20 Years On
I’m returning to The Golden Notebook after about two decades. I first read this book in the early 1980s and loved every page of it. At the time it felt like the quintessential women’s novel to me, surprisingly timeless and endlessly relevant. I read it again over the course of that decade a couple of times, finding more in it each time, and becoming more and more intrigued by the African material and by her quite bitter critique of communism from the inside. It’s been almost 20 years since I last read the book, but the gap has not dimmed my enjoyment one bit. All the elements that resonated with me in the past are still there, but now I find myself looking at the text much more historically, and much less universally. I’m also finding myself really interested now in her writing techniques, when and where she shifts from descriptive to analytical, the way the different notebooks shape the flow, the way Lessing builds characters and makes you want to love them and hate them and sometimes shake them, and sometimes all at the same time.
Philippa Levine
on November 17th, 2008 at 12:27 am