When men try understanding women

Imagine a man attempting to understand a woman. He would fret over the complexities of female psychology, scratch his head in frustration and waste uncountable pages and pens. There would be several rewritings, broken threads of reason, sparks of emotion and passages of to-and-fro analytical narrative. And in the end after implementing much intelligence our diligent writer would come up with something very similar to 'The Golden Notebook'.
Yes, dear readers, that is clearly what Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing does in her book 'The Golden Notebook'. Lessing, keenly and creatively, dissects Anna Wulf, a middle-aged writer who lives with her young daughter and is often visited by her friend Molly. Despite the fact that Anna's first novel about Africa was a success, she lives a writing career of dissatisfaction. She is just not happy with her writing. To add to it, abandoned by her lover, Anna now faces a writer's block. In the wake of her inability to write and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, she decides to maintain four coloured diaries to salvage her confused identity.
Page by page, she records her sexual experiences, emotional upheavals, political disillusionment, reactions to her society and the confusion of being a 'free woman'. The black notebook relates Anna's early years in Africa on which her debut novel was based. The red notebook documents her political views, especially that of communism in a post-war Britain. The yellow notebook shelters a fictionalized version of Anna's personal experiences which is basically the raw material for her next novel. Finally there's a blue notebook which is Anna's true personal diary where she mentions Saul Green, an American ex-communist and self-confused personality, who was her lover.
Having fragmented herself unintentionally by writing the four diaries, Anna then faces a greater risk. She is no more just one person but is a disjointed combination of four different wholes. She grows fearful of losing her personality altogether and tries to restore order in her life by bringing together all four notebooks in a final notebook called the golden notebook.
Initially looking at herself from four different angles and then unifying those viewpoints, Anna's journey takes her to her true self, to the ultimate whole of a 'free woman'.
Structurally The Golden Notebook is significantly complex. One must sit down with a pencil and scribble on the sides of pages to grasp the book quickly. Otherwise it will take several readings before one can comprehend the larger picture of the novel. On the other hand in terms of psychoanalysis this novel could be a landmark. Every word, every glance, every gesture exchanged between a man and a woman is depicted with great insight. Lessing vividly portrays the transformation of a man-woman relationship from moment to moment.
As for Anna calling herself a 'free woman', nothing could be more ironical. Anna's newly declared 'freedom', instead of being a source of happiness, brings her misery. With a 'freedom' to love as many men as she wants, she feels the pangs of desolation more than ever. Having 'freed' herself from communism, Anna is now terrorized by the news of threats to humanity in the daily newspapers. For Anna life as a 'free woman' is more of a pain than bliss. Who knows, maybe Lessing intends to show that regardless of a woman's desire for freedom, she ends up feeling lonely and miserable when she achieves it.
With complex but rounded characters, in-depth psychological portraits, fragmented structure, sometimes conversational and sometimes stream of consciousness mode of writing, The Golden Notebook is a difficult but rewarding book. In order to reap its benefit, a reader must be patient and must invest time because this novel must be read and discussed with other readers. This novel must be written about and debated over. Eventually The Golden Notebook must be read again, to start a fresh discussion, a new interpretation.

Efadul Huq is at BRAC University and a regular book critic.