The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

[KEV67]

I am about 60 pages in. I am worried I may have made an Alexandria Quartet sized mistake. Doris Lessing did write in the preface not to read stuff you don't like, so I cannot entirely blame her.

 

I read one of her other books I found in my father's bookcase. The cover made it look like a romance. I think he liked it in part because it was set in Rhodesia and the protagonist's lefty politics resembled his own in his youth. My father lived for six years in Zambia where he was a teacher. The Golden Notebook looks like the one Lessing got the Nobel Prize for, but I am concerned it will be a ton of self-flagellating introspection. And I don't share her politics.

[itsmeagain]

I didn't like it, got it from Leeds library back in the 1980s. Her and Nadine Gordimer, really dreadful disappointing lack of a juicy story all told.

[KEV67]

Actually, it is not that bad. It is a lot better than Alexandria Quartet. I wonder if all her books were about the African ex-pat experience.

[itsmeagain]

16 minutes ago, KEV67 said:

Actually, it is not that bad. It is a lot better than Alexandria Quartet. I wonder if all her books were about the African ex-pat experience.

Mostly white South African, coming of age, feminist vibes I recall...could be wrong.

Edited August 28, 2023 by itsmeagain

[KEV67]

On 8/26/2023 at 2:40 PM, KEV67 said:

I am concerned it will be a ton of self-flagellating introspection.

 

There is quite a lot of self-flagellating introspection, but it is still pretty good. I am wary of experimental novels. I like books with chapters, so I know when I can stop reading. This book has parts rather than chapters. Some sections are fiction written by a fictional author, who is basing her fiction on her own life, which by implication is Doris Lessing's own, but you don't know. I have never totally understood what the term 'post-modern' meant, but I think in literature this is post-modern. All these stories about people telling stories, jumping around in timelines and the blurring of fact and fiction. Generally, I don't care for it. Umberto Eco used to write like that and although I liked Name of the Rose, his books Focault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before drove me nuts. I did not like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five neither. Quentin Tarrantino does something similar in film making. I do quite like his stuff, although I would like it more if he edited his films down.

[KEV67]

In the ten pages I read today, the narrator was recounting two business dinners she had with television/theatre producers who wanted to turn her most famous book into television series. One was British. He said they could not afford to shoot in Africa, but they could transpose all the important bits to Britain and make it a doomed romance similar to Brief Encounter. The other was an American. She said her theatrical company was always looking for fresh stories about different sorts of people in different situations, but there were certain topics that were off limits, such as race, religion, extra-marital sex and politics. The narrator said her book contained race and politics. So the narrator was quite rude to them both. The narrator is not exactly Doris Lessing, but come to think of it, I cannot think of any television or film adaptions of her books. I wonder if any television or film producers would be interested in them now they are far more wokified.

[KEV67]

I am over half way. If I were still on Good Reads I would give it five stars. Doris Lessing is very good at reproducing speech patterns and keeping her characters in character.

[KEV67]

The politics is quite interesting. It was written when a lot of people were leaving the British Communist Party after stories of Soviet atrocities were leaking out. There were still a few die-hards hanging in. The others were in emotional crisis not sure what to believe, because they were still lefties who believed in social justice. This book was written in the 50s. 1984 had come out in 1949. McCarthyism was rife in America. The Korean War was either being fought or had just come to an end. The left wing movement was splintering into different groups. 

It took quite a long time for the Communist Party to die off in Britain, if it is not still lingering on. I had a friend at school who was considering entering the CP but a teacher advised him it could be bad for his career. 

I have read a couple of Alexie Sayle's memoirs, which are pretty good. His parents were both confirmed communists who kept the faith. In the 60s and 70s there were various factions, which if you knew their code words you could identify. Apparently the Marxists were Communists, while the Leninist-Marxists were Maoists, or maybe the other way around.

Edited September 30, 2023 by KEV67

[KEV67]

One thing that bothers me with this book is that the heroine(s)/protagonist has a lot of sex with married men, who are all creeps to a greater or lesser extent. Alright, she is a divorcee with a child, and it is the 50s. But isn't she complicit if she keeps having sex with them. In the ten pages I read to day she slept with a man from Ceylon called Nelson. He might be handsome, but he was well weird, so why did she sleep with him?

[KEV67]

I was reading a bit about Doris Lessing earlier on. She left her first husband and two small children. Seems astonishing to me. In the first book of hers I read the heroine did that. She left her husband in Rhodesia with her children. In the Golden Notebook, the heroine Anna Wulf, as well as the heroine in the book Anna writes, both have one child. In their cases they both have a child from a failed marriage, and both become mistresses of married men. I don't know whether Lessing became anyone's mistress, but she did marry again and have another child. I get the impression Doris Lessing used her real life as inspiration for her books. I suppose that is obvious, but I wonder how autobiographical they are. I suspect very.

Edited October 4, 2023 by KEV67

[KEV67]

Almost finished. I did not like the last sections so much.