The Golden Notebook

 

There are plenty of long passages, chapters in The Golden Book that I enjoyed very much. The adventures in Africa for instance.

There are passages that I did not like- “licking blood and brains on the floor” to take one example.

There is way too much communism for my taste. I had more than enough over about 25 years to read about it with any kind of pleasure.

Doris Lessing criticises many communist actions and yet it is not a subject that I take in. therefore, I had to go through parts of the book with great speed and little attention.  

To quote from the internet: “….the work explores mental and societal breakdown. The book also contains a powerful anti-war and anti-Stalinist message, an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a famed examination of the budding sexual and women's liberation movements. The Golden Notebook has been translated into a number of other languages.

In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present”

The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Molly and Anna, and their children, ex-husbands and lovers—entitled Free Women—with excerpts from Anna's four notebooks, coloured black (of Anna's experience in Southern Rhodesia, before and during WWII, which inspired her own bestselling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair), and blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life). Each notebook is returned to four times, interspersed with episodes from Free Women, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections that interact with one another. This post-modernistic styling, with its space and room for "play" engaging the characters and readers, is among the most famous features of the book, although Lessing insisted that readers and reviewers pay attention to the serious themes in the novel”

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