«The Golden Notebook» de Doris Lessing, guanyadora del Premi Nobel per la literatura al any 2007.

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. The black cover one is the review of the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer, Anna tries to bring all four books together in a golden notebook.

A novel of shocking power and blistering honesty: The Golden Notebook.

As a feminist and a free woman, Anna Wulf displays some curiously traditional female behaviour, which is even more puzzling on rereading. On one page she can declare that «every woman believes in her heart that if a man does not satisfy her she has a right to go to another.» But this same woman  is discovered preparing a meal for the man she loves and knows she is about to lose. Much care is lavished on this memorable set piece. Throughout the novel it is the women who do all the cooking and make all the cups of tea. Even for men to whom they owe less than nothing. It’s almost like being in a Kerouac novel. And yet it seemed liberating at the time.

It is a radical work, whose character nonetheless derives from and is encompassed by literary tradition. Doris Lessing set out to write a novel that was neither morally deformed by the politics nor was forced to process the deformity through modernist techniques. But The Golden Notebook is a consciously traditional text. The evasiveness of the English novel has nothing in common with Lessing’s personal and political realism at all.