Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) | D. H. Lawrence

Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) | D. H. Lawrence | Incandescent. Perfect.

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Lady Chatterley's ...

	Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) D. H. Lawrence Penguin Classics, 2006 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 88 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century, Lady Chatterley?s Lover was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928. The unexpurgated edition did not appear in America until 1959, after one of the most spectacular legal battles in publishing history.

Still works

I have to admit I've missed this classic for too long. Still holds up and works for today's audience.

Incandescent. Perfect.

"She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty, but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body!"

Oh...my...God!!! Speechless, stunned, drooling, floored.

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Love in the Void

"Lady Chatterly's Lover" is one of the most (brutally) honest portrayals of love and intimacy in 20th century literature. Turning away from the flowery and the poetic sentiments of many other writers, Lawrence completely de-romanticizes romance and shows it as something visceral and almost beastial. Written during the span between the first and second World Wars, when industrialization and mechanization seemed to threaten the essence of humanity, Constance Chatterly can, I think, be seen as an Every-Wo/man character searching for intimacy in a society that was increasingly cold and cerebral. Is it possible to love someone when you are alienated from everyone around you? Can you feel passion when you are nothing more than a cog in the gears of some great machine? These are the central questions asked by Lawrence in this novel and of course they are still relevant today.

While "Chatterly" may not be considered Lawrence's best work, it is still a great book and definitely worth reading. Of course, this novel has flaws - notably the characterization of Mellors, and also the very abrupt ending - but Lawrence's beautiful language (minus the various 4 letter words that appear throughout the text) and his keen understanding of humanity make this work really great. Read this book and consider the romantic relationships in your life and I'm sure you will have a lot to think about.

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Mixed feelings on this one...

On the whole, I would say that this book is considered a classic mostly because of its legendary troubles with the censors. Don't get me wrong - it was an alright book, interesting enough to hold my attention for the most part. However, I don't think that I'll be recommending it any time soon.

First off, I agree with the other commenters about Lawrence's basic lack of knowledge about female anatomy. My god. It's as if there's nothing at all that Clifford could have done for Connie. And apparently Connie is (in Lawrence's eyes) the apex of womanhood because she's one of the (very) few who can reach climax without any clitoral stimulation. Jesus christ, this isn't a book about sex. It's a book about misinformation!

Aside from that, what do we have?

We have Connie, who's barely sympathetic as a protagonist. I'd put her somewhere between Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina on the sympathy scale. On the one hand, who can't sympathize with her situation? She's trapped in an essentially joyless life. On the other hand, she's also a terrible snob. Witness the way that she looks down on the people of Tevershall - "Oh, everything is good and beautiful in Ye Olde English Woode where I screw my husband's gamekeeper, but that dirty dirty little town with all those hunched-over people who work for a living... how disgusting!"

And then we've got Mellors, who, quite frankly, I found kinda annoying. Is it just me, or does he come off as somewhat mentally deficient? Whenever he lapsed into "broad," I always imagined him talking like some kind of Scottish version of Cookie Monster.

And the ranting, oh my god, the ranting. Ok, Lawrence, we GET IT. Mellors is supposed to be the Man O' The Woods. The Green Man. The Great Horned God. Pan. But did you really have to spell it out for us in heavy handed sermons before and after every sex scene? Couldn't you have left just a little for us to figure out for ourselves?

Really, the only character who I kinda liked was Clifford. Sure, he was pathetic. But he knew it. He knew that he was, quite literally, the last of a dying breed. At the same time, though, he had a detached sort of irony, and that great British gift of understatement. You got the feeling that he was smart, and maybe even had a sense of humor. Who knows, perhaps this character would have seemed more terrifying back in the day, back when the British aristocracy was still kind of a threat to someone.

Oh yeah, and that one scene where we're really supposed to hate him? The one where his wheelchair gets stuck up on the hill? I actually felt kinda sorry for him there.

Ultimately, I'll say this about Lady Chatterly's Lover - I like what Lawrence was trying to do, but I don't really feel like he pulled it off. He makes some valid points about getting in touch with our physical, emotional, and spiritual natures. However, this gets obscured by some of his personal prejudices, as well as his total lack of understanding about women and their anatomy.

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