The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition (Perennial Classics)

Amazon.com

Much to its author's chagrin, The Golden Notebook instantly became a staple of the feminist movement when it was published in 1962. Doris Lessing's novel deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, a sometime-Communist and a deeply leftist writer living in postwar London with her small daughter. Anna is battling writer's block, and, it often seems, the damaging chaos of life itself. The elements that made the book remarkable when it first appeared--extremely candid sexual and psychological descriptions of its characters and a fractured, postmodern structure--are no longer shocking. Nevertheless, The Golden Notebook has retained a great deal of power, chiefly due to its often brutal honesty and the sheer variation and sweep of its prose.

This largely autobiographical work comprises Anna's four notebooks: "a black notebook which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary." In a brilliant act of verisimilitude, Lessing alternates between these notebooks instead of presenting each one whole, also weaving in a novel called Free Women, which views Anna's life from the omniscient narrator's point of view. As the novel draws to a close, Anna, in the midst of a breakdown, abandons her dependence on compartmentalization and writes the single golden notebook of the title.

In tracking Anna's psychological movements--her recollections of her years in Africa, her relationship with her best friend, Molly, her travails with men, her disillusionment with the Party, the tidal pull of motherhood--Lessing pinpoints the pulse of a generation of women who were waiting to see what their postwar hopes would bring them. What arrived was unprecedented freedom, but with that freedom came unprecedented confusion. Lessing herself said in a 1994 interview: "I say fiction is better than telling the truth. Because the point about life is that it's a mess, isn't it? It hasn't got any shape except for you're born and you die."

The Golden Notebook suffers from certain weaknesses, among them giving rather simplistic, overblown illustrations to the phrase "a good man is hard to find" in the form of an endless parade of weak, selfish men. But it still has the capacity to fill emotional voids with the great rushes of feeling it details. Perhaps this is because it embodies one of Anna's own revelations: "I've been forced to acknowledge that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguiseable private emotion. Even in translation there is no mistaking these lightning flashes of genuine personal feeling." It seems that Lessing, like Anna when she decides to abandon her notebooks for the single, golden one, attempted to put all of herself in one book. --Melanie Rehak

Book Description

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. 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 relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Customer Reviews:

About time.......2007-10-11

I got interested in the year I was born (1962) about a decade ago and searched out things that were of interest and note in that year and so I ran across and read this book.

I found it lyrical, poetic and straightforward. Her view of the world through her notebook approach was intriguing and interesting. I was sort of shocked when i came on to see that amazon had originally written such a timid review.

Im so thrilled that this book that I found and enjoyed simply because of hte year I was born in brought Doris Lessing the triumph she deserved. ON a side note, I was bemused by AMAZONS original editorial review of the book. Read it again knowing that she was just awarded the NOBEL PRIZE for literature.

A brilliant but flawed study in irony and self-indulgence.......2007-01-26

This is as much a period piece as, say, a Jane Austen novel. The characters in this novel are filled with self-pity and remorse, but this appears to be a function of the time in which they are living. For many the post-war (that is, World War II) era was fraught with anxiety and introspection, to the exclusion of joy and humor and mysticism. The bitter ennui of the characters in this novel borders on the amusing, much like present-day 20-year-olds attempting to appear world-weary and all-knowing. (Never mind that young people who are truly all-knowing and world-weary are not sardonic or ironic, but bitter and dangerous). Every other gesture, smile, or grimace in this novel is "ironic", and characters can seemingly intuit the motives of others through every gesture, tic, and change of facial expression. The influence of Freud is strongly felt.

The characters in this novel are largely amoral, and see no causal connection between their actions and the torpor and dissatisfaction of their lives. Yet, from the perspective of 21st Century morality (contradictory as that term may seem) it will be evident to even the casual, cynical reader that the amorality of their thoughts and the immorality of their actions lead directly to their dissatisfaction and that of those around them. They are nothing if not entirely self-indulgent. It seems that the main character, Anna Wulf, never sleeps with any but married men, and then wonders why her affairs end in recrimination and blame. Which is not to exonerate the men she beds; their cruelty and unthinking malice toward Anna and their wives is inexcusable. But as this novel focuses almost exclusively on the feelings and reactions of women, it is the outcomes of their actions which truly matter here, and those actions contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. No doubt the frank talk of sexuality and (briefly) menstruation were quite daring in 1962. Yet from the context of our current era, this knowledge is commonplace and therefore overdone.

