[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-143828-en":3,"doc-seo-143828-105":31,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":92},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":21,"is_downloadable":21,"audit_status":21,"page_count":22,"language":23,"language_code":24,"site_id":25,"html_lang":24,"table_of_contents":26,"faqs":27,"seo_title":28,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":29,"read_time":30},143828,1099514067415,"Rowan","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/100002539d78ffe74a7?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1779092875211072502",2,"Literature","The Golden Notebook - Introduction","Doris Lessing’s introduction reflects on how The Golden Notebook has continued to surprise readers across countries, generations, and institutions since its publication. Lessing discusses its reception in universities, history and politics classes, and among students in different social contexts, linking the novel’s emotional matrix to historical understanding. She highlights themes of politics, women’s experience, changing communist ideals, and the book’s sustained “charge,” vitality, and capacity to contradict surface messages.","Doris Lessing  \nThe Golden Notebook  \nWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR  \nIntroduction  \n1993  \nThis novel’s progress continues to surprise me, because it keeps putting its head up in new places, and often not where one would expect. The mostrecent was China, where I was on a trip at the invitation of the main Chinese writers’ association. An edition of 80,000 has just been published, not a large number in that vast country, a small edition for them. It sold out in three days. It had been published once before, and had done well.“Everyone has read it,” they say, meaning, as this usually does these days, mostly people in universities. The universities I visited in Beijing, Shanghai, Shi’an, and Canton (Guanjou) have a most lively and informed interest in British and American literature. Only now has it occurred to me that universities are more and more our equivalent of the medieval monasteries, keeping things of the mind alive and well in countries where people are too poor to buy books. (Not that China can any longer be described as a poor country.) Recently I got a letter from a waitress in a hotel in Rio saying,“I can’t afford to buy books. My husband works in the university and he is allowed to use the library and he got The Golden Notebook for me and I feel I must tell you…”  \nI hear that the book is being assigned in history classes and politics classes in schools and universities. This pleases me, since one of the reasons I wrote the novel was that I felt there are blank spaces where novelsought to be, particularly in nineteenth-century literature. For instance, I would like to read novels that give the taste and flavour of the Chartists, and their personal lives, their discussions, their conflicts, and perhaps, the small revolutionary groups that flourished in London in the nineteenth century, most of them dedicated to fomenting revolution in Europe. I think The Golden Notebook is a useful testament to its time, particularly now that communism is dead or dying everywhere, or changing its nature. Nothing seems more improbable than what people believed when this belief has gone with the wind. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.  \nA Yugoslav woman student said to me (this dates the reminiscence),“How interesting to read about all those old politics.” Old and exotic in communist Yugoslavia, but you may hear too,“It describes what happened in my political group in the seventies” or “The Golden Notebook describes my life as a woman.”  \nWhen it first came out it was considered quite an advanced book, but recently it was given to girls of fifteen in a school in North London and they took it in their stride. This year it is being read in a class in the University of Zimbabwe, at the request of black and white students, male and female. They were surprised, so said the teacher, a friend, that the talk of the young communists was idealistic and optimistic in those ancient days before there was a communist regime in Zimbabwe. They associated communism and communists with self-seeking and opportunism. It had not occurred to them that communism had begun as a genuine dream for a better world.  \nI continue to get letters from men about The Golden Notebook—as many as from women. They may say that it opened their eyes to the feelings and experiences of women, or that what interests them is the politics, or the“style” of the main American character, who now seems to them quite ridiculously macho. Or a woman writes to say—and this has happened often—that her boyfriend or husband gave her the book, saying it influenced him. I also hear the other side of this when a man says he has just read such-and-such a book and liked it. He was at a university where Doris Lessing was the property of the women’s movement, and so he did not bother to read my books and now he was sorry he didn’t and was writing to tell me so.  \nYes, I do get a lot of feedback, and I am always interested,","cbCaiqhIw8GM7Eta","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiqhIw8GM7Eta","pdf",3038242,5,1,605,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n## Reception and reading in universities\n## Politics, communism, and changing belief\n## Emotional “matrix” and narrative truth\n## Writing process and the novel’s vitality","[{\"question\":\"Why does Doris Lessing think the novel keeps surprising readers?\",\"answer\":\"She notes the book keeps “putting its head up in new places,” reaching audiences in unexpected locations and contexts, and sustaining a notable vitality or “charge.”\"},{\"question\":\"How does Lessing describe the novel’s relationship to politics and communism?\",\"answer\":\"She explains that readers connect it both to historical communist dreams and to later realizations, and she emphasizes the way novels convey the emotional texture of political eras beyond formal history.\"},{\"question\":\"What does Lessing say fiction can do better than factual records?\",\"answer\":\"She concludes that fiction is better at “the truth” than a factual record, because it can capture lived complexity and emotional realities more effectively.\"}]","The Golden Notebook - 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