Lady Chatterley's Lover

Rating:
Summary: The modern age
Review: The most well-drawn character in this novel is not Lady Chatterley (Connie, an INFP personality type), her lover Mellors, her husband Clifford, Clifford's nurse, or any human. It is Clifford's hometown Tevershall and the surrounding coal district. His home Wragby stands where the great Nottingham Forest of legend once dominated the landscape. Now it is coal -- mines, colliers, colliers' shanties, colliers' towns, and, most of all, money and ennui. It is dead, as seen through the eyes of Mellors and Connie -- dead, lifeless, and grim, slowly sucking away at what is left of humanity and of human tenderness. The only idyllic place is the remnant of the Forest where Mellors is gamekeeper, and even it reeks of the smell of coal and of money and of the folly of money. The colliers and those who command them, the Cliffords, are soulless, dead, and, tellingly, impotent in the most important ways.

D. H. Lawrence has a unique voice and tells this tale in a unique way, albeit heavy-handedly in places. His characters' sermon-like conversations are sometimes hard to swallow as realistic. But the frustrations and the spiritlessness of the people are real enough and save the novel from becoming too much of an intellectual exercise or a diatribe. I found myself wishing for the more subtle touch of a Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, another novel in which a human story is told against a larger setting, or even of a Tolstoy, but this is more of a story-in-a-box -- a limited box. Recommended if you can suspend belief a bit; if you are looking for a good story rather than a great one; and if you are looking not for puerile pleasure in Lawrence's liberal smattering of "naughty" words, but for a place to begin start asking the questions. There are no answers here, but there is the foundation for a beginning.

Rating:
Summary: Madame Bouvary like tale but with greater lyricism
Review: The story of a fallen woman with a theme similar to Flaubert's "Madame Bovery" which I have also read. This novel was actually banned I believe because of it's open discussion of the adulterous wife and her passionate love affair. Another theme in the book is the life of the leisured class. These were squires, Lords, Earls and other titled persons who lived lives unencumbered by the need to work. Today's Internet millionaires don't know when to quit. They should walk away from work to pursue hunting duck, quail and pheasant on their large estates. Some of them would also pursue gardening, literature, and painting. The world would be a richer place. Imagine if Picasso had a job: we wouldn't have Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon. Surely that would be a pity.

Rating:
Summary: read for curiosity's sake
Review: Why is this book so famous? Some say for its quality, some say for its incredibly controversial (at the time of publication) sexual content. It's worth reading for the whole *this was banned and mega-controversial and is it pornography or art?* sort of thing, but I didn't think it was believable or otherwise well written. It's quite sexist, and it's somewhat boring.

Rating:
Summary: a true story has no ending
Review: What I most like about Lawrence is he never ends the story at the end of the novel because life itself is open ended. You close the book wondering what happenned after the story. What a violent love letter at the end, how real a love story can be. It is not a fairy tale. But shocking truth about love, sex, women and men.

Rating:
Summary: A love awakening has begun
Review: This book is simply a marvellous example of true love between two persons.

The marriage of Sir Clifford and Constance was doomed, brought on not by the paralysis or abstinence of sex between the two parties but that their characters and personalities were incompatible right from the beginning.

The romantic part is of course with Mellors. According to me, he was a fine man, more cultured and deep-rooted in character and that he possessed that unusual male strength, much more a man than Sir Clifford, with all his riches and wealth of knowledge. WIth Clifford, it is like a show, a facade performed and worn to please others but deep inside, it is rotten bones and a great failure to appreciate life values. But with Mellors, he represent fresh air and beauty that will never cease with time and age.

To be frank, one has to admit that the best part of the story is Lawrence's bold and candid descriptions of the sexual exploits of the star crossed lovers. It's just so very beautiful to celebrate love in this fashion.

Whew! What a timeless classic...

Rating:
Summary: Honest and beautiful
Review: I didn't find this novel perverted at all. I think the underlying depiction of human sexuality was just but eye-opening honest and fundamentally beautiful, as opossed to so many hypocritical, really perverted, or really prejudiced points of view about sexuality that populate our cultures and societies. I really wish I had read this book when I was 15. In my opinion very few writers can be as honest, frank, and genuine about sexuality as Lawrence is. This is the first of Lawrence's books I read, and am planning to read many of his books now.