Which is not to say that this is not a brilliant piece of writing by an enormously talented writer. Lessing has captured the tenor of the times with great skill. And, much like watching a train wreck unfold, there is a certain grim fascination in seeing Anna's self-destruction (and eventual though minor redemption) come to fruition. But at over 600 pages, it is a large dose of bitterness to swallow. Rumor has it that "The Summer Before the Dark" is a much more accessible book, and perhaps that is the right place to begin for a taste of Doris Lessing. But many consider "The Golden Notebook" her masterwork, and to say one has truly read Lessing is to have read this one. God help you.

Art Imitating Life Imitating Art Ad Infinitum.......2006-08-30

Whenever any author writes in a new fashion there are bound to be an equal numbers of readers who hail it as a groundbreaking work of art as those who wish to consign it to the ground as a turgid unreadable mess. Such was the case when Doris Lessing published THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK. In it she juggles many literary balls, deftly keeping most aloft, while dropping only a few. Lessing's interest is in deconstructing both herself personally as an author writing this book and herself as the subject of this book. Lessing is the master magician. This is no standard autobiographical novel, no roman a clef with herself as the encoded celebrity. Lessing blurs the distinction between the "her" in real life and the "her" in fictionalized life. Lessing writes of Anna Wulf, whose life mirrors closely Lessing's. Both are of South African origin with an abiding interest in race relations, male-female interactions, the proper role of women in a post-War London patriarchal society, the angst of writer's block, sexual affairs gone awry, and for good measure, a dabbling into left-wing politics and communism. This is more than a mouthful, more than what even one talented writer can cover in six hundred plus pages. But Lessing uses THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK as a literary buzz saw, first ripping to pieces Wulf's life and then using some pretty innovative writing to recreate that life one step at a time, so that the reconstituted Anna Wulf of the last few pages may have found some firm ground from which she may stand proudly and assert a multi-pronged femininity that she was sure was always there but had no way to bring to the surface.

There are several Annas in THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, all of whom overlap, diverge, and merge at various points into Doris Lessing, but the Anna at the first page is a weary, writer-blocked author who seeks to use her pen to heal herself, but can't. She struggles, not because of a lack of talent, but because she is not ready to break free from the many shackles binding her. So if Anna cannot build a new life with words, she can use them to break down the old Anna into four separate Annas, each with a new life, a new goal, a new history. The primary Anna places her four selves into colored books, with each color heavily symbolic of that Anna's chosen life course. There is the Anna who writes of her black days in a black country dealing with black issues. There is the Anna of her communist days who gets her little red book. There is the Anna of this Anna who writes of her hoped for golden days in a yellow book. And then there is the Anna who is sort of an amalgam of all of them who gets a blue book. Of all these Annas, Lessing tears herself apart, builds herself right back up, and weighs the differences and potential improvement of each. She does not choose one as the best although the reader probably assumes the last Anna is the best if for no other reason than quantity has a quality all its own. But such an interpretation is probably overly hasty since THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK is a record of the journey that Lessing/Wulf took. But the linking of the first sentence of the book with the identical last sentence suggests a closed loop singularity that she/they chose to tread. Each reader is invited to deconstruct/reconstruct in a similar manner and in so doing may find that Lessing/Wulf has lit a candle that opens more doors than it closes.

The insufferable Anna Wulf.......2006-06-10

Like many other reviewers, I struggled with this book. For more than 600 pages, Anna Wulf explores every thought and emotion that comes into her head and tries to make sense out of her life. This might be an interesting book for fiction writers, who might understand the elaborate process Anna goes through to create characters and combine her life with her art. But for the average reader, this is just too much and too long.

I am very patient with novels. Perhaps too patient, because I should have put this one down sooner. I got all the way to page 500 before I realized I just couldn't go on. And it's quite depressing to invest so much time in a book and then put it down. Doris Lessing says herself that no one should force themselves to read a book they are not connecting with. I should have taken her advice sooner. But while some books you might not just be 'ready' for, I don't think I will ever be ready for this one.

It's disappointing because I am a Doris Lessing fan. The Four-Gated City explores many of the same themes - an emotional breakdown can be constructive in order to build yourself back up whole and understand the world around you. Anna Wulf did have a fragmented mind, as demonstrated through her keeping of four separate notebooks. She was kept together by the routines of her life, such as making breakfast for her daughter. When she didn't have anything constructive to do, she thought herself to death. And if you read this book, you'll likely be right there with her - going crazy.

