel is a meditative journey into the decadent and disillusioned world of English intellectuals in the 1950s and sixties. The genesis of the protagonist's fascination with Communism can be found at a colony of fellow travelers in Africa in the 1940s. These spirited witty youth spend World War II using their spirit and wit to play an intellectually dishonest game of trying to convince themselves and others the validity of Communist theory, and as they turn into adults they depend on Communism to dampen and control the raging ego that so dominates all creative manic depressives. The impossible contradiction for these intellectuals is to balance their desire for the valium and ritalin that is Communism for their need for the bread and water that is writing.

Being a writer in a time of television, trying to maintain the sanctimonity of the word against the omnipresence of the image, is another impossible contradiction. The protagonist Anna Wulf manages a minor best-seller at an early age, having exploited her African experience into a quasi-memoir and is now reluctantly being seduced and exploited by television executives. Anna knows better, but wants also to feel wanted. She once had a lover Michael who could never love her, and she knows many couples whose relationships are fruitless chasms.

These three impossible contradictions -- of being a believer in something so absurd as Communism, of being a writer in a time of the image, of being a woman in love with a man -- all come crystalized together in the nexus that is Saul Green. Anna Wulf is hopelessly in love with this American writer who's in England to escape McCarthyism. It's doubtful that Saul Green actually believes in Communism, and it's even more doubtful that Anna is in love with Saul, who she knows cheats on him because she reads his diary, and in her violating his privacy she also violates her identity as a writer and lets her instincts as a woman come first. The two wallow in their self-anger and self-hate, and in the classic co-dependency mode they fight, make love, fight again, and then make love again.

The internal failings of the individual -- the self-denial and self-hate, the narcissism and self-righteousness -- is the novel's dominant motif. Seeing these adults fight and claw at each other incessantly, Anna's best friend's son decides to shoot himself, and Anna's daughter dreams for the stifling ordinariness of boarding school. These adults eventually tire themselves out -- they marry into conformity or retire into conventionality.

The storm will eventually fade, and everything will have been for naught: that is the tragedy and hope of "The Golden Notebook."

mixed 2009-10-27

Reviewer: whj

The unique structure of the book in 4 notebooks was what attracted me as well as the fact that the subject matters looked interesting and complex. But after 400 pages the fragmented structure became more of an obstacle and distraction than refreshing, and I think this book would have been much better if it had been half of its length as I think there is too much repetition in the book. I agree with the author that this is not just about feminism, it is about the era of the 60's experienced by a woman with complex and active emotional, intellectual and political spirit. But I didn't find the protagonist, Anna Wulf personally relatable to me, and didn't feel that the golden notebook very intergrating either. In the end, my goal became just to finish the book which I did.

Fragmented, yet engaging....using hypocrisy 2009-10-10

Reviewer: Troy

At first I thought the book entirely too fragmented ...yet (I am assuming intentional) the writer uses hypocrisy to touch on social issues (women's rights, racism, homophobia).... the "socialist ex-communist" leftist Anna et al still had their own internal contradictions. Especially seen in Anna's treatment and internal thoughts on homosexuality, male "domination" (or rather Female domination in the case of Ella).