قصة الكتاب :
The Golden Notebook is the first of three novels on the same theme that were authored by Doris Lessing. Published in 1962, this book along with the ones that followed it explores mental and societal breakdown. It contains powerful anti-war messages and quotes, includes a thorough analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to 1950s as well as a look at the budding sexual and women’s liberation movements at the time. It is about one woman’s search for personal and political identity, told in many voices.

\r\nThe main character is Anna Wulf, a writer who keeps four notebooks. She is a divorced, single mother and is afflicted with writer’s block. The four notebooks serve as unique spaces in which Wulf records her life. The book is about her attempt to tie all the four together into a single golden notebook. The Golden Notebook includes excerpts of stories of Anna and her friend Molly Jacobs in a narrative titled Free Women and is scattered in no particular order in between the contents of the four notebooks. They give us a glimpse into the lives of Anna and Molly as well as the relationships that they have. Each notebook represents a different compartment in Anna’s life and has a different colour. There is the black notebook that contains details of Anna’s experience in Southern Rhodesia before and during the Second World War, which also inspired her first successful novel as a writer. The red notebook symbolically details her experiences as a member of the Communist Party. The yellow notebook contains a story based on the painful ending of her love affair. The blue notebook is more like a personal diary where Anna records her emotions, dreams and thoughts regularly. Each notebook is returned to four times and mixed together with the writings from Free Women to construct a deconstructed novel. This post-modern styling of the novel is its most unique feature and has attracted a good deal of attention. Lessing however has always maintained that the novel is about more important themes. The styling of the novel has been deliberated scattered and broken to provide a depiction of fragmentation. The mental breakdown that Anna suffers is the theme that Lessing attempts to portray through this fragmented narrative. Her attempts to put everything together into the golden notebook are part of the final stage of her mental breakdown and a literary depiction of her desperate attempt to overcome the madness and maintain sanity.

\r\nThe novel hovers on the edge of madness and explores the idea that a writer who manages to compose a streamlined and uniform narrative somehow betrays the truth of human existence. The TIME in 2005 ranked The Golden Notebook among the 100 Best English-language novels since 1929. It has been translated into other languages and has also been acclaimed as one of the most important books regarding the women’s movement of the 1960s.\r\n