Tuesday, June 13, 2006
book report: The Golden Notebook
The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
I really wanted to like this book. It's held up as a great, creative, boundary-breaking novel by a tremendously gifted writer. And I can see how the structure especially was ground-breaking when it was first published in 1962. The book is more like a collection of novellas than a single work - it encompasses the "real life" story of the main character, Anna Wulf, and long excerpts from each of the 4 notebooks that she keeps for herself. The notebook that I found most interesting was the yellow notebook in which Anna writes fiction. She wrote a very long fictionalized version of her years in Africa with other young European Communists in the 1950s... which was fascinating and completely outside my experience. But I was horribly frustrated by Anna's continued self-sabotage... not to mention the fact that I couldn't relate, at all, to the anguish she felt over her relationship with The Party. And her vivid descriptions of the revulsion and helplessness she felt with some of her lovers gave me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is a "good" book, in the sense that it is well-written and left an impression on me... but I didn't like it very much.
by Doris Lessing
I really wanted to like this book. It's held up as a great, creative, boundary-breaking novel by a tremendously gifted writer. And I can see how the structure especially was ground-breaking when it was first published in 1962. The book is more like a collection of novellas than a single work - it encompasses the "real life" story of the main character, Anna Wulf, and long excerpts from each of the 4 notebooks that she keeps for herself. The notebook that I found most interesting was the yellow notebook in which Anna writes fiction. She wrote a very long fictionalized version of her years in Africa with other young European Communists in the 1950s... which was fascinating and completely outside my experience. But I was horribly frustrated by Anna's continued self-sabotage... not to mention the fact that I couldn't relate, at all, to the anguish she felt over her relationship with The Party. And her vivid descriptions of the revulsion and helplessness she felt with some of her lovers gave me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is a "good" book, in the sense that it is well-written and left an impression on me... but I didn't like it very much.
Labels: book reports
