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3.45 AVERAGE
3.45 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
Yes
I love love love this story. The themes exploring male companionship and love within the constraints of normal society are my favourite parts.
This should be called anxty, closeted bisexual men in love.
DNF for now, p.100
Realising that I keep falling asleep on this book every night & really, as much as I love this guy's short stories & character portraits, he really wrote this book as a compendium of every single conversation he's ever had in his head with all the people he hates - and while I do love that for him, endless bitching at fancy london clubs & bourgeois tea parties just sort of gets boring after awhile. Every new convo is basically a bunch of intellectual brits getting together for high society chats which devolves into the characters absolutely ripping into one another (verbally) because of Primal and Inexplainable Urges; and while the insight into human beings' "Primal Urges" was meant to be the premise of the book, if this is all the book is doing with that premise then it'd probably have been better as a short story tbh. (Ofc, lots of really interesting introspections in this so I may return to it but each new chapter is basically characters talking about a topic, and then the self-insert Authorial Moment where DH Lawrence tears them all a new arsehole with the Correct Opinion on what they're all talking about. And man I really need to read something more engaging than this, feels like it's been ages)
He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist [...] He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion.
Realising that I keep falling asleep on this book every night & really, as much as I love this guy's short stories & character portraits, he really wrote this book as a compendium of every single conversation he's ever had in his head with all the people he hates - and while I do love that for him, endless bitching at fancy london clubs & bourgeois tea parties just sort of gets boring after awhile. Every new convo is basically a bunch of intellectual brits getting together for high society chats which devolves into the characters absolutely ripping into one another (verbally) because of Primal and Inexplainable Urges; and while the insight into human beings' "Primal Urges" was meant to be the premise of the book, if this is all the book is doing with that premise then it'd probably have been better as a short story tbh. (Ofc, lots of really interesting introspections in this so I may return to it but each new chapter is basically characters talking about a topic, and then the self-insert Authorial Moment where DH Lawrence tears them all a new arsehole with the Correct Opinion on what they're all talking about. And man I really need to read something more engaging than this, feels like it's been ages)
He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion, like in a Brocken mist [...] He lives for the sake of that Brocken spectre, the reflection of himself in the human opinion.
This is a fantastic book that explores a lot of social questions facing young people. The book was written in the early 1900s so the examples and specifics are not relevant to today, but I really liked the larger questions the book raises over the ideas of love, marriage, and relationships. It's great for making you think about these questions while giving you a story to direct your thinking. To me it seemed like there were a lot of influences from Neitzsche.
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I found this hard to get into--it was mostly talk and very little action. There were some beautiful moments, but overall I just don't think Lawrence is for me.
The joy of Women in Love lies in its descriptive writing. We all learned what ‘pathetic fallacy’ was during GCSE English for some reason. Here, the state of the natural world does more than mirror the plot - it drives it. Nature has the capacity to swallow and destroy human life. Characters are constantly pontificating on its beauty in long, Impressionistic passages - Man’s relationship to woman and their shared relationship to nature becomes the novel’s central theme, so it makes sense that the outside world in every European form - town, city, stately home, country lane, lake, iceberg - melts together into a fifth main character. As the Dakota is the villain of Rosemary’s Baby, the entire outdoors grows into the antagonist of Women in Love.
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae is this book’s closest relative (she has called it a ‘profound influence’), and her conception (once Nietzche’s) of the Apollonian helped to decode one of the clearest threads in the book, that of homoerotic paleness and ice in opposition to plastic water, mud and death.
My blog
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae is this book’s closest relative (she has called it a ‘profound influence’), and her conception (once Nietzche’s) of the Apollonian helped to decode one of the clearest threads in the book, that of homoerotic paleness and ice in opposition to plastic water, mud and death.
My blog
I was not impressed by Women in Love. For some reason, I expected the novel to be about two sisters experiencing the joy and anguish of falling in love (not with each other.) Instead, it seemed that all four major characters, Ursula, Gudrun, Birkin, and Gerald, seesawed from violent loathing to desperate love and back again in a matter of moments for no apparent reason. Also, a great deal of their conversations was Birkin mansplaining every possible topic to the sisters, while they argued half-heartedly with him.
I didn't think much of this one. It had some interesting bits, but there was a lot of angst. The characters seemed to be all rather confused, perhaps a bit naive in how they thought about love. The book has a heavy focus on the internal dialogue of the characters, but I didn't really get a unique voice from any of them.
One of those books that makes a gal wonder if she missed the point or if it was really as simple that.
Some really nice passages on marriage though. DH is a great writer, so I do not begrudge him a bit.
Some really nice passages on marriage though. DH is a great writer, so I do not begrudge him a bit.