SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

“We ought to be able to arrange this sex thing as if we were going to the dentist.” A book which has achieved more notoriety for its sex scenes (shocking in 1930, when the book was written) than for its character studies, Lady Chatterley’s Lover focuses on the affair between Constance, the “sturdy” young wife […]

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In what is considered to be D. H. Lawrence’s most autobiographical novel, Lawrence’s main character, Paul Morel, is a frail, artistic boy, having more in common with his mother than with his coal miner father. His mother had had some education before she married the once-attractive Walter Morel, but he eventually succumbed to alcohol and his bleak life in the pits. When Paul’s older brother, who became the mainstay of the family, left for London and later died, his mother transferred her dependence from him to Paul.

Written in 1913, the novel was shocking at the time, dealing as it does with an unhealthy relationship between mother and son, leading to the son’s subsequent inability to love women his own age. Though the novel is almost a hundred years old, it is as fresh and rewarding to read today as a contemporary novel, even when one considers the mores and prohibitions of that time period.

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Written in 1920 and often regarded as D. H. Lawrence’s greatest novel, Women in Love is the complex story of two women and two men who scrutinize their lives and personal needs in an effort to discover something that makes the future worth living. The personal and social traumas of post-World War I, combined with the rise of industry and urbanization, have affected all four main characters, often at cross purposes as they explore love and its role in their lives. Intensely introspective and self-conscious, each character shares his/her thoughts with the reader, allowing the reader to participate in the inner conflicts and crises that each faces. Extremely complex in its exploration of the period’s social and philosophical influences on the characters (who are archetypes of society), the novel is also full of symbolism, with many parallels drawn between love and death, which the characters sometimes prefer to life. As the love affairs of these four characters play out, filled with complications, disagreements about the meaning of love, questions about love’s relation to power and dominance, and the role of sexuality, Lawrence projects the tumult of post-war England as the values of the past yield to newer, more personal goals.

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Geoffrey Firmin, the former British consul to Mexico, is a prisoner of alcoholism. A victim of the shakes, he hears voices, talks to people who are not there, and hallucinates, though he is often able to hide the extent of his drinking. “True, he might lie down in the street, but he would never reel.” On The Day of the Dead in 1938, his recently divorced wife Yvonne returns to Quauhnahuac, over which two smoking volcanoes loom, to try to persuade him to reconcile. Despite the depressing subject matter and a frustrating main character who cannot or will not help himself during the novel’s four hundred pages, the novel is breath-taking–elegant both in language and construction. Carefully plotted, filled with unique imagery, and enhanced by symbolism which brings it alive on new levels, it overwhelms the reader with its impact, and approaches classical tragedy as the inevitable, doom-filled events play out. (To see the full review, click on the title of this excerpt.)

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Escaping in 1756, after sixteen months in a Venice jail, Giacomo Casanova, “all seven deadly sins in one accursed body,” arrives in Bolzano, where the Doge and the Inquisition cannot reach him. Seeing himself as “that rare creature, a writer with a life to write about,” he and a defrocked priest, Balbi, move into a hotel, not far from where the Duke of Parma and his young bride Francesca reside. Casanova was wounded by the duke in a duel over Francesca three years before and has promised never to see her again. When the Duke arrives at Casanova’s hotel with a letter from Francesca, asking to see him, the stage is set for the action and a surprising ending.

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