Golden Notebook discussion has begun

A quick reminder: the online conversation addressing Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook begins today. Check it out here.

Haphazard browsing on the site's forum brought me to a comment noting that the New York Times included The Golden Notebook on a list of the books Barack Obama says have been important to him. Another comment alluded to the Bechdel test, and still another paid tribute to Alison Bechdel. I have a feeling this site could be a real time sink...

A Conversation in the margins of The Golden Notebook

When Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook first appeared in 1962, it made a major splash. And though its author disdained feminism and feminists herself, the novel became an important reading experience for many feminists over the next couple of decades. I can recall excited discussions that brought out both deep interest and ambivalence in the novel's feminist readers. Almost half a century later, now, The Institute for the Future of the Book has organized an online close reading of the novel.

Bob Stein, whose brainchild this is, writes:

Seven women will read Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and carry on a conversation in the margins. The idea for the project arose out of my experience re-reading the novel in the summer of 2007 just before Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Golden Notebook was one of the two or three most influential books of my youth and I decided I wanted to "try it on" again after so many years. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reading experiences of my life. With an interval of thirty-seven years the lens of perception was so different; things that stood out the first-time around were now of lesser importance, and entire themes I missed the first time came front and center. When I told my younger colleagues what I was reading, I was surprised that not one of them had read it, not even the ones with degrees in English literature. It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between two readers, one under thirty, one over fifty or sixty, in which they react to the book and to each other's reactions. And then of course I realized that we now actually have the technology to do just that. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Meade, my colleague and director of if:book London, the Arts Council England enthusiastically and generously agreed to fund the project. Chris was also the link to Doris Lessing who through her publisher HarperCollins signed on with the rights to putting the entire text of the novel online.

Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don't yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web's two-dimensional environment and we're hoping this experiment will help us learn what's necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible. In addition to making comments in the margin, we expect that the readers will also record their reactions to the process in a group blog. In the public forum, everyone who is reading along and following the conversation can post their comments on the book and the process itself.

The seven writers participating are Naomi Alderman, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Laura Kipnis, Philippa Levine, Lenelle Moise, Helen Oyeyemi, and Harriet Rubin.

I'm very curious to see how this will work. I'm thinking, myself, of trying to make time to do a re-read before November 10. It's been years since I've read any of Doris Lessing's work (mostly because her conservative ideology has, since The Sentimental Agents, tended to get up my nose), and I'm always very interested to see how books that mattered to me thirty years ago strike me today.

Thinking About The Four Gated City on Doris Lessing's Birthday

By Nancy Jane Moore

I just finished re-reading Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City and am pleased to report that I still think it's a great book. I haven't read all of Lessing, so I will refrain from saying it's her best book, but it remains my favorite.

I was a little unsure at first. I did a panel at Capclave on re-reading, and one of the subjects we discussed, over and over, was that some books do not hold up well on re-reading, especially many years later. And the beginning of The Four-Gated City is slow, and reads like a fairly traditional tale of human relationships.

But it moves on to include the best comprehension of the phenomenon we call the Sixties I have ever read. Written during the Sixties by someone who was open enough to see what was happening and old enough to make sense of it, she gets to the heart of the matter, melding together swinging London, communal living, and exploration of the mind in a way that both validates my own experiments of the time and makes me blush to realize how superficially I understood what I was doing.

More important -- at least to the readers of this blog and to me at this stage of the game -- it's science fiction. The book moves from conventional explanations of insanity into mind exploration, using some ideas that might be Jungian, but going farther into potential telepathy. The appendix is pure near future apocalyptic SF.

And while The Four-Gated City's near future is our recent past, the fact that the predicted catastrophes didn't happen in the extreme way presented in the book doesn't weaken its power, because the truth underlying those catastrophes (climate change, new plagues, dangerous and foolish governments, people who get stuck in negative scripts in their brains) are all quite familiar to us at present. Here's one of a hundred lines that struck me:

It can be taken absolutely as an axiom that the populace will not be told the truth, nine-tenths because the governments concerned won't know what is the truth, will be as much in the dark as anybody else, and one-tenth out of panic, greed, hysteria, fear of their own citizenry.

