t is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four
notebooks in which she
keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to
tie them all together
in a fifth, gold colored
notebook. After the opening realistic section, ironically called "Free
Women," the book fragments into Anna''s four notebooks and each notebook
is returned to four times, creating non-chronological, overlapping
sections. The black notebook is for Anna''s
memories of her life in
Central Africa, which inspired her own best-selling novel; the red one
for her experiences with the British Communist Party; the yellow one
for a fiction she writes that is based on the painful ending of her own
love affair; and the blue one for recording her memories, dreams, and
emotional life. All four notebooks and the frame narrative testify to
women''s struggles with the conflicts of work, sex, love, maternity, and
politics. This kind of novel became popular among English writers
during the 1960s. In them, the novelist is interested in the process of
writing and the finished product. It has been translated into other
languages, including Arabic.