Books, I read some
Jul. 5th, 2012 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricAlthough not as many lately as I might like. Still. In the last few months I've read...
D.H. Lawrence,
I... in the end I did not like this book but I might love it anyway. Lawrence kept stringing me along, with his insights and his satire on the various futile, dull men in Constance's life. He skewers the sex-negative and, somewhat more gently, mocks the kind of men whose interest in sex is entirely removed from the women they sleep with.
In the end I wanted to claw Mellors' eyes out, Mellors with his stupid, ridiculous, phallic notions and his litany of complaints against all his exes. And then when I realised he was getting away with it I wanted to claw D.H. Lawrence's eyes out as well.
Without knocking the joys of anal sex, nor ladies (certainly not men!) who enjoy it, I'm pretty sure that the awakening of a woman's true soul/sexuality/whatever is not normally achieved by an act of unprecedentedly deep anal penetration. Not how it works, D.H. Lawrence my friend.
And yet. Something about the book - something about Lawrence's characterisation of all three leads, Constance, Lord Chatterley and Mellors... I found it an unsettling, but not unsympathetic, portrait of mental illness. His description of Lord Chatterly's shellshock was, I suppose, ableist in that it compared his injured pysche to his immobile limbs. But then, what Lawrence/Connie was trying to do was give a physical sense to an invisible problem; both injuries being caused by the same war. The other two... I found them interesting depictions of different kinds of depression-type patterns. Connie's listless, aimless, restlessness struck home to me, as did Mellors' self-defensive isolation. Even Lord Chatterly's clinging to routine and external validation.
Mary Ann Schaeffer and Annie Barrows,
I bought this on impulse before getting on the plane, which was just as well, since the book I I had brought with me for the purpose turned out to be rather boring. I devoured this book in a few hours - it's a light book, but I don't think it's a simple one. It is told almost entirely in letters (which you can see is straining the ending; the ending was one of the areas which needed major work when Mary Ann Schaeffer handed the draft over to her niece for completion, and it's still not as good as the rest of the book, IMHO.
What to say about this book? My mother would like it, so I'm going to try to fit it into my baggage going back instead of passing it on to Oxfam or suchlike. I loved how so many characters developed rich and vibrant personality, and the connections which grew up between them. I loved Isola and Stephen's friendship. I loved the matter-of-fact way the novel dealt with Stephen's homosexuality, as a perfectly normal thing even in the 1940s. I thought Juliet's adoption of the child worked perfectly. I wish some more space could've been given to Renne, the former POW; and I am, as often, unsatisfied with a novel which ends with a declaration of love/engagement/whatever. Marriage propositions do not all your problems solve!
---
At home, I'm most of the way through Robin Hobb's Ship of Magic and adoring it (again). In Oxford I picked up a Vintage Paperback copy of Possession and am reading it (again), a little more slowly this time, and always carrying a pencil or ballpoint so that I can scrawl all over it. I'm not normally one to write on my leisure reading (all over my textbooks, yes), but it feels wrong to read such a self-consciously literary novel without treating it as a primary source. I'm finding, tracking little connections and making notes-to-self in the margins. Whoever ends up reading my copy after me is either going to be driven mad, or greatly amused.
D.H. Lawrence,
I... in the end I did not like this book but I might love it anyway. Lawrence kept stringing me along, with his insights and his satire on the various futile, dull men in Constance's life. He skewers the sex-negative and, somewhat more gently, mocks the kind of men whose interest in sex is entirely removed from the women they sleep with.
In the end I wanted to claw Mellors' eyes out, Mellors with his stupid, ridiculous, phallic notions and his litany of complaints against all his exes. And then when I realised he was getting away with it I wanted to claw D.H. Lawrence's eyes out as well.
Without knocking the joys of anal sex, nor ladies (certainly not men!) who enjoy it, I'm pretty sure that the awakening of a woman's true soul/sexuality/whatever is not normally achieved by an act of unprecedentedly deep anal penetration. Not how it works, D.H. Lawrence my friend.
And yet. Something about the book - something about Lawrence's characterisation of all three leads, Constance, Lord Chatterley and Mellors... I found it an unsettling, but not unsympathetic, portrait of mental illness. His description of Lord Chatterly's shellshock was, I suppose, ableist in that it compared his injured pysche to his immobile limbs. But then, what Lawrence/Connie was trying to do was give a physical sense to an invisible problem; both injuries being caused by the same war. The other two... I found them interesting depictions of different kinds of depression-type patterns. Connie's listless, aimless, restlessness struck home to me, as did Mellors' self-defensive isolation. Even Lord Chatterly's clinging to routine and external validation.
Mary Ann Schaeffer and Annie Barrows,
I bought this on impulse before getting on the plane, which was just as well, since the book I I had brought with me for the purpose turned out to be rather boring. I devoured this book in a few hours - it's a light book, but I don't think it's a simple one. It is told almost entirely in letters (which you can see is straining the ending; the ending was one of the areas which needed major work when Mary Ann Schaeffer handed the draft over to her niece for completion, and it's still not as good as the rest of the book, IMHO.
What to say about this book? My mother would like it, so I'm going to try to fit it into my baggage going back instead of passing it on to Oxfam or suchlike. I loved how so many characters developed rich and vibrant personality, and the connections which grew up between them. I loved Isola and Stephen's friendship. I loved the matter-of-fact way the novel dealt with Stephen's homosexuality, as a perfectly normal thing even in the 1940s. I thought Juliet's adoption of the child worked perfectly. I wish some more space could've been given to Renne, the former POW; and I am, as often, unsatisfied with a novel which ends with a declaration of love/engagement/whatever. Marriage propositions do not all your problems solve!
---
At home, I'm most of the way through Robin Hobb's Ship of Magic and adoring it (again). In Oxford I picked up a Vintage Paperback copy of Possession and am reading it (again), a little more slowly this time, and always carrying a pencil or ballpoint so that I can scrawl all over it. I'm not normally one to write on my leisure reading (all over my textbooks, yes), but it feels wrong to read such a self-consciously literary novel without treating it as a primary source. I'm finding, tracking little connections and making notes-to-self in the margins. Whoever ends up reading my copy after me is either going to be driven mad, or greatly amused.