An interesting mess of a novel.......2005-06-24

Intellectual energy is always a healthy attribute for a writer of fiction. Doris Lessing, an incredibly prolific author who has covered many different genres, has plenty; but her early novel "The Golden Notebook" too often sacrifices coherence and focus for ineffective artistic experimentation. That it doesn't have much of a plot is not a deficiency, because many great modern novels have discarded the notion of a necessity for a conventional plot; rather, its narrative power is diminished by Lessing's apparent indecisiveness about the kind of tale she wishes to tell. In one section she writes synopses of about two dozen short stories in quick succession, and we have to wonder why we're looking at blueprints instead of the finished product.

Summarily, "The Golden Notebook" is a work of fiction about the erratic process of writing fiction, and it problematically attempts to intertwine several novels into one. The main story is that of Lessing's alter ego Anna Wulf, who compiles her memoirs, blending the real with the fictional, into four color-coded notebooks of which the contents are revealed in an alternating fashion. Anna, a rising literary star who has published an acclaimed novel called "Frontiers of War" based loosely on her experiences and her circle of friends in Rhodesia where she lived during World War II, now resides in England with her young daughter Janet, drawing income from gradually dwindling royalties while being courted by philistine film producers who propose to adapt and warp her novel for the screen.

Love and sexuality play major roles throughout the multiple narratives, but "The Golden Notebook" is neither sentimental enough to be a romantic novel nor cynical enough to be a satire. Anna's relationships with a string of men, from her ex-husband Max, a German refugee whom she met in Africa, to an aimless American expatriate named Saul, are the basis of her fictional life; she has created an alter ego of her own named Ella, a struggling novelist who has numerous affairs almost exclusively with married men, to be used possibly as the heroine of a new novel. She can be maternal as well, not just to her daughter but also to her older friend Molly's son Tommy, a restless and discontented youth who is forced to endure the physical aftermath of a botched suicide attempt.

A central feature of "The Golden Notebook" is the changing course of Anna's political outlook which begins in Rhodesia. Her abhorrence of the "color bar"--the racist policies of white European colonists towards blacks--in southern Africa and her observations of the poverty of the workers steered her towards Communism. As it turns out, the British Communists with whom she associates are a muddled and disorganized group, inveterate liars and prevaricators with utopian delusions; but Anna's eventual decision to leave them arises more from her disenchantment with their attitude that art should be used only for political purposes and not to express personal ideas or emotions. This is anathema to a creative writer such as Anna, as it should be; "The Golden Notebook" is Lessing's defiant response to that dictum.

Were I to describe "The Golden Notebook" accurately as remarkably original, uniquely structured, overflowing with a multitude of literary thoughts, and driven by fascinating impulses, you might think it a book worth reading; but in fact I hesitate to recommend it to anybody but an avowed Lessing fan. When Saul asks Anna why she keeps four separate notebooks, she answers that "...it's been necessary to split [her]self up," and therein lies the trouble--the reader is made to suffer for Anna's narrative schizophrenia. I am unsure whether "The Golden Notebook," so energetic but so disjointed, is too much or not enough of whatever it is that it wants to be, but it is definitely not the correct amount.

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What Oracle?
Strong Mixture of Traditional and Experimental
Left Hanging
I loved it, I loved it not, I loved it, I loved it not, etc...
A master of fiction

Oracle Night: A Novel (Auster, Paul)
Paul Auster
Manufacturer: Henry Holt and Co.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0805073205

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In Oracle Night, Paul Auster returns to one of his favorite themes: writing about writers and the act of writing. Recovering from a severe illness that has left him weak and prone to nosebleeds, struggling novelist Sidney Orr takes the suggestion of his mentor, the acclaimed novelist John Trause, and begins a story about a man who, upon considering a near-death experience as an omen (or excuse), walks out on his wife and begins a new life. Nick Bowen, Orr's protagonist, moves to Kansas City and finds work with a man engaged in creating a sort of catalogue of all known persons from a warehouse filled with phonebooks. Dressed in Goodwill clothing, Nick finds it "fitting to don the wardrobe of a man who has likewise ceased to exist--as if that double negation made the erasure of his past more thorough, more permanent." Grace, however, acts strangely soon after Sidney begins the "novel-within-a-novel" in a mysterious blue notebook.

