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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
If you're looking for something to dissuade you from participating in human relationships, read this book. I can't think of another writer who's so accurately captured the contradiction of how we come to despise those to whom we are bound in love and need.
This is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read.
I really really liked the first half of this book - it was headed for a much higher rating. I felt a lot of understanding of the situation with the dad and loved the character development. Then the second half just got weird and the mom was obsessed with her son and he was a weirdo. So, just weird...
emotional
medium-paced
Also known as A guy with a mother complex ruins his life and the life of two women who were honestly in love with him because his mother disapproves of them.
Okay, at times D.H.Lawrence really did surprise me with the level of depth he gave his characters but at other times that depth is lacking.
He paints a good picture of human relationships and how everything is tied to one another and has consequences on the psyche. His depiction of Gertrude, William, and Paul was great, especially in the first 150 pages. Which brings another point out:
This book is so unnecessarily long. It lasts forever.
The writer lingers on details that aren’t important to the point he was making. I almost lost the point at around 300 pages where he was describing Paul’s working life, and how Gertrude is unhappy with her husband – for like the 100th time already.
I read this book for almost three weeks. And the only feeling I got from it is relief that it’s done.
Inconsistent characterisation
Especially in female characters. And that smell of misogyny in certain paragraphs and in Clara’s character. She is portrayed as a feminist – and everyone sees it as something bad, which is characteristically for the time but come on. D.H. concludes that she doesn’t love Paul but then contradicts himself by saying that she will always carry him in her heart? I really didn’t like how her story wrapped up. And the whole story of Miriam waiting an eternity for Paul???
Paul annoyed the shit out of me. One of the top 10 spineless characters I have ever read about.
Not a good book to connect to
Basically, I didn’t care about the plot nor characters. The writing made it unbearable to read at certain parts, the book felt repetitive and dragging, it doesn’t pull the reader in, nor does it give the reader anything to connect to.
I don’t think that the whole book was bad, let’s say the first 150 pages were a solid 3 star read for me, but it went downhill from.
I would advise you to skip over this work and read another book about a dysfunctional family because this isn't it.
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Finally done with this book. Review to come sometime in the future.
Okay, at times D.H.Lawrence really did surprise me with the level of depth he gave his characters but at other times that depth is lacking.
He paints a good picture of human relationships and how everything is tied to one another and has consequences on the psyche. His depiction of Gertrude, William, and Paul was great, especially in the first 150 pages. Which brings another point out:
This book is so unnecessarily long. It lasts forever.
The writer lingers on details that aren’t important to the point he was making. I almost lost the point at around 300 pages where he was describing Paul’s working life, and how Gertrude is unhappy with her husband – for like the 100th time already.
I read this book for almost three weeks. And the only feeling I got from it is relief that it’s done.
Inconsistent characterisation
Especially in female characters. And that smell of misogyny in certain paragraphs and in Clara’s character. She is portrayed as a feminist – and everyone sees it as something bad, which is characteristically for the time but come on. D.H. concludes that she doesn’t love Paul but then contradicts himself by saying that she will always carry him in her heart? I really didn’t like how her story wrapped up. And the whole story of Miriam waiting an eternity for Paul???
Paul annoyed the shit out of me. One of the top 10 spineless characters I have ever read about.
Not a good book to connect to
Basically, I didn’t care about the plot nor characters. The writing made it unbearable to read at certain parts, the book felt repetitive and dragging, it doesn’t pull the reader in, nor does it give the reader anything to connect to.
I don’t think that the whole book was bad, let’s say the first 150 pages were a solid 3 star read for me, but it went downhill from
Spoiler
Williams deathI would advise you to skip over this work and read another book about a dysfunctional family because this isn't it.
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Finally done with this book. Review to come sometime in the future.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Summary: Tortured young man with artistic soul grows up, experiences love and sex, while maintaining a close bond with his incestuous mother. If you enjoy character studies with complex relationships, this might be something for you - if you prefer actual plot, probably not.
Let me start by saying that the premise of the novel is in itself extremely weak, due to lack of a structured story. It follows the young life of Paul Morel, a stand-in for Lawrence himself, who grows up in the Midlands in the late 1800s. His early life is shaped by an abusive alcoholic father, and a mother who raises him and his older brother as replacements for her husband. Later on, Paul finds work as a clerk and develops into a talented painter, while falling in love with two different women (which we will come back to). This autobiographical aspect is occasionally to the novel's detriment, because the author makes no distinction between interesting and uninteresting parts from his own life. The lack of filtering bogs pages down with unnecessary events or descriptions that only tangle up the pacing.
