
The Golden Notebook
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Buy Now for £41.99
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Narrated by:
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Juliet Stevenson
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By:
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Doris Lessing
About this listen
One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, The Golden Notebook was brought to the attention of a wider public by the Nobel Prize award to Doris Lessing in 2007.
Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook: sources of her creative inspiration in a black book, communism in a red book, the breakdown of her marriage in a yellow book, and day-to-day emotions and dreams in a blue book. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.
In this authentic, taboo-breaking novel, Lessing brings the plight of women’s lives from obscurity behind closed doors into broad daylight. The Golden Notebook resonates with the concerns and experiences of a great many women and is a true modern classic, thoroughly deserving of its reputation as a feminist bible. A notoriously long and complex work, it is given a new life by this – its first unabridged recording.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©1962 Doris Lessing (P)2010 Naxos AudiobookCritic reviews
Everybody should listen to this book!
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I urge every adult human being, especially those of us who write fiction, to immerse yourself in this really quite disturbing experience.
I'm not the same person I was when I first downloaded the book and began listening- the mark of great fiction
Superb and challenging classic novel
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An examination of the sexual politics of her time.
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Not to be read or listened to if you feel in need of cheering up!
At times delightful at times depressing
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Juliet Stevenson helps with soldiering through it all.
it's all very odd, isn't?
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There is brilliant satire in places. Nevertheless this is a big dense book which i think i might have found hard going to read on paper. To listen to it has been nutritous brain food and superb entertainment. Juliet stevenson is an excellent narrator.
An astonishing novel
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I enjoyed the early African setting but as the plot developed , and I am not sure plot is the correct word, it became an uncomfortable listen. This was not because of the performance but because of the content. A brilliant feminist work of its time but it rambles and one feels inside a mental crisis.
For me the writing was skilled but I got confused with the structure and it is a huge work and I gave up.
Three cheers for the narrator
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But also utterly timeless.
I don’t think I’ve come across such an accurate and penetrating a voice as Anna Wulf before.
Astonishing
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intimate details with plenty of nasty cruelty thrown in.
Well read and performed by Juliet Stevenson. I hope she
was well paid for her endurance.
The ugly side of humanity
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Second, I spent quite a lot of the 27 hrs and 33 mins feeling that I must be too stupid to 'get' the complexities of this book that I know is a modern feminist classic, because the blurb and a lot of other stuff on line says it is. In fact, I resorted to looking at narratives on line at one point maybe about 5 hrs in, in order to read what I ought to be thinking or feeling. So I know that the author herself describes the central theme as fragmentation. This is applied to love, and relationships of all types; to society, politics; and to mental health. There may be more which I missed. Anyway, I recommend a quick Google if only to sort out the Note Books upon which the novel is based - each of which deals with a different narrative, style, period and purpose.
Then at times, I felt I was 'getting' the point. Frankly these moments were mainly in the Black Book sections. These are more story-based - easier to access, I suppose. And even in the opaque parts (for me, about 60% of the time), I was often just enjoying the writing.
However, I grew to detest Anna, which made the journey through the last 25% of the book even harder. I was so sick of her internal whining, I was heartily glad she gave up writing and just lived off the royalties of her one piece of work, ever.
I enjoyed the jibes at organised politics - here, the British Communist Party, mainly. It is peopled mostly by rich and/or privileged Comrades who do almost nothing except drink, lay about, have sex with one another and mock other, working class people. I enjoyed what I hope was a very extended dig at self-absorbed pseudo-intellectuals such as Anna and their vapid circles. I really do hope we were supposed to laugh out loud at much of her endless navel-gazing. If not, I really did miss the target.
But even for a book written in the early 1960s, it is very difficult to reconcile it with feminism, because it is based solely on the premise that women need men, and especially to have sex with them, in order to be 'real women'. I can see the descriptions of sex and bodily functions - tame for 2021 - might have been ground breaking in 1962, however, so I think I will focus on that aspect of the treatment of women.
I didn't hate (all of) it. I enjoyed some of it. But I did get very bored by c hour 18 and breathed a sigh of relief when it ended.
Confusing reactions to a very complex book
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