Sons and Lovers in Classics Without All the Class

Oct 24, 2020 Beth rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This begins as a Victorian novel, but then slyly becomes a treatise on the lack of power of women at the time. The Oedipal issues seem overdone, but Lawrence contends it was very autobiographical.

1 like · Like · see review

May 29, 2014 Avisek Bandyopadhyay rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, romance, drama, awesome-reads

One of the novels that is so good that it hurts to read more. Just for the sheer anxiety that it will be over. And such is the power of words that Lawrence produces, it gives you a visual treat where you find yourself attracted and repulsed by the simplicity and vivacity of it.I love descriptive writings and long drawn out, well etched characters. And Lawrence, I would say after Hardy's 'Far from the madding crowd', I never read a book that would create a sense of retrospection in me.

Coming to One of the novels that is so good that it hurts to read more. Just for the sheer anxiety that it will be over. And such is the power of words that Lawrence produces, it gives you a visual treat where you find yourself attracted and repulsed by the simplicity and vivacity of it.I love descriptive writings and long drawn out, well etched characters. And Lawrence, I would say after Hardy's 'Far from the madding crowd', I never read a book that would create a sense of retrospection in me.

Coming to the book, it has been controversial since it was born i.e 1923. The topic is eerily relevant even in today's landscape. A man is torn between his love for his mother and his lover. As hard it is for the mother to hand over her rights on her son to a young unknown girl, it is as difficult for a guy to love a girl with the same reverence,same all consuming love. Most of the times, we manage with the passion we find in our lovers and manage to draw a balance between the two ladies in our lives. Even though, the balance is threatened time and over, we manage it somehow with either of the ladies resigning or surrendering (more often than not, the mother gives over her rights). This story is an extension about what might happen if the mother refuses to subside, to surrender. The story is beautiful as well as disturbing. While we look for passion, a match of wits, a converser in our lovers, more often than not we find annoying habits, quirks and nuisances in her character. While our mother looms large over our minds, the lovers strive to cast themselves as we wish, what is delicately called as compromise in our society.

I loved the tension between the mother and the father, her desperate attempts at making a man that suits her out of her sons, the abstract conversations between the son and his girlfriend, the quest for physical fulfillment, the correlation between creativity and emotions in our mind and the omniscient nature looming large over the story. A master story teller, sensitive and brute in expressing emotions, I know why this book has stood the test of time.

Classic it indeed is !! ...more

Like · see review