Some People Write a Lot

I'm still trying to work through Coetzee. I'm also trying to develop a love for pushups and kale, so there you go.

I don't really know what to say about the Master of Petersburg (side note: I really, really want to go to St. Petersburg). I was definitely helped through this one by my love of Russian novels. This one is relentlessly bleak, but if you can embrace the stark beauty of that bleakness you'll be semi okay-ish, more or less.

Right, so he gets the style right. It works. It feels very Dostoevsky-esque. But ultimately, it is a super frustrating novel. You think the novel is reaching some sort of a climax of some sort, we get this startling revelation, and then the novel turns and just sort of drops off. It's so odd.

I'm not a fan of D. H. Lawrence. He just gets old pretty quickly for me. However, if you do decide to read The Rainbow and Women In Love, please, do yourself a favor: read them in that order. Seriously. I can only blame myself, of course, but I really can't emphasize this point strongly enough. Don't do what I did. I think I would have gotten so much more out of Women in Love if I had done this in the right order. Though I still wouldn't have understood why they named one of their daughters Gudrun. I mean, really? And to me, that's the biggest mystery.

Essentially, the novel explores identity formation across three generations. How do we become ourselves? What does it mean to be an actualized individual? What does it mean to grow up, and how do we grow up? How do we define ourselves and both separate and connected to our families?

I did enjoy this one much more than Women in Love. I was mostly struck by how the structure of this novel is so unusual, but overall it worked. I still don't love D. H. Lawrence, but this was my favorite of his overall. He captures so much the anxieties and earnings of his characters.

But man, I wish I could say that I was done with his canon, but no: three to go.