Auster uses footnotes to provide interesting backstory and develops Sidney's insecurities regarding love and fidelity, but when Sidney hits a patchy spot and writes Bowen into a corner, he (and Auster) shrugs and drops the story. The mystery that seemingly unrelated coincidences may have a causal connection is left unresolved, and Trause's delinquent son shows up to facilitate a hollow, climactic ending. Auster is a gifted writer, to be sure, but once trapped by the inner story, Oracle Night loses steam. --Michael Ferch

Book Description

Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously close his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book-only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.

Customer Reviews:

What Oracle?.......2007-09-14

Not sure what Auster's intentions were for this one other than to provide the reader with a series of novel treatments that he never got around to writing. Tied together by the narrator's relationship with Grace and a famous author who used to be Grace's lover, it failed to provide closure at every level.

Strong Mixture of Traditional and Experimental.......2007-04-25

Stylistically somewhere between The New York Trilogy and The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night encompasses what I loved about both.

Auster gives us a bit of a plot, but there is also much experimentation in this rich novel as well. And, like with The New York Trilogy, if you are a fan of linear storytelling with a concrete introduction, body, and conclusion, Oracle Night may not be for you, though there are elements of all three.

That being said, Oracle Night was a captivating read with deeply charismatic characters who were not difficult to emotionally connect with at all. However, there are many (literal) footnotes and several asides, all of which I enjoyed immensely. Unfortunately, I'm not certain a casual reader would feel the same.

So, all in all, if you're an Auster enthusiast, this is more greatness from a wonderful writer. If you're unfamiliar with Auster but are open-minded and interested in trying out a mixture of traditional and experimental storytelling, I think you'd like Oracle Night. However, if you're into more conventional storytelling, I recommend Auster's Mr. Vertigo or The Brooklyn Follies.

Left Hanging.......2007-02-20

This book has a great premise: Sid, a novelist recently out of the hospital after a life-threatening illness, is having trouble writing. In fact, he's having trouble doing much of anything. He feels bad depending on his wife Grace, whom he absolutely adores, to financially support them.

One day while out for a walk, Sid comes across a small stationery store, where he falls in love with a blue composition book. Once home with the book, he sits down and writes for hours on end. He doesn't hear Grace return, and she insists that when she peeked into his study, he wasn't there at all. Sid writes the beginning of an amazing story, then finds he's written himself into a corner from which he can't escape.

Oddly enough, once Sid begins writing in his new notebook, strange coincidences begin surrounding him. Grace dreams about a situation almost exactly the same as the one in the story Sid had been writing. She also disappears without a word one day, just as his main character did. Could Sid be catching a glimpse of the future and writing it into his story?

This book seemed to be leading somewhere, with the strangeness of Mr. Chang, the mysterious past of Grace and the odd blue notebook. However, at the end of the book things were left hanging. Grace's past was cleared up, but the touch of supernatural in the person of Chang and in the story in Sid's notebook were unfinished. I felt like Auster was leading me in one direction but then he just quit.

I loved it, I loved it not, I loved it, I loved it not, etc..........2007-02-08

Even after turning the last page, I found myself unable to determine whether *Oracle Night* was a magically original piece of serious fiction or the sort of pop literary-lite that passes for such in today's commercially oriented publishing industry. This novel by equal turns intrigued me and annoyed me. It sucked me in from the very first page and then seemed intent on spitting me back out every twenty pages or so with its unbearably saccharine sentimentality. But each and every time I was about to call it quits, give the novel just two more pages, it sucked me back in again. The husband who loves his wife almost to the point of imbecility, the black guy with the heart of gold, the gratuitous Holocaust subplot...there were times I was convinced that Auster was straining to stuff all the elements of a surefire Oprah-pick into this novel, going right on down the checklist of all the politically correct sympathetic archetypes as he pictured himself sitting there on a couch in front of a studio audience filled with adoring middle-aged women.

Im still not entirely certain thats not what he was doing.

