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Loading... Sons and lovers (original 1913; edition 1913)by D. H. Lawrence
Work detailsSons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (1913)
None.  anguinea | Apr 4, 2013 |  Fairly interesting, although I admit a tad dry at times. (  ) HadriantheBlind | Mar 30, 2013 | Rated: C+ The New Lifetime Reading Plan: Number 113 (  ) jmcdbooks | Jan 28, 2013 | Published in 1913, this was surely schocking to society, describing an affair between a married woman and a younger man, as part of a larger saga of a working family in the outskirts of Nottingham, England, before the first world war. The novel coalesces around the loves of Paul Morel, an aspiring artist, who loves his mother most of all, and finds his adoring girlfriend from his youth too stifling, but her friend, an older married woman living apart from her husband, enticing. His story is told at length, beginning with his mother’s story, his father’s rough ways as a coal miner, and his childhood. At the end, his married lover returns to her husband, who hd been befriended by Paul after an accident, and Paul rejects the desparate plea of Miriam, his girlfriend, to end on a very existentialist note, with Paul feeling as though he is nothing, longing for his mother, but vowing to go on after her death. The landscape and society evoked in the descriptions is beautiful, and now foreign and lost, with the local towns connected by trains, and dispersed among walking paths and fields. I was slow in reading this, not interested in parts, but I had to see how the relationships would end. ( ) neurodrew | Nov 18, 2012 | eBook Quite simply, this is a gorgeous book, and I'm more than a little ashamed that it's taken me this long to get around to reading it. Although, honestly, I never really bought into all the oedipal stuff, which seems to be the aspect of the book for which it is most revered. It's a simple story, really, of a woman, her son, and the two women he pursues and rejects (often simultaneously), but it's the characters, rather than the plot (of which there isn't much), that are truly compelling. I found myself bookmarking so many pages, less because of what they were saying than the fact that so much of what they said sounded like an echo of things I've said or thought. I'm always confused by books wherein I have such a strong sense of personal identification with the characters. Am I responding to the book or to some sick mixture of egotism and self-loathing. I suppose it doesn't much matter, nor do the two have to be mutually exclusive. Anyway, Paul is such a great character. His struggles to navigate the murky and treacherous waters of his own conflicted desires are profoundly epic, despite their small scale, and in his treatment of Miriam, especially, Lawrence has painted the definitive portrait of the atrocities a profoundly self-involved douchebag can commit, even when he's fighting futilely to do what he sees as "the right thing." (  ) jawalter | Nov 18, 2012 | no reviews | add a review Is contained inSons and Lovers; St Mawr; The Fox; The White Peacock; Love among the Haystacks; The Virgin and the Gypsy; Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers / The Fox / Love Among the Haystacks / Aaron's Rod / The Ladybird / Women in Love (D.H. Laurence Omnibus by D. H. Lawrence Has as a student's study guide
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Popular coversRatingAverage: (3.61)
 Audible.comSeven editions of this book were published by Audible.com.
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Wikipedia in English (4)
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Granted, the book centers around a permanent state of frustration, both physical and spiritual, but about three quarters through the book, I thought I would have strangled each and every character for their wishy-washiness and ineffectual decisions. If D.H. Lawrence had meant the reader to feel the anger from accumulated sexual frustration by building the story up but avoiding satisfying conclusions again and again, well, he certainly succeeded!
I will credit him for incredible insight into the minds and motives of introverts and his intertwining of the simple beauty of flowers (the birds and the bees, as it were) vs the complexity of self-conscious civilized people trying to connect. However, I think I need something to actually happen to fully enjoy a story. (