Doris Lessing (1919–2013)

Read this one for my book club, and had a lot of mixed thoughts about it. The portrait of what it was like for women during that period of time, just before the second wave of feminism ramped up, was interesting—although having grown up in a household where that was definitely a part of the goings-on, it wasn't news to me. Also the glimpse into the politics of the British Communist Party, which I knew less about. But the nonstop introspection wore on me a bit—the deep dive into unhappy, dissatisfied hearts and minds was a lot to sustain over 600-odd pages. Though it also made me think of my mom a lot, as she lived through that time and that dissatisfaction, which was necessary for her to get to the life she wanted to live. The book was on our shelves growing up, and I do wish I could talk to her about it now.

Ultimately I'm glad I read it. It sparked a great conversation, lots of very different thoughts and opinions, so it was a great book club choice in that sense. I'm happy enough to leave the characters behind, but I keep thinking about it at odd moments, so in that sense it was also a worthwhile reading project (but it did feel like a project).… (mais)

The Golden Notebook is the final book on this iteration of my reading list and–unfortunately–was not a case of saving the best for last. It landed on my list as part of TIME magazine's All-TIME 100 as A Book With A Color In Its Title; in hindsight, I would reclassify it as A Book At The Bottom Of Your To-Read List.

Doris Lessing's novel is structurally complex, consisting of six parts, each of which (save one) begins with the continuing story of Anna Wulf, a divorced novelist raising her pre-teen daughter in London, and her friend Molly Jacobs, a divorced actress raising her twenty-year-old son. Within these parts are the contents of four colored notebooks (black, red, yellow, blue), Anna's memoir, political ramblings, fictional musings and diary, respectively. Further complicating the reader's comprehension is the backward revelation of much of Anna's story, where the notebooks reveal fictionalized events in her life prior to Anna as narrator disclosing their "real" counterparts. Add to this the climax of the novel—the simultaneous mental breakdowns of fictional-Anna and her Sybil-like male flat mate, and you have a confused collection of stories about a promiscuous former communist living an intellectually vacuous life off the royalties of her one and only novel.

While this schizophrenic structure is probably intended to give the reader the feeling of sharing Anna's breakdown, I found it numbingly over-complicated. Tellingly, Lessing often felt her first-person narrator needed to identify herself by name (e.g. "I, Anna...") so the reader could distinguish between Anna's "real" and fictive narration. The scenes at the beginning of each part are mostly dialogue paired with intrusive adverbs ("he said angrily") using an anonymous narration, no character point-of-view that often doesn't provide sufficient information to understand why particular statements are made. While the novel also suffers repetitive dream sequences and abstruse conversations between Anna and her psychoanalyst, my main objection is that Anna is simply an unlikeable character whose convictions vacillate in reaction to every sentence spoken to her. Compounding my dislike is her annoying role as analytical observer, criticizing others with a false sophistication when she herself is so flawed.

My copy of The Golden Notebook is 623 pages long; on page 565, Anna finally admits she's had writer's block since her highly successful debut novel. To me, this novel reads like Lessing suffered the same problem and has just stitched together several discordant attempts at a novel similar to Anna's efforts in the fictive story.… (mais)