Sunday 24 July 2011

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

Collins Classic
Tahun 2010
Page 512
Price RM10.00


SOLD OUT - RUZAINI - MUAR JOHOR
10 OGOS 2011

I finished this book, number 12 on the all time best, English fiction list. It had a slow start, but in the end, profoundly insightful and moving.

In a nutshell,
Woman meets an attractive man at a dance. Marries him a year later. He is a miner who's life depressed the hell out of him. He becomes an alcoholic shell. His wife's knight becomes the night to her.

She seeks her life through her kids, especially a son named Paul. She becomes obsessed with Paul, and creates a co-dependency of convenience.

There is an invisible force-field, between Paul and the women that he loves. He has no insight why his love torments himself and the women, yet, he can not have them.

His mother dies . . . he dies emotionally. One of the women who loves him too dies (emotionally), because Paul can only be a shell without his mother.

His relationship was never incestuous with his mother on a physical front, but certainly it was on an emotional one.

Here is some of the brilliant writing of Lawrence, the very last page of the book. This was some time, maybe a few years after the death of his mother. On this night he ran into one of the women he loved so dearly but could not have (and she remained faithful to him for years without ever seeing him again). The hope at the end (and it isn't clear) that he returns to find her.

Notice the desperation of the soul without God . . that which attempts to live in the impersonal universe. Paul gave up all belief in God at an early age.

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