Books galore

Lady Chatterley's Lover and Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence

At this point, I've read a good bit of D.H. Lawrence, which maybe says something about me. Unlike his (sort-of) contemporaries Dickens, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, etc, where I read two or so books and call it good, Lawrence has entered a realm inhabited by a few authors - E.M. Forster, Jane Austen - who seem to call to me to read everything they've written. Of those, Lawrence is probably the most opaque. I don't find him especially easy to read or to understand, I don't sympathize immediately or strongly with his protagonists, but I keep coming back. Secretly, I think it's just him.

No matter that Lawrence looked like a slightly tubercular version of my boyfriend; I just love what Lawrence's books tell me about their author, about what he cared about and what he paid attention to in life. And I think it's Lawrence's obsessions with sex, beauty and the search for truth that get to me. Some authors write characters that you fall in love with. Lawrence writes a damn sexy omniscient third person narrator.

Of the two, I vastly preferred Lady Chatterley. It was much more straightforward than his other books, and I think he wrote it, in a sense, for people he knew, not for the general public. Women in Love was affecting in parts, but in the end, left me cold (that's a pun, but you have to read the book to get it.)


A Town Like Alice and The Chequerboard by Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute has also drawn me in, in the last few years. I read On the Beach as part of my post-apocalyptic kick, and then recognized the name on Alice in the dollar bin at Powell's. I adored A Town Like Alice. In was one of the most romantic books I've ever read. When a book gets you, really gets you, to think that the two aren't going to get together, and then they do...ah, magic. And the two - and Englishwoman and an Australian, thrown together in WW2 in the Phillipines - are wonderfully written characters. The Chequerboard was less moving, but engaging and powerful. It's basically a narrative diatribe against racism, with object lessons in the form of the four men in the story. It was written in 1947, which only makes me sadder to think how many more years of the kind of racism described were ahead. Things are very different now, which takes some of the air out of the story (think "Gentleman's Agreement") but it was good all the same.

Whew...and time to pick up a new book, now.