Reading this novel today one might well wonder what all the fuss was about. So, did Lessing achieve her “major aim”? does the novel amount to a “wordless statement”? Lessing wrote in the same 1971 preface that her “major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped…” and “this was not noticed”. Now is this judgement at all based on “The Golden Notebook”? Is it Epic? Sceptical? Full of fire? Is it visionary? And did it subject a divided civilisation, if indeed it was so divided, to scrutiny?Īccording to Robert McCrum “The Golden Notebook probably explains why, in 2007, Lessing was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.”Īs Lessing wrote in the 1971 preface for this novel written in 1962 that “there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap” she must have felt that she was attempting something too much, even something great, and the Novel Committee seem to have agreed with her, even that she succeeded in doing something great. “ that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny” – Nobel Prize Committee.
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