Rating:
Summary: Underlying Theme Is Incorrect
Review: Lady Chatterley's Lover is a beautiful love story written by a great artist. It is by no means only a "sex" story, but portrays two individuals quite sensitively. If one sticks to the surface story, one will probably be quite taken with the beauty of it. But there is an underlying theme here which runs throughout all of Lawrence's work: the idea that the world is a dirty, unpleasant place and that people are always small, disagreeable and nasty and that the solutions to all of life's most pressing problems is orgasm. This is rather silly, to say the least. Certain portions of life can be ugly, but the extent to which Lawrence does so in this novel is really stretching it a bit. It seems like a set-up to me: after showing only the negative portion of life and convincing the reader that this is reality as "it really is", he springs his stock solution: sex. This seems as absurd to me as trying to grab a handful of air; imagination is at the root of the sexual appetite in humans and this he leaves rather untouched. Intellectualism is also disavowed in prference to a sort of bodily exaltation which leaves one at the mercy of one's physical being without recourse to higher faculties (inlcuding those of control and discipline). It is also interesting to note that in his philosophical position, Lawrence is much closer to Sartre than Camus, who although still a pessimist, finds a great deal of exuberance in the physical world of nature that Lawrence and Sartre tend to reject as ugly and forbidding. The philosophical underpinnings sort of ruin the novel for me, although it may not be noticeable until the second or third read.

Rating:
Summary: Effortless work by a Great Writer
Review: If you want a good Lawrence book, read Sons and Lovers or Women in Love instead. Lady Chatterly, although written later, is much more immature in terms of style than Lawrence's first book, sons and lovers. The popularity probally results from the scandal that surrounded the book and not the writing or plot. The book only has real importance in a sociological reading, showing the social mores of the period it was written in.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful tale.
Review: Many people dismiss this book as nothing but pervertedness and filthiness. They fail to see the beauty of this tale. This book deserves literary merit, for it's a brave masterpiece. Not, as one prosecutor put it, "dirt for dirt's sake."

This book should not be seen as a piece of work advertising pornography, but rather as a mere attack against industrialization. Perhaps Lawrence, through the tale of Lady Chatterley and her lover, was trying to bring a message across about industry (Clifford Chatterley's coal mine) and the working class (significantly the gamekeeper, Mellors). But, of course, we can't overlook the endless romance between Lady Chatterley and her lover, for it is what this story is about.

The fact that it contains that little four-lettered Anglo-Saxon word that begins with an "F" is more reason why this book deserves literary merit, for it is one of the first and foremost important works of literature to contain it. Now, of course, it is hard to find a book, a movie, or a song without that famous word.

If D. H. Lawrence should be remembered a thousand years from now, it should be for writing this story. He was a very courageous, very daring person to have written it. This taboo of a story is one that will stay in the reader's mind forever.

(Note: If you are to read this book, I'd recommend the unexpurgated version.)

Rating:
Summary: Scathing indictment of class structure, among other things.
Review: I opened this book expecting litle more than a fleshed-out porno movie, since it was, after all, the subject of one many years ago and was well thumbed in my high school library, but only at the sexy parts. What a surprise for me to discover a harsh critique of British class structure, the industrial revolution, artists and intellectuals, and self-gratifying sex.

Yes, there are explicit sex scenes. Yes, he uses some language that must have been extremely shocking in its time. But my, oh my--if everybody on this planet made love the way Mellors and Constance Chatterly did, with awareness, and tenderness, and absolute vulnerability--well then, I won't go so far as to say we would have world peace, but I bet we'd be a heck of a lot happier.

This book is not a great piece of literature. It offers a grim picture of an earlier England by somebody obviously disenchanted with it, a great harpooning of Robin Hood forests, the upper crust, and literary snobs. It's a bit ponderous here and there, and the seasonal metaphors are a bit sophomoric. Still, it was the Lawrence's final book, and embodies a lifetime of thinking about sex, the body, and the spirit. Worth the read!