Reviews with content warning for Racism - The Golden Notebook

This is a difficult book to unpack, that's exactly why it is so good. It is full of cognitive dissonance and a desperation to make sense of the world. Anna is constantly dissecting and coming to conclusions, just to turn around and come to a different conclusion a few pages later, followed by another, and another, often increasingly and unsatisfyingly simplistic. She seems to feel safe in these oversimplifications. Buttoning up the situation, to borrow her own phrasing. Anna is both ignorant and highly cognizant. She is full of love and hate. She deals with prejudice constantly, both internal and external, both of others and her own.

Outside of the complexity of the characters themselves, Anna being the only one I have the energy to try to "name" in such detail (more phrasing borrowed from the character's own very defined speech patterns), this book tackles 3 main issues in my opinion: relationships (with others and the self), men vs women, and communism in the 50s. The communism representation was particularly interesting for me as it came from an angle I had never seen. It focuses a lot on the dissatisfaction of those within the party itself as they grapple with the ideals that they entered the party with vs the reality of what the party has become and the atrocities which have been committed in its name. The other two themes were more relevant overall though and therefore a bit more complex, so I won't go into detail here.

The negatives for me were mostly the length and the structure. It is easily the longest book I have ever read, not by page count, but by word count. If they used a more standard font size, this book would easily hit 1000+ pages. The structure, while deeply unique, clever, and ambitious, it heavily affected the pacing at times in rather negative ways. There are no real chapters, and how it is otherwise divided up leaves it with sections that range from anywhere from 2-3 pages to 70+, and certain notebook sections can be a bit mind-numbing to get through. It is also good to note this is a very straight white story. The representations of Africans and gay people, while showing more thought than the average white novel for the time, definitely have some issues. However, the Lessing does at least seem to be aware of Anna's/other characters' ignorance and prejudice, as well as her own, which is displayed in various ways, even if she doesn't quite know the best way to deal with it, which is actually pretty consistent with just about everything else these characters are going through.

They think and think and think and still have no idea what the hell is going on. I can relate.
4.25/5

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