Doris Lessing is a communist, feminist, and writer. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And even if The Golden Notebook were the only book she ever wrote, she should still be given the Nobel. Such books have not been written by women before her, and there is no point in writing after her.
How do you evaluate The Golden Notebook? It's not easy. To give it an "A," but in terms of language, imagery, wow effect, this book doesn't even pull a "D." To give it a "two," a "three," a "four"? But that's kind of shallow for a novel like this.
Both of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Like other women writers from southern African who did not graduate from high school (such as Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer), Lessing made herself into a self-educated intellectual.
What is The Golden Notebook? The novel is divided into parts, each with the same title, "Free Women" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Inside, each part is also divided into parts. At the center of the narrative is the free woman Anne Wolfe. The beginning of each part is about Anne in her present. And then there are Anna's diary entries. Anna is not an ordinary woman. She keeps not one diary, but four at once. Four notebooks: black, red, yellow, blue. In the black one, Anna records her memories of life in an African colony during World War II. Anna is a communist, so she writes everything about politics and the party in the red notebook. The yellow notebook represents Anna's life story, but told in the form of a novel, that is, in this notebook Anna writes about herself as if from the outside, here she is not Anna, but Ella. The blue notebook was meant to impartially record everything that actually happens to Anna.
Anna has a best friend, Molly. Both are women in their forties. Both are single mothers. Both are communists. Both are free women. When Doris Lessing's book came out in print (1950s), many critics and beyond declared that "this book is an effective weapon in the war against men. It is an ode to feminism, to women free of men. In the preface to the book, however, Doris Lessing says that she put a slightly different meaning into it when she undertook to write the novel. She wanted to write about how people gradually plunges into a deep depression, nothing outwardly it at first manifests itself, then falls into hysteria and, finally, breaks down. The central theme of the novel is that of "disruption"-the idea that "inner splitting, breaking into pieces" may prove to be the path to healing, to an inner rejection of false dichotomies and of fragmentation. Nevertheless, this theme was not noticed, and the book was and still is perceived as the apotheosis of feminist literature.
But, if one removes the labels, it is not so difficult to consider Doris Lessing's idea. Here before us are Anna and Molly. They are independent. And they don't seem to need men. And everything seems to be fine with them. But are these women happy? Molly is a perpetual critic who hates her ex-husband and the way of life and the world he represents. She has a grown-up son. She has a job in the theater. Men happen to come along. But here's the trouble. Men only happen, but they don't bring happiness. Molly is a completely insensitive mother. She doesn't understand what's happening to her son and that she's to blame for the tragedy that's about to unfold.
Anna. Men happen to her, too. One more beautiful than the other. Some women know how to "choose" types. Anna. Anna wrote a book that became a bestseller, and she's been living off the royalties from that novel for years. She doesn't work. She's raising a daughter. Anna married a man she didn't love when she found out she was pregnant so she could have a child in the marriage, and after giving birth, she divorced right away. Such a free woman. Anna. Anna falls in love with a married man and lives with him for five long years. Anna always falls in love out of the blue. Her relationships with the opposite sex are all wrong.
Anna. She's not writing a new novel. She's in a writer's block. But she writes four notebooks, four diaries, as if splitting her life into separate parts. She doesn't want to keep one diary, to avoid chaos, to put everything in its place. But when chaos is in her thoughts, dividing those thoughts into notebooks can bring even more chaos. Unnoticed by herself, she falls into depression, prolonged hysteria, split personality... But even after this, there is a light at the end of the tunnel - Anna puts the four diaries aside and starts a new, golden, notebook, putting her personality back together in pieces.
Everything I've told you above is plot driven. And at first glance, it seems like a great canvas for an all-time novel. Why, then, did I choose to call my review so unsightly: "vomit of human feelings"? It's all about the form. Have you ever read novels written in stream-of-consciousness form? Like Faulkner or Virginia Woolf? Well, their stream-of-consciousness is highly artistic verbal finesse.
Doris Lessing does not write "stream of consciousness. It's much worse than that. She put on paper everything, everything, absolutely everything, down to the smallest detail, that a woman can do and think. We read Anne Woolf's diaries and are immersed not just in her world, but in her brain. No one with such frankness and such naturalism does not write about women's fears, the momentary transition from sadness to the euphoria of happiness, about the female body, orgasm, frigidity and other manifestations of the female body, the female psyche, female feelings. The more you read, the more you get bogged down in it all. To the point of nausea. Doris Lessing described the woman as she is. No embellishments. No artistic softening. No reticence. After reading it, you are left with the distinct feeling that the woman threw up on you with all her thoughts and feelings. There's a lot of truth in that. No, everything here is true. We all think it, we all do it. But we don't talk about it to the world. Much less write about it. Much less read it.
Have you ever had the thought: I'd like to get inside his/her head and find out what he/she is thinking? We've all wanted that at one time or another in our lives. "The Golden Notebook gives us that opportunity. After this book, however, I never want to read anyone's mind. And it's better not to dig deep into my own.
I can see why the Golden Notebook has been hailed as the Bible of feminism. Such a loud female voice has never been heard before. Nevertheless, it doesn't smell of feminism. No heroines, though free women, have no freedom from men, because in the end everyone and everyone always and everywhere wants the same thing:
"Everyone who lives in this world thinks, 'I wish there was just one person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who would treat me kindly.' That's what people really, really want, if they're not lying."
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