Fills i amants (1913)

I remember feeling exhausted when finishing Sons & Lovers from my own emotional investment. This novel is incredible and very intense. I adore Lawrence for the emotional realism of his characters (I was blown away by the accuracy of Constance's consciousness in Lady Chatterley's Lover; the depression in his short story 'The Horse Dealer's Daughter'; and similarly I thought Lawrence truly captured the experience of a family suffering from alcoholism here). Very beautiful and sad, I'm excited to read more Lawrence in the future.

Modern Library did this novel a disservice by ranking it so highly. It's brilliant at times, but also far too limited to be deserving a top ten distinction.

At its best Lawrence constructs and analyzes the complexity of the mother/son relationship. Theirs is a love that builds Paul and hinders him for his whole life. The writing that describes his desire to please her, to relate to other women, and finally as their relationship come to an end is excellent.

At its worst the women in Paul's life are not only treated as objects by Paul, but also the narrator. Only occasionally are they examined for their bodies and unbridled emotional states. A source of annoyance for me was also the word repetition: how many times are these characters describes as hating one another? The emotional swings of "he loved her, yet he hated her," "he hated her a little," "he never hated her so much"...it made me wonder if this was meant to reflect the shallow emotional depth of Paul, but the women feel these intense (and repetitive) hatreds, too. Couldn't such a fine writer find other words and more importantly more subtle gradients of feeling?

In sum, Sons and Lovers is certainly worth reading. As a psychological study of how an obsessive love and desire for control mangles a child's life--this novel is extradorinday. In many other ways, the novel lacks imagination. ( )

This book took me a while to get through. I wasn't into fiction during winter, the first third of the book is unnecessary to the main of it, and Lawrence spends an awfully long time describing flowers, trees, and other such natural scenes.

But boy was it worth it. The descriptions of nature serve to draw out the main moments and let them breathe and take up significance. And they really do: Sons and Lovers, first published in 1913 manages to achieve something I can't really say I have found elsewhere now - an honest portrayal and description of the emotional map of life, the instinctual animal feelings that drive so much of our social behaviour and experience, and to do so in English as a first language. This is so much more than a refreshingly wide embrace of Freudian frameworks of looking at human relations, which we would do well to recover in contemporary writing. It is remarkable and blows my mind to see that English can be used this way. It is not that English is such a necessarily cold and mercantile/scientific language, but rather that we have developed a culture that has produced it as such. Lawrence shows us another way.

Our emotional lives, the emotional decisions of parents and families, set up real consequences for the lives of all of us. It was lovely to read a story that centres this understanding so significantly. More please! ( )

This was not my favorite book by Lawrence, although it was more readable than Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover- there was less philosophizing. Although it contain elements of Lawrence's major themes such as the conflict between the life of the mind, body and spirit, this conflict plays out through the actions of the characters instead of through soliloquies as in his later novels. It also touches on the issue of euthanasia, and most importantly, parenting.
The story begins with a marriage between Gertrude and Walter Morel which quickly deteriorates into a battle of wills. Mrs. Morel puts all her energy and love into her son Paul.
"At last, Mrs. Morel despised her husband. She turned to the child, she turned from the father... There began a battle between the husband and wife- a fearful, bloody battle that ended only with the death of one."
Her death leaves Paul lost and alone, unable to truly give himself completely to any woman.

" 'Mother!" he whispered-'mother!'
She was the only thing that held him up, himself amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her."

Of course, the character Gertrude Morel is an extreme example of over parenting- or as we now call it- helicopter parenting, but Lawrence examines her inner life, as well as her son's, in a compassionate way.
( )

He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body and not him. ( )