SYNOPSIS

The novel follows the adventures of Anna Wulf through her diaries, four notebooks that she tries to unite in the end into one called golden. It is also about the people who have had an important influence on her life, such as her daughter, her ex-husbands and lovers, her friend Molly and her son Tommy. The narrated facts are interspersed with episodes extracted from the diaries, in which the protagonist’s experiences in Africa, before and during the Second World War, are recounted; the period in which she was a member of the Communist Party; a novel she tries to write; and her daily life, between dreams and reality.

REVIEW

The reading was very intense and gave me several food for thought on the general behaviour of men in those time; on the internal female struggle between the desire to form a family and freedom from any type of bond, in order to live their own life to the full; and on the influence of a political ideology. It is not a novel that follows a plot, and the excessive length of the book is sometimes discouraging, despite this, from my point of view it is an interesting reading experience that leaves its mark.
The author alternates the use of the first and third person narrator in the different parts that make up the story and, on some occasions, seems to create a certain confusion between the two points of view. As for the characters, they are much more in-depth in the psychological aspect rather than the physical one, and it is a choice coherent with the theme of the book.
Analysing the structure of the novel, the protagonist’s monologues prevail over the dialogues, and the story goes slowly, as if the author wanted to reproduce not only the socio-cultural context of the time, but also the feelings that those conversations produced, such as, for example, frustration and misunderstanding.
On the main theme, the writer focuses all her efforts and deals with it explicitly until the end of the book. Around it, the writer frequently uses time leaps that often do not clarify in which historical moment the protagonist is or the facts are told. Furthermore, she does not provide many details of the physical space in which the episodes take place, rather she focuses her attention on the inner space of the protagonist’s consciousness.