My first Doris Lessing. (About time, considering she just won the Nobel…) And despite it’s age (it was first published in 1962), I’m finding it surprisingly fresh and relevant. Her wranglings and disillusionment with the “CP” (Communist Party) could be the decline of a belief in any ideology, and her parallel struggles with the men in her life (fascinatingly, on three levels: her, her protagonist Anna, and Anna’s fictional doppelganger Ella) seem to indicate that we haven’t moved very far. I tend to gravitate toward those novels that are the most biographical. I’m as interested in a writer’s life and his or her craft.The Doris Lessing Website calls this her “longest and most ambitious” work. Lessing herself has more to say:
About five years ago I found myself thinking about that novel which most writers now are tempted to write at some time or another —about the problems of a writer, about the artistic sensibility. I saw no point in writing this again: it has been done too often; it has been one of the major themes of the novel in our time. Yet, having decided not to write it, I continued to think about it, and about the reasons why artists now have to combat various kinds of narcissism. (more)
Bingo. If I’ve had any reluctance about blogging, it’s due to the incredible narcissism I keep running into out here on the vast, untamed Web, on all levels, from mommy blogs to politics to literary criticism. Do any of us really have anything to say, or do we just need to hear ourselves talking to prove that we exist?Lessing was toying with two books at the birth of The Golden Notebook: one on the travails of a blocked writer, and another on literary criticism, hence the inspiration for the multiple notebooks on which the novel is based. By merging the two books, she believes she broke through the cliche´:
This novel, then, is an attempt to break a form; to break certain forms of consciousness and go beyond them. While writing it, I found I did not believe some of the things I thought I believed: or rather, that I hold in my mind at the same time beliefs and ideas that are apparently contradictory. Why not? We are, after all, living in the middle of a whirlwind.
To admit to holding two contradictory beliefs in such an absolute time is a real act of courage.