Today I am linking up to Book Beginnings hosted by Rose City Reader where readers share the first sentence of the current book they are reading.
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she realized that one must live and learn."
I must confess, I am intrigued by banned books. A banned book deemed a classic...even better. I have previously read D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow but I was not prepared for Lady Chatterley's Lover. The introduction is quite breathtaking in describing the discontentment of the characters. It is easy to see how Lawrence's use of vocabulary in this novel would not have been favored by the masses at the time of its release. In the past few years, many novels have been published with the intent on shocking the reader by detailing what was once deemed romance in explicit detail. However, the themes addressed in Lady Chatterley's Lover set it apart from those current books as it tackles large issues of the time such as the class system and social conflict.
About the Book ( from wikipedia): Lady Chatterley’s
Lover by D.H. Lawrence was first published in
1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence,
Italy, with assistance from Pino Orioli;
an unexpurgated edition could not be published openly in the United Kingdom
until 1960. (A private edition was issued by Inky
Stephensen's Mandrake Press in 1929.) The book soon became notorious
for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its
explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable
words. The story is said to have originated from events in
Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings
of the book from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where he grew
up. Lawrence at one time
considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to
the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in
three versions.
About the Author (from wikipedia): David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English
novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published
as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works, among other things, represent
an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In
them, some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality,
spontaneity and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he
endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative
work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a
voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage."
