A review by trve_zach
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Look, I can’t make this book appear or sound fun. Surface level: a woman (that is to say, low-class/poor) named Gertrude has come to dislike her life of raising and bearing more children. She hates her abusive husband. She struggles to find joy, a way out.
Her eldest son, William, dies, and her middle son, Paul, becomes the focus of her life and of the book. Paul is a painter with a day job who very much loves his mother (and because of his devout love, struggles to love anyone else). His mother desires a life inaccessible to her (or any of the other women in this story because, you know, they’re women…and poor) and lives it through Paul as well as her other children and comes to resent them as they grow independent.
Paul struggles between loving two women, Miriam (spiritual) and Clara (worldly), ultimately loves neither, and ends up messing everyone’s life up for a decade or so.
Then his mother dies a slow death. The way it ruins his life is really heartbreaking and the detailed recounting of her last breaths in bed is all too real/familiar. Ultimately, Paul is able to let this go and continue on.
Much like the Russian authors writing accounts of peasant life in a realistic style, this is a window into life for the downtrodden of Nottinghamshire. It’s about all the small ways we slowly pull away from our parents as we establish our own lives and joy and the pain of those experiences, and of finding love and wrestling with choosing a path, and losing family members and processing that, or of trying to find a place/having to fight for basic rights. Beautifully written, pedestrian-but-profound…I’m glad I read it.
Her eldest son, William, dies, and her middle son, Paul, becomes the focus of her life and of the book. Paul is a painter with a day job who very much loves his mother (and because of his devout love, struggles to love anyone else). His mother desires a life inaccessible to her (or any of the other women in this story because, you know, they’re women…and poor) and lives it through Paul as well as her other children and comes to resent them as they grow independent.
Paul struggles between loving two women, Miriam (spiritual) and Clara (worldly), ultimately loves neither, and ends up messing everyone’s life up for a decade or so.
Then his mother dies a slow death. The way it ruins his life is really heartbreaking and the detailed recounting of her last breaths in bed is all too real/familiar. Ultimately, Paul is able to let this go and continue on.
Much like the Russian authors writing accounts of peasant life in a realistic style, this is a window into life for the downtrodden of Nottinghamshire. It’s about all the small ways we slowly pull away from our parents as we establish our own lives and joy and the pain of those experiences, and of finding love and wrestling with choosing a path, and losing family members and processing that, or of trying to find a place/having to fight for basic rights. Beautifully written, pedestrian-but-profound…I’m glad I read it.