There remains in my memory no other book which I have found so incredible, yet so difficult to read that I would not go through the experience again if possible. Lessing's The Golden Notebook is the first to fit into this ambiguous category: is it a good thing, a bad thing, or perhaps indicative of its remarkable nature? I don't really know.
The Golden Notebook was probably one of the most feminist texts I've ever read. Yet as Doris Lessing writes herself in the reader's guide that came with my book, she never intended it as a feminist text. It just was. Lessing's ability to portray human relationships, male-female sexual interactions in all their different shapes and messed up forms was mindblowing. She isn't one of those overwrought emotional writers which waste endless words, ink, paper on a simple interaction - her succinctness is probably one of the best I've seen. Yet at the same time due to the sheer mass of all her words, the density of content, made her extremely tiring to read. It was like eating a too rich cake. No wonder I could only plod slowly through.
Finally there is the aspect of mental illness: a theme I had not noticed as I read the book. Simply put, I had not noticed that it was there at all, because I legitimately thought that people did behave like that (and that it was acceptable). That idea, strikes me mostly more than anything else in the novel.
I guess I've found a book to add to the 2011 list.
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