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The Golden Notebook (Paladin Books) [Paperback]

Doris Lessing
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)

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Book Description

2 Dec 2002 Paladin Books

One of Doris Lessing’s most important works, exploring politics, feminism, motherhood and the intellectual climate of the 1950s.

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. In fear 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.



Product details

  • Paperback: 576 pages
  • Publisher: Flamingo; (Reissue) edition (2 Dec 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0586089233
  • ISBN-13: 978-0586089231
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 432,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

‘At the beginning of the Sixties, this vast, frank, complicated novel helped to sustain our reputation for courageous, ambitious, experimental writing. Soon a worldwide bestseller, it is still her finest work. “The Golden Notebook” captured the heady mix of the early Sixties, when not just novels but political certainties were dissolving. The rising feminist movement seized it as a Bible.’ Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Essential Library’.’ Mail on Sunday

‘Her greatest work…Shows the power of the female imagination at full throttle. It doesn't bear a simple political message but it does rip off the masks that women were accustomed to wear, and it shows up the dangers and difficulties that women encounter if they try to live a free life in a man's world…A landmark novel, a book that both changed and explained a generation…One of the finest writers of the century.’ Natasha Walter, Independent

From the Back Cover

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. In fear 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.


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars not for the casual reader 3 Mar 2009
Format:Paperback
I could hardly put it down, but I'm under no illusion...

Don't read this book unless you are interested in: feminist literature, mental breakdown, social and personal entropy, freudian philosophy, the creative process, the aristic crisis, the communist experience in the west, the artist as ethnographer, the need to love and be loved and human ability to repeat the same mistakes (again and again and again).
Don't read this book if you aren't able (or willing) to examine art within it's cultural and historical context.
And whatever you do don't read this book if you want a nice story with a straight forward message.
Otherwise its a very rewarding and engaging read that makes you wonder if you too could help push a boulder.
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70 of 78 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars All the Amazing Notes 14 Nov 2002
Format:Paperback
The Golden Notebook is Lessing's most well known of her works and with good reason. It is an incredibly complex and layered work that addresses such ideas as authorship of one's life, the political climate of the 60s and the power relation between the sexes. It would be naïve to consider this novel as just a feminist polemic. I know many people have read it only this way or not read it because they assume it is only this. Lessing articulates this point well in her introduction. The novel inhabits many worlds of thought. It just so happens that at the time of its publication it was a very poignant work for feminism. More than any book I know it has the deepest and longest meditation on what it means to split your identity into categories because you can not conceive of yourself as whole in the present climate of society and in viewing your own interactions with people. This obsession with constructing a comprehensive sense of identity leads to an infinite fictionalisation of the protagonist's life. Consider the following passage "I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: 'Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a 'young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph." She can't attach her own vision of herself to the reality of her life. The two are separated by the ideologies of society which influence her own vision of who she should be.

This novel also captures the political climate of the era, a state of post-war disillusionment with the available models political ideology. They recognise the need for some kind of change, but are unable to envision a model that will work.... Read more ›

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31 of 35 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Only connect ... 29 Dec 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
... Read more ›
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59 of 68 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Call me a philistine. 8 Feb 2008
By Ralph Blumenau TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
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.
... Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars Only for the girls
so deep and filled with insight, kept me thinking, guys could learn a lot about how we think from reading this...
Published 1 month ago by Maddy
3.0 out of 5 stars golden notebook
Hard going for some reason cant seem to get into it. Will try to complete book as it has promise & need to find out what happens to the characters
Published 2 months ago by Mrs. Alison Marchant-Jones
3.0 out of 5 stars An honest supplier
Prompt delivery. Very happy with the accurate and fair description of the book. Makes a pleasant change to have a description that matches Amazon's guidelines. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Rachel Rhatigan
4.0 out of 5 stars Easy to admire, difficult to warm to.
As an experiment in form, temporality, and methods of narration, The Golden Notebook is strangely ahead of it's time. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Oliver49
2.0 out of 5 stars Golden Notebook
This was a difficult book,written for women about women so I thought I'd give it a go but I felt excluded as if I was outside all that the writer was trying to say.... Read more
Published 14 months ago by Luke Skywalker
3.0 out of 5 stars Not sure if it's worth the effort
Anna Wulf, 40 something, living in London off the proceeds of her successful novel set in Africa, keeps 4 notebooks :
Black - about Africa
Red - her dealings and thoughts... Read more
Published 14 months ago by A. C. Dickens
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating but Confusing
This is Lessing's best-known book but I have to say it's not the one I've enjoyed the most, by a long way. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Kate Hopkins
4.0 out of 5 stars Cyclical
A feminist book. I am not a feminist myself but it was an interesting read, if extremely bleak and depressing. Cyclical in the events; interesting and insightful.
Published on 26 Jan 2011 by Roét
1.0 out of 5 stars The missing book
I did not receive my order for The Golden Notebook and can only assume that it has gone missing since it was dispatched. Read more
Published on 21 Dec 2010 by Lynda
5.0 out of 5 stars A book to make you think...
This was not love at first sight. My immediate first thought: "Christ, it's going to take me the rest of the year to read that! Read more
Published on 23 Oct 2010 by E. R. Dewsnap
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