novels to read to understand the true meaning of love

[hitmouse]

I haven't read, don't have a copy of, Rex Warner's The Aerodrome, but that sf novel even has the subtitle "A Love Story." Can ayone comment?

My memory (reading in an O level English class many years ago) would put that as an ironic subtitle. Not really a romantic story if I recall correctly.

 

[hitmouse]

Old Yeller

Did he die of rabies, or was that Big Red?

 

[Extollager]

It's not a novel, so perhaps this shouldn't be offered, but I'll mention William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night."

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

 

[Extollager]

My memory (reading in an O level English class many years ago) would put that as an ironic subtitle. Not really a romantic story if I recall correctly.

Thanks! Good to know (about The Aerodrome).

 

[hitmouse]

It's not a novel, so perhaps this shouldn't be offered, but I'll mention William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night."

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

I didn't know he was a poet. That is quite good.
Poetry might be cheating just a little bit here, even though well done love poems are probably the literary benchmark on this subject.

 

[Danny McG]

Speaking of love poems, it's almost Valentine's Day.

Roses are red, Violets are blue etc

 

[DannMcGrew]

I didn't know he was a poet. That is quite good.
Poetry might be cheating just a little bit here, even though well done love poems are probably the literary benchmark on this subject.

Methinks the sonnet is Shakespeare's (116) and the short story Hodgson's

 

[Extollager]

The sonnet is a close fit with the theme of Hodgson’s story.

 

[dask]

Did he die of rabies, or was that Big Red?

Old yeller had hydrophobia (rabies) but had to be put down with a rifle bullet.

 

[mosaix]

Try Our Souls At Night by Kent Haruf.

 

[Boneman]

SHOGUN. My favourite novel of all time, and a brilliant love story.

 

[nixie]

Let's get back on topic shall we?

I'd also like to add, if you are offend by a response please report it or let a moderator know, we do not tolerate bullying or offensive behaviour from anyone.

Remember posting as newbie on a forum can be intimidating please consider this before replying and choose your words carefully.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

Some of Thomas Hardy's novels cover the theme of love and betrayal. One in particular is Far From the Madding Crowd, also Jude the Obscure.

 

[Extollager]

To put in another word for my favorite, C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces --

I love the Narnian books, but I think there must have been a big imaginative release for CSL when he finished writing these famous children's books. His next work of fiction, TWHF, was very different. It's not a hard book to read in the sense of style, structure, etc., but it lacks the Faerie glamour that we often expect from mythopoeic fantasy, and yet, in a way, that's what it is, as a retelling of the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche. It's written in the first person -- also something we don't expect from CSL -- and the writer is a woman, Orual. She is the older of two sisters of a petty king who bullies his daughters. When their mother dies, he takes a second wife, who bears a beautiful third daughter, Psyche. Orual comes to have an erotic passion for Psyche -- I don't mean that she wants to be the lesbian lover of her stepsister, but she does wish she had been not just Psyche's mother so that she could care for her daughter, but that she had been a man so she could be Psyche's husband, etc. She wants to be one with Psyche, to possess her, and, of course, feels that there is nothing she wouldn't do for her. Orual is rather contemptuous of her sexy sister Redival. She herself is ugly. Her young years are largely consumed with these feelings plus her studies under a Greek slave, who brings to that obscure, shabby little kingdom glimpses of rationality that begin to free Orual from her superstitious fears centered around the cult of the fertility goddess Ungit. When famine comes to the land, it turns out that Psyche must be sacrificed to the Beast-god. After Psyche is gone, and as Orual becomes a physically mature women, she develops a passion for a married soldier, Bardia. Thematically, the book is about the painful business of the getting of wisdom and particularly as regards love.

Except for quoting that Shakespeare sonnet that came to mind in connection with the Hodgson story, I've confined myself to "genre" (fantasy & sf) recommendations so far.

I wouldn't trust movies of the following to be adequate substitutes for the books.

I don't remember seeing Pride and Prejudice mentioned, but it does provide plenty to think about as regards romantic love.

Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov is bursting with imagination and ideas, and one important element is the passionate business of Dmitri, Grushenka, and Katya.

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair comes to mind. Waugh's A Handful of Dust is an unsparing account -- while being a masterpiece of ironic humor -- about bad love. Madison Jones's Passage Through Gehenna and An Exile are powerful short novels about destructive eros.

 

[The Judge]

Further to nixie's post above, some posts have been removed from this thread, and some have been edited to accord with those removals.

If anyone has a problem with another member's tone, you refer the issue to a moderator, and formal steps will be taken if the issue is thought to warrant it. We don't tolerate bullying, but nor do we tolerate anything that gives the appearance of a display of personal animosity under whatever guise.

 

[Extollager]

Dickens is criticized sometimes for his female characters, but he was a developing artist till almost the end. The love of Pip for Estella in Great Expectations and the "relationships" between Lizzie, Bradley Headstone, and Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend are intriguing.

One could mention Dorothea's story in Eliot's Middlemarch (and the young doctor's life with Rosamund in the same book), but I admit it's 40 years since I read this novel and I'm not sure I will read it again.

I agree with the original poster about Anna Karenina. The famous affair of Anna and Vronsky is a very great presentation of eros as destructive god, but it is balanced by the too often neglected or forgotten love of Levin and Kitty. By the way, it's my view that the great artists can take risks that would not end well in lesser hands. One example is the climax of Kurosawa's film Throne of Blood. Audiences would have laughed had this been done by a lesser artist. (I don't want to be more specific, for the sake of people who might not have seen the film.) But in Anna Karenina Tolstoy took a risk with the scene in which Levin and Kitty are writing strings of letters, the first letters of certain messages, and the other person does get what is meant. This might seem corny, contrived, in lesser hands. And, yes, the seen with Levin's brother and Varenka, on the mushroom hunt, is poignant and convincing.

The study of jealousy in Trollope's He Knew He Was Right is tangential to this thread but I'llmention it anyway. How about the Lily Dale - Johnny Eames matter in the Barsetshire sequence? I salute Trollope for daring to "fail" his readers' wishes. As Harry Nilsson spoke it:

Now, if you haven't got an answer, you'd never have a question
And if you never had a question, then you'd never have a problem
But if you never had a problem, well everyone would be happy
But if everyone was happy, there'd never be a love song