The story's strength lies in its depictions of complex relationships between characters as passionate as they are flawed, relying solely on Lawrence's writing, which does an admirable job at compensating for shortcomings. The prose is beautiful, moving, and flows like a steady stream, though at times it becomes rambling and long-winded.
Love interest 1, Miriam, seems promising when we first meet her; we can see that she's miserable and friendless, but she has a transcendent quality about her that hints at hidden depth. Sadly, any spirit is inexplicably gone by the time she and Paul reach adolescence, and she spends the rest of the book being a door mat. It's a shame, because their dynamic is genuinenly interesting and could have been explored much better if she didn't constantly let Paul walk all over her.
Love interest 2, Clara, is far more convincing - she's independent, reserved and haughty, but underneath the surface there's a strong, colourful personality. She's a suffragette who's separated from her husband, and finds new life through Paul, though they have no chance at a permanent relationship. (view spoiler) She's a pretty good character; I do, however, feel that I could live without at least some of the descriptions of her strong, white arms and shapely breasts.
Paul's mother, Mrs Morel, remains the centre of his life through to the end. She is as pitiable as she is disgusting, treating him as her confidante and husband while jealously guarding him from other women; he becomes so used to this that he can't commit to anyone else. It's saddening to think that Lawrence probably never saw her as an abuser, but as the love of his life, maybe even until his own death.
All in all, Sons and Lovers is a worthwhile read, but requires a bit of patience, particularly at the start. Readers who like psychological, character-driven narratives will probably enjoy it, but those who prefer a strong plot should choose something else.
Let me start by saying that the premise of the novel is in itself extremely weak, due to lack of a structured story. It follows the young life of Paul Morel, a stand-in for Lawrence himself, who grows up in the Midlands in the late 1800s. His early life is shaped by an abusive alcoholic father, and a mother who raises him and his older brother as replacements for her husband. Later on, Paul finds work as a clerk and develops into a talented painter, while falling in love with two different women (which we will come back to). This autobiographical aspect is occasionally to the novel's detriment, because the author makes no distinction between interesting and uninteresting parts from his own life. The lack of filtering bogs pages down with unnecessary events or descriptions that only tangle up the pacing.
The story's strength lies in its depictions of complex relationships between characters as passionate as they are flawed, relying solely on Lawrence's writing, which does an admirable job at compensating for shortcomings. The prose is beautiful, moving, and flows like a steady stream, though at times it becomes rambling and long-winded.
Love interest 1, Miriam, seems promising when we first meet her; we can see that she's miserable and friendless, but she has a transcendent quality about her that hints at hidden depth. Sadly, any spirit is inexplicably gone by the time she and Paul reach adolescence, and she spends the rest of the book being a door mat. It's a shame, because their dynamic is genuinenly interesting and could have been explored much better if she didn't constantly let Paul walk all over her.
Love interest 2, Clara, is far more convincing - she's independent, reserved and haughty, but underneath the surface there's a strong, colourful personality. She's a suffragette who's separated from her husband, and finds new life through Paul, though they have no chance at a permanent relationship. (view spoiler) She's a pretty good character; I do, however, feel that I could live without at least some of the descriptions of her strong, white arms and shapely breasts.
Paul's mother, Mrs Morel, remains the centre of his life through to the end. She is as pitiable as she is disgusting, treating him as her confidante and husband while jealously guarding him from other women; he becomes so used to this that he can't commit to anyone else. It's saddening to think that Lawrence probably never saw her as an abuser, but as the love of his life, maybe even until his own death.
All in all, Sons and Lovers is a worthwhile read, but requires a bit of patience, particularly at the start. Readers who like psychological, character-driven narratives will probably enjoy it, but those who prefer a strong plot should choose something else.
Content Warnings
Minor: Incest, Racial slurs
I struggled to get immersed in this book. Too many characters and plot lines distracted from the central story. Paul's inability to love, and his mother's inability to let him love, were unappealing. There are flashes of brilliant insight about human relationships, which earned the three stars.
First, my heart goes out to anyone picking this up as a first foray into Lawrence, rubbing their hands together, and thinking "Now for some sexytime."
