Amants et fils (1913)

A book about people never becoming themselves but failing at transcending themselves. ( )

This novel is of an English family and their financial conditions that are not so good. ( )

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! ( )