The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing's most complex work. It is generally hailed as a pioneering novel on male-female relationships and places her among the great writers of novels. It uses overlapping stories, each slightly similar to the prior, starting with a fictional writer Anna Wulf, her story, and the stories she writes. Doris Lessing (1919 - ) is the 2007 Nobel Prize winner in literature. She has a score...
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This was my first Lessing fiction and it's a true inspiration. The notebooks and short story are well-paced well retaining consistent stylistics of the writer 'Anna'. I particularly enjoy the short story and the yellow notebook, which imitates the short story. Lessing writes with such honesty it forces you to read with honesty as well while reflecting on similar situations in your own life. This book reminds me of a...
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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...
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Future generations will call this the most important novel of the 20th century, or at least they should, for this is the book that expresses the major themes of the world in that century. What we now call gender issues (now there's a broad label!) occupy a major portion of the novel, but it is just as much a picture of the Fear of humanity during the Cold War times, when every day we were 30 minutes from doomsday. It is...
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The Golden Notebook is brilliant. Lessing does an amazing job of holding many strands together. Apparently she wrote it exactly as is published--page after page rather than completing the "notebooks" and short novel separately and spliting them into final form later. I must admit that one notebook did give me a bit of grief until I caught on to Lessing's plan, but it was well worth it--especially for the last 80 pages or so.The...
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