Still and all, when all is said and done, *Oracle Night* is an engaging novel featuring what has become a trademark of Auster's style: a story within a story within story, all of them obliquely linked together, an interplay of reality and fiction, each reflecting the other. *Oracle Night* is written with the directness of a fable--and this indeed seems to be part of Auster's intention and on that ground one might justifiably attempt to excuse its people-pleasing sunnyside up point of view--but, as in all fables, even though the language is clear and straightforward, the plot takes many strange and unexpected turns. What seems simple at first--a writer, recuperating after a long illness begins to write a novel--ends up being a complex and labyrinthine journey through a heart-rending landscape of love, betrayal, regret, and redemption.

There's plenty about *Oracle Night* to deride and despise, to find intellectually and emotionally dishonest, to disdain as pandering of the first order, but still enough left over to keep you reading, and reading with ardor if for nothing else than to find out what happens next. Which, after all, is one of the marks of a good book. It's a book that I don't regret taking the time to read. Which is another.

A master of fiction .......2007-02-06

This Auster novel is the story of the writer Sidney Orr and his wife Gracie, and her elderly friend- since- childhood the writer John Trause. But saying that I feel how impossible it would be for me to make any summary of the work which would approximate its complexity, intricacy ad richness. It is a work in which reality and imagination are confounded in the most surprising ways. As it is a story of two writers it also contains subplots of the works they are working on, and how these effect the major story of the main characters.
Auster is an unbelievably interesting writer. He can suddenly in the midst of a whole tell a story for two pages which is tremendously effecting. In this work within the fictional work being written by Orr about a man who has simply walked away from his family to make a new life, there is a small story from the Holocaust. It is about a mother getting milk to give to the baby she is carrying around who has been dead for days. The way Auster tells this story is just one example of his mastery.
The relationship between Sidney Orr the narrator-writer and his wife the beautiful Gracie is at the heart of this work. But we have a feeling of mystery and question in their relations to the very end. One long speculative effort at Orr at solving the problem does not necessarily provide the answer. The book ends in a surprising and horrible way.
Auster's power to surprise, his capacity for creating characters of tremendous interest, his ability to make the reader urgently want to know what will happen next, his rich knowledge of human life and situation are also evident in this truly first- rate novel.
After reading it I wonder if there is any writer of fiction working today who has the gifts and the skills , the sheer mastery, that Auster does.

CENTENARY ED WORKS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: VOL. XXI, THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS, 1853185 (Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne)

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CENTENARY ED WORKS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: VOL. XXI, THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS, 1853185 (Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne)
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Manufacturer: Ohio State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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CENTENARY ED WORKS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: VOL. XXII, THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS, 185618 (Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne)

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CENTENARY ED WORKS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: VOL. XXII, THE ENGLISH NOTEBOOKS, 185618 (Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne)
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Manufacturer: Ohio State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0814206719

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A first-aid kit for novelists
No Lollipop
Not your traditional writer's workbook.....
Inspiration and practical advice
Great tool for the aspiring author or the seasoned one

The Novelist's Notebook
Laurie Henry
Manufacturer: Story Press Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1884910424

Amazon.com

There is a page in The Novelist's Notebook for figuring out what keeps you from beginning your novel, and one for imagining your characters 20 or 40 years after your story ends. Author Laurie Henry offers paths for finding a subject, and for reaching a story's dénouement. Perhaps you hunger for a simple writing exercise ("present the mood of a crowd"), or to enrich the writing you are already doing. "Think of the least likely action you can imagine any of your characters doing," Henry suggests, "and then make them do it." These writing exercises are all over the map, but somehow the book seems to work.

Thoughts on fiction writing from a range of novelists round out the book. James D. Houston, when asked how long it takes him to write a novel, usually responds that it takes a year, or even a few. But the real answer, he says, "is that it takes your entire life. I am forty-four, and it took me forty-four years to get this novel finished." Larry Brown likens the toil of writing to that of house-building. "After the house is finished, no matter how tired your muscles have been on all those other days, the memory of the work is something that goes away." And the eminently quotable Ernest Hemingway drives home the isolation of the writer's work with--surprise--a sports analogy. "They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher," he says. "A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him." --Jane Steinberg

Book Description

Laurie Henry nurtures writers throught the long and sometimes lonely task of writing a novel. Her 115 imaginative journal activities offer ways to approach every stage of the process from creating characters to shaping the story, from exploring themes ro revising and polishing. She helps writers develop a schedule, conduct research, benefit from bad days, even think of a title.

