SHORT NOTE: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

              The Golden Notebook is extremely long and not very well organized; despite its being considered a novel, it is a compendium of Doris Lessing's views on all those issues which have occupied her. The story of the novel is of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she records her life, and her attempt to tie them together in a fifth, gold-coloured, notebook. Lessing indicates in her introduction to her novel that the major theme of The Golden Notebook is that of cracks or mental breakdown. To emphasize the significance of this theme, in the opening page of the novel, one of the first statement made by Anna is: "everything's cracking up". The form of the novel and its topics were praised by some and scorned by others when the book was first released. The novel experiments with chronological sequence and narrative voice and it deconstructs language as an endeavor to search for meaning and truth. All of these experimental aspects became the principle elements of the postmodernist movement that followed the book's publication. The Golden Notebook also touches on feminist issues that were only just beginning to be debated at the same time it was published. Additionally the book openly discusses the protagonist, Anna, as being attracted to communism. At the same time, however, Anna is dissatisfied with communism as a practice. Anna's fragmentation mirrors the fragmentation of society. Horrors of war left people afraid and divided, unable to connect. Anna is unable to connect pieces of herself and of her life and of her art. That is why she splits herself into different selves: Anna the mother, Anna the friend, the writer, the communist, and Golden notebook is an attempt to connect all the pieces and bind the book The Golden Notebook together.