{"id":3978,"date":"2012-04-07T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2012-04-07T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=3978"},"modified":"2025-05-28T19:17:20","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T19:17:20","slug":"faded-colored-notebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/faded-colored-notebooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Faded colored notebooks"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/blockquote>\n

The Grauniad<\/em> celebrates<\/a> a half-century of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook<\/em> by asking various writers what they think of it.\u00a0 The book is appalling, and one hopes will be forgotten before another half-century elapses.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

In her earlier novels and subsequently, Lessing is one of the best writers in English of any century – gripping narratives, superbly-judged choices of words, inviting and compelling voices, and a sharp observational intelligence.\u00a0 \u00a0 The Golden Notebook<\/em>, however, is our Doris off her game.\u00a0 Self-indulgent, overly-long, poorly-structured, apparently unedited, it is a mis-mash of different stuff that looks as if it were put down once in a hurry and then, it seems, never re-read.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

To this reader, the book appears as some random ideas for a novel, or perhaps several, which were never reworked coherently: Clip some jottings together, put a cover on them, and call it post-modern – that should work.\u00a0\u00a0 If art really is the doing of all things with artlessness, as Piet Hein once said*, then this book lacks even an attempt to be artful, as if the author was taking the michael, or worse.<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n

* FOOTNOTE:<\/em><\/p>\n

There is but one art,
\nNo more, no less:
\nTo do all things
\nWith artlessness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Grauniad celebrates a half-century of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook by asking various writers what they think of it.\u00a0 The book is appalling, and one hopes will be forgotten before another half-century elapses.\u00a0 In her earlier novels and subsequently, Lessing is one of the best writers in English of any century – gripping narratives, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-literature","p1","y2012","m04","d07","h12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3978"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13911,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3978\/revisions\/13911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}