Customer Reviews:

A first-aid kit for novelists.......2004-05-03

"The Novelist's Notebook" is a neat idea. It's a journal (there are blank spots on pages where you're supposed to write things) in which you play with exercises and ideas in an effort to improve and aid your novel-writing. It's broken up into six sections: Planning, Beginning to Write, Necessities, Possibilities, When You're Stuck, and Double-Checking and Revising. The table of contents helpfully lists out every exercise, so you can find whatever you need at a moment's notice. Even the shortest chapter has 13 exercises; the longest has close to 30. So whatever your novel-writing inclinations, there should be plenty of things in here that you can make use of.

Perhaps the best detail about the book is that it unabashedly makes use of variety. Where you find material on planning out your novel, you'll also find material on writing without an outline. Where one novelist is quoted as saying that only insane writers allow their characters to decide what happens, another is quoted as explaining that this is the key to her success. The book shows by example that what works for one author will not work for another. It merely suggests that you play with all of the various tools available until you find the ones that work *for you.* This might help the beginning writer to find the confidence to pick and choose her own techniques, rather than mindlessly doing what some opinionated writer once told her to do. Seeing such contradictory and decisive quotes from writers makes it clear that just because one writer thinks it's the only way to do things doesn't necessarily mean a thing.

If this book has any flaw at all, it is that you'll probably only find a couple dozen pages with material that will work for you over and over again, and many of these techniques have been covered in other books. However, as long as you copy the exercises rather than writing in the book, you'll be able to use them over and over with each successive novel you write. You can even photocopy the ones that work for you and keep them together in an individually-tailored packet.

No Lollipop.......2003-04-21

This book was so so . I have seen and read it before and frankly it wasn't worth the money.
It also would have been nice if they had quoted a few more GREAT writers instead of current "pops" whose main thing was to tell us all their belly aches. Who cares if Anne Rice "lost" her Catholic faith? She never had it any way if mere death could do it -- there would be NO Christians!!
Ditto for the others.
This is more like a shrink in a book and the readers are the sounding boards.
Don't waste your cash on this one.

Not your traditional writer's workbook............2002-11-17

So if that sort of thing scares you, check this book out anyways.

Let me start out by saying that I loathe the 'How To Write' books that give you corny exercises that have absolutely nothing to do with your book. You know, the "If my character was a flavor of ice cream, he would be ____" type things. Ugh. I can't see myself working for hours on insipid exercises that have nothing to do with the story I want to tell.

That's mostly the reason why I love this book. It's chock full of exercises, but of the sort that actually PERTAIN to what you want to write. Gasp! Shock! Laurie Henry has hit the nail on the head exactly with the Novelist's Notebook. She encourages you to think out your story in phases -- the book is divided into sections : Planning, Beginning to Write, Necessities, Possibilities, When You're Stuck, and Double Checking and Revising. Basically the idea is to take the idea you have, and to try out different ways of seeing a particular character, theme, or idea. Expand and revise! I didn't think I needed help in these areas, and yet I find this book (and continue to find it) immensely helpful.

Each page is a different exercise, and I can't think of one that isn't particularly helpful. Examples : Write a family tree out, Create an obnoxious character, try writing in a different voice, try a crowd scene, etc. It sounds average in this review, I know, but the way it's presented in the book is nothing short of wonderful. Each page is also complete with a quote on writing from famous authors that are just as fun as the writing exercises themselves.

On a visual note, this is one of the finest looking writing books I've happened to run across. Silly to grade a book on this, I know, but you definitely feel like you're getting your money's worth. The book is slimmer than I imagined, and it's hardcover (another thing that surprised me). Even the paper on the inside is of fairly high quality, and not the glossy type, since you are going to be writing all over this book. I couldn't have been more pleased with my purchase. You may laugh at me grading this, but given the fact that I carry it around with me everywhere, it is a very classy volume to tote around with you, and not in the least embarassing (unlike those obnoxiously orange Complete Idiot's Guides).

Inspiration and practical advice.......2002-07-27

Typical of the suggestions in this book:
"Write a scene in which one or more of your characters must work against a time limit..."
"Write a flash-forward..."
"Write a scene in which coincidence plays a major role..."
"Reveal a secret about one of your characters that you have been keeping from your readers."
"List all the places where the action of your novel will occur"
"Write what you can do to acquire whatever you need to finish the book"

I really think Henry has covered all the bases here -- from planning to writing "the muddle in the middle" to finishing your book. This is truly a workbook with useful exercises to get you started writing, to help you with the minutaie of plot, character development, structure, voice and all the rest of the nitty gritty details of writing a book.