Sound familiar?

Here's what really caught me on this re-read: This is the book that paved the way to science fiction for me.

I am not one of those people who read SF as a kid. I didn't disdain it, but I didn't focus on it. In college I came across Dune, the Foundation Trilogy, Stranger in a Strange Land, and (of course) Lord of the Rings, but while those books affected me, I didn't separate them into a separate category from other reading.

It was a few years after reading The Four-Gated City that I began seriously reading SF, because it was in SF that I found the same kind of complex ideas that Lessing raises. At the time, much so-called literary fiction was mired in stories about middle and upper class people and their failed marriages -- a subject that bores me to death -- while SF looked at at any number of ways we might live.

No wonder I'm not in the Analog Mafia -- I didn't come to SF for science and technology themselves (though they bring a lot to the mix). I came for thinking that made me question the most fundamental things -- what does it mean to be human, how does the human race become civilized, what capacities do we have that we are ignoring?

No wonder I'm impatient with formulaic fantasy and space opera, much as I love a good rollicking adventure story. I want ideas, even in my adventures.

Blame it on Doris Lessing. She ruined me for superficial SF. Give me ideas, meaty ideas, ideas that haunt me for years. I first read The Four-Gated City in 1973 and I'm still thinking about it. It's just possible I'll still be thinking about it when I die.

Finally, Doris Lessing Wins the Nobel Prize

By Nancy Jane Moore

Doris Lessing has won this year's Nobel Prize in literature. It's about time. I've been waiting to hear this for years.

I began reading Lessing when I was in college and have read her ever since. My favorite of her books is one I haven't seen mentioned yet in the news about the prize: The Four-Gated City. For years I would bring up this book in conversation no matter what subject we were discussing. "Oh, yes," I would say, "Doris Lessing wrote about that in The Four-Gated City."

And she did -- The Four-Gated City gets at the heart of politics, of mysticism, of racism, of men and women, of the Sixties (even though she was a generation older than that), of just being alive. It even touches on the fantastic, presaging her later SF series of novels, Canopus in Argos. The Four-Gated City is usually cited as the final work in the Children of Violence series, but it stands on its own. The first four books introduce you to Martha Quest, but in The Four-Gated City Martha shows us the world.

It's been years since I last read it, but I just dug out my battered paperback copy so I can re-read it once more. Here's the last sentence, which I recognized immediately:

Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else it been, ever ...

By the way, Lessing says she writes science fiction when she does, which is refreshing.

I recall when Shikasta came out, the New York Review of Books had Gore Vidal review it, presumably on the assumption that she was a literary writer who had dipped into SF and so was he (if you define literary very loosely, at least when he's writing fiction). Vidal, predictably, completely missed the point and trashed it. I haven't taken his work seriously since. Of course, Vidal hasn't won the Nobel and while I often find the Academy's choices puzzling, I doubt he will. (If you want to read this review, it's available for three bucks here, though you can probably tell all you need to know about it from the nasty first paragraph, which is at that same link for free..)

I was just looking online to see which of Lessing's works were still in print -- The Four-Gated City apparently isn't -- and was amazed at how many books she's written. I think of myself as someone who reads Lessing, and yet I doubt I've read half of them. I should snap up some used hardbacks quick online, before the prices go up.

Of course, The Golden Notebook is always mentioned when Lessing is discussed. It's a brilliant book, but very painful: I read it twice some years ago and recall reading faster and faster to get through it because I hurt for the characters. I should chase down my copy of that and re-read it, too.

She turns 88 next week, and according to Wikipedia, she's the oldest person to receive the Nobel.

A Reuters story, published on The Washington Post online says she's the 11th woman to win the literature award, which has been given since 1901. (34 women overall have received Nobels, according to the article.) I won't bother to discuss here how absurd that number is; I'm just going to enjoy the fact that a writer whose work made a lasting imprint on my life won the Nobel.