This book starts out in the coal pits of the English midlands. Everyone literally caked in coal dust. We get the transaction of coal dust into gold, rent for the miners' housing, French lessons for the children.
(Chapter IV.)
The book brims over with life because it's drawn from life: It's Lawrence's thinly fictionalized autobiography. The place, the time, the characters all feel true and faithfully drawn; you sense that Lawrence lived all of this.
The book captures the striving ambition of its young protagonist, Paul, groomed by his mother to escape the coal mine that had swallowed his father, to ascend into immaculate middle-class respectability, out of the miasma of coal dust enveloping Bestwood. It also captures, much later in the book, after much careful grounding in the coal-mining-town, working-class setting, and without the least obscenity, the overwhelming sexual urges that overcome our young protagonist--and the forbidding wall of his fixation on his mother on which those urges crash.
Near the end, the book begins to feel a bit overwrought. [SPOILERS] Yes, Paul has a dramatic affair with a married woman who's separated from her husband. Yes, he's unhealthily attached to his mother, and her death leaves him feeling unmoored in the world, but these stakes, for a young man of 25, though presented as all-consequential, may strike the reader, especially a middle-aged reader much further down life's path than Paul, as a bit of a tempest in a teapot. Young love is tumultuous and disorienting. The loss of a parent at any age is utterly disorienting. But the melodrama attached to these events here feels very much like the work of a young man. The reader suspects that Paul will probably recover from these early traumas.
Overall, a brilliantly drawn bit of early 20th-century British realism, presented without Dickensian mawkishness, in a clear-eyed, simple prose, harbinger of the clean realism to follow later in the century. Lawrence also manages to make the book move, with event and intrigue: the reader never suffers through Jamesian longeurs. An important work from the last century.
This book starts out in the coal pits of the English midlands. Everyone literally caked in coal dust. We get the transaction of coal dust into gold, rent for the miners' housing, French lessons for the children.
"Seventeen pounds eleven and fivepence. Why don't you shout out when you're called?" said Mr. Braithwaite. He banged on to the invoice a five-pound bag of silver, then in a delicate and pretty movement, picked up a little ten-pound column of gold, and plumped it beside the silver. The gold slid in a bright stream over the paper. The cashier finished counting off the money; the boy dragged the whole down the counter to Mr. Winterbottom, to whom the stoppages for rent and tools must be paid. Here he suffered again.
"Sixteen an' six," said Mr. Winterbottom.
The lad was too much upset to count. He pushed forward some loose silver and half a sovereign.
(Chapter IV.)
The book brims over with life because it's drawn from life: It's Lawrence's thinly fictionalized autobiography. The place, the time, the characters all feel true and faithfully drawn; you sense that Lawrence lived all of this.
The book captures the striving ambition of its young protagonist, Paul, groomed by his mother to escape the coal mine that had swallowed his father, to ascend into immaculate middle-class respectability, out of the miasma of coal dust enveloping Bestwood. It also captures, much later in the book, after much careful grounding in the coal-mining-town, working-class setting, and without the least obscenity, the overwhelming sexual urges that overcome our young protagonist--and the forbidding wall of his fixation on his mother on which those urges crash.
Near the end, the book begins to feel a bit overwrought. [SPOILERS] Yes, Paul has a dramatic affair with a married woman who's separated from her husband. Yes, he's unhealthily attached to his mother, and her death leaves him feeling unmoored in the world, but these stakes, for a young man of 25, though presented as all-consequential, may strike the reader, especially a middle-aged reader much further down life's path than Paul, as a bit of a tempest in a teapot. Young love is tumultuous and disorienting. The loss of a parent at any age is utterly disorienting. But the melodrama attached to these events here feels very much like the work of a young man. The reader suspects that Paul will probably recover from these early traumas.
Overall, a brilliantly drawn bit of early 20th-century British realism, presented without Dickensian mawkishness, in a clear-eyed, simple prose, harbinger of the clean realism to follow later in the century. Lawrence also manages to make the book move, with event and intrigue: the reader never suffers through Jamesian longeurs. An important work from the last century.
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
It was a bit tedious at times (which is why it took me so long to finish), but was overall interesting. Written over 100 years ago, I could still find relevance in the plot and characters. Though the ending was a little weak, I loved the overall story.