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The Golden Notebook Paperback – Import, January 1, 2007

by Doris Lessing (Author)

4.0 942 ratings

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Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Print length

576 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Harper Perennial
Publication date

January 1, 2007
Dimensions

5.08 x 1.38 x 7.8 inches
ISBN-10

9780007247202
ISBN-13

978-0007247202
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Popular Highlights in this book

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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.
Highlighted by 299 Kindle readers
Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life.
Highlighted by 258 Kindle readers

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0007247206
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; (Reissue) edition (January 1, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780007247202
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007247202
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 1.38 x 7.8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,441,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #64,287 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #185,003 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.0 942 ratings

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Doris Lessing
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Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Elke Wetzig (elya) (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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4 out of 5

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crown

Groundbreaking

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2013

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Doris Lessing's real achievement in this book, I think, was simply in her matter-of-fact her handling of controversial matters (controversial in the period between World War II and the sixties, at any rate). She writes about the life of a divorced woman with a child, her relationships with that child, with her best (woman) friend, with her lovers, her comrades in the English CP, her body, the political world, etc., in ways that are remarkable for their straightforward candor. At the time a woman writing about her day-to-day life would be likely to either write in circumlocutions to avoid being indelicate or else be deliberately provocative. Lessing does neither of those: she simply tells the truth as she sees it. Which, in a repressed society, is itself a revolutionary act. That's not all there is to the book, not by a long shot, but that's what stood out for me on first reading.

12 people found this helpful

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JN Reviews

Not the easiest read, but worthwhile to trudge through

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2023

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A complex and interesting book, it was a great book to read for a book group which included women who read this when it first came out. A bit dated, and a somewhat uneven read, it still was impressive structurally (divided into several notebooks and interlacing stories), and gave glimpses into the political climate and views of women in the 1950s. Also a good depiction of dissociation, madness, and introspection in the main character, Anna.

2 people found this helpful

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firao

should be required reading

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2013

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i first ran across this novel in the 1970's, in PB in a used bookshop. i was "blown away" as we too often said back then but Lessing's honed insights have not become less relevant, or less affective... while some of the readers I've known take issue with her conceptual frameworks, i'm always moved by how perceptive she is about the fragility and intensity of insight, and how well she tracks the difficulty of building a world, any world, based on empathy, intuition, and connection. re-reading this after 25 years ( it used to be an annual event) has opened up a new set of perceptions. she always makes it worthwhile.

15 people found this helpful

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Ken Bartsch

TMI

Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2015

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I finished this book several weeks ago. I understand it was important when it was published in the 1960's. Feminists greeted its frank description of menstruation and sexual intercourse as great leaps forward in the process of liberation. This male thought it was TMI. If that's liberty no wonder so few people want it.
I was impressed however by Lessing's description of the failure of Communism. I appreciated the disillusionment and despair so many true believers felt as they ignored horror stories from Stalinist Russia. It was heartbreaking. They hoped that our Original Fallen State could be overcome with better organization and motivation.
There are many Americans who still believe "education" can overcome drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and suicide. Their optimism is not very different from that of communist sympathizers. They deny the reality of concupiscence, that innate tendency to sin which corrupts every human endeavor. The effort itself is corrupt.
The book ends when Anna Wulf gives up her quest to be an artiste and assumes her quotidian duty to mother her daughter. She surrenders her individuality and becomes a person at last. It would be wonderful if she learned through the experience to be a person who writes.

12 people found this helpful

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F. Tait

a riveting approach to self knowledge

Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2014

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Doris Lessing's searing and relentless self-probing and analysis of what it was to be an intelligent, thoughtful woman in the chaos of post-war London is as thought-provoking and readable today as when it was written. One wonders how a dialogue between Doris and Henry Miller might have been (perhaps she had one?) or Lawrence Durrell. They too broke boundaries in style and expression in pursuit of the big existential questions around meaning, love, justice, equality, loneliness and sanity, but seen through a man's lens.
Doris was, as I understand it, disappointed that the book was seized upon and claimed as a feminist tract. Indeed. For it's subject matter is much bigger than that.

5 people found this helpful

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Audrey

the golden notebook (UPDATE)

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2007

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I don't know why it took me so long to discover Doris Lessing. Her books are off-the-chart engrossing. Her description is so vivid that it puts one there, along with the rest whether it's in London or Africa. Her insight into human character and emotions is astonishing. I'm reading still another of her many books.
Thank goodness we have writers like her somewhere on this planet. She has it all---adventure, political savvy, terrific understanding of what went wrong with the femminist movement....
I recommend her as one of the outstanding writers of this century.

6 people found this helpful

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Andrea Pecoriello

Don’t buy it in kindle format

Reviewed in Mexico on February 22, 2024

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Ebook version is terrible. Everything is underline and tried to change it but couldn’t. Had to return it due to the imposibilite of reading such a format.