Each page is a challenge to complete an exercise and each page has a quote from a famous writer. For instance, on p. 99, from Margaret Atwood, "I never know how a book is going to end when I begin it. If I knew how it was going to end, I probably would not continue on." Robert Heinlein says,"The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat." And Andre Gide: "Never present ideas except in terms of temperaments and characters."

Both experienced and novice writers will find this useful IF they don't just look at it and put it aside. It's a book to be used!

Great tool for the aspiring author or the seasoned one.......2001-04-21

This nice hardcover book is exactly what it says it is -- The Novelist's Notebook. It is in journal format with key notes on each page with plenty of space left for you to write your own thoughts and answers to the questions Ms. Henry poses.

The book is broken down into categories: Planning, Beginning to Write, Necessities, Possibilities, When You're Stuck, Double-Checking and Revising. Each of those categies has multiple subtopis and writing prompts, advice, and quotes from published authors.

I believe this book would be helpful in any stage of the writing process, whether you are a published author or not. The ideas and exercises would be useful with your first book all the way through your last. Though you can certainly write in the book, I have found I can also use it along with my writer's notebook -- that spiral notebook we all carry everywhere.

Book Description

poet Merrill's 1965 novel w/new afterword

Customer Reviews:

4 ½* Poetic Narrative.......2002-12-10

Another gem from the Dalkey publishing house, this exploration of creativity reads beautifully. For the most part, it succeeds both as literary experiment and as narrative. Author James Merrill is a poet, and his imagery and poetic structure are the major attraction of this "book within a book."

Merrill's protagonist, Sandy, struggles with a novel he's writing about his family and their experiences on the Greek island of "Diblos." Merrill's conceit is that his (Merrill's) book is really the notebook of author "Sandy." There are two types of entries in this notebook: Sandy's draft of a novel, complete with edits, restarts, notes to himself, etc., and Sandy's journal about his "real life" and people and experiences from which he derives much of his novel.

I won't be giving away too much by providing a brief key to the names of characters in Sandy's novel and their counterparts Sandy's life. "Orestes" is the draft novel 's name for Orson, Sandy's half-brother. "Dora" (the older woman unnamed at the start of Sandy's novel), Orestes' friend and lover, is based on Dora, friend and lover of Orson on Diblos who later accompanies him to New York City. "Sandy" remains unnamed in the novel, but is Orestes' half-brother. "Arthur Orson" is Orson's godfather; his place in the novel is not yet resolved.

"The (Diblos) Notebook" is not as confusing as it may sound, and the writing is evocative and beautifully impressionistic: "The islands of Greece Across vivid water the islands of Greece lie. They have been cut out of cardboard and set on bases of at subtle odds with one another, upon bases of pale haze. Their colors are mauve, exhausted blue, tanned rose, here and there crinkled to catch the light. They do not seem It is inconceivable that they are of one substance with the warm red rock underfoot"

These fits and starts are especially prevalent in the beginning of Merrill's book, and (as he notes in his 1994 afterword) are his attempt to show that, contrary to the notions of some Beat writers, the first creative impulse is not always the best. Sometimes revision improves writing. What I found just as interesting, though, were the sentences in which the original sounded truer, as if the revisions were trying to hide certain emotions. The editing device, with the fragments that resemble poetry and the hints at repression get somewhat tiring after awhile, and Merrill focuses more on straightforward narrative in the well-paced second half. His presentations of brilliant, vain Orson, insightful but isolated Sandy, and the contrasts between Greece and New York read easily and are as insightful as the more overtly psychological revisions. It's an interesting book, rich with such pleasures. At times the book is challenging, and Merrill perhaps overplays his "experiment," but it's also one of those books that reveals more pleasures with each rereading (whether of the whole book or just sections). This book was well received by the critics; it was a final nominee for the National Book Award in Fiction in 1965. Definitely recommended.

Average customer rating:
Great Eastern Land: From the Notebooks of David Castell : A Novel
D. J. Taylor
Manufacturer: Trafalgar Square Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 043651625X

Average customer rating:
Pen To Paper - A Novelist's Notebook
Pamela Frankau
Manufacturer: Doubleday & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000J33MVM

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