classic book review: Women in love by D. H. Lawrence

Women in love by D. H. Lawrence is the first classic book I read, without a teacher telling me so. I read before classics because I should, they were part of the school assignments. I didn’t enjoy them much. I always thought they were long, boring, written with a really sophisticated style, using some ancient adjectives that you can’t even find in the dictionary. 

This book was no exception, it contains (in my version) 542 page, the first half of it was so boring, and after reading two pages of it I had already giving up using the dictionary, I couldn’t find the meaning of most of the words I was looking for. The only thing that did give me strength to continue reading was this article, I had read about reasons you should be reading the classics, other than: Because we said so. Thanks to this article I didn’t give up reading, and I’m glad I didn’t, because the second half of the book was so interesting, and I enjoyed reading it.

The story follows the relationships of Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun with their lovers Rupert Birkin and Gerald. I got really attached to those four characters, after reading 542 page about them, I feel like I know them personally, I don’t love them or hate them I just know them.

Those are some aspects in this book that I did really enjoy:

• The high intellectual discussions between the characters.
• The way the author would show us their dark side and their anger; “A sudden desire leapt in his heart to kill her”, “What a perfect voluptuous consummation it would be to strangle her”
• I liked the way the writer would express the sadness, the depression,  the happiness , the feelings of the characters ; “He would overlook the old grief, he would put away the old ethic, he would be free in his new state”, “Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance”, “The only window was death. One should look out on the great dark sky of death with emotion, as one looked out of the class room window as a child, and seen perfect freedom in the outside.”, “Sometimes I think it is a curse to be alive”
• I loved how the author would dedicate an entire chapter to discuss some deep ideas as love, death, life, faith.
• The book is composed of 31 chapters, I enjoyed most the last chapters, but there is also this chapter that I think is my favorite, about Gerald and his dad, both really successful industrialists, where the author did a comparison between their perspective on work and religion.

This book was definitely not an easy read for me, sometimes I felt really confused. I couldn’t tell if they loved or hated each other, there was also this complex relationship between the two male characters I couldn't understand is it just strong friendship or more? In this quote Birkin was trying to explain it to Ursula “having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love”

Sometimes the characters would talk to each other in a different language, I didn’t have a problem when they used French, but when they use other than French, I’m like how am I supposed to know what they are talking about? And how much language do those characters know?

Overall I enjoyed this book much more than I thought, I have already started reading another classic book , it’s Sense and sensibility by JANE AUSTEN, I kind of understand now why people still read those books, they are as fun as the other books but in many ways they are much more interesting.