Woman Behind the Painter: The Diaries of Rosalie, Mrs. James Clarke Hook Book

D.H Lawrence journey's through Italy in an extremely unhelpful travel guide.

I was going to write the entirity of this review as a snarky 'I'd never finished a Lawrence book before. Now I have and I'm delighted to know I don't have to read D.H bloody Lawrence anymore'. I admitedly went into this with prejudice against the author after all my previous failed attempts at his other works and though I may have chosen a bad work in his bibliography, I swear I forced myself to find some good points and my God did I struggle.

His depiction of Italians is borderline bestial, like some pith helmeted colonialist admiring the marvellous manners of the natives, with him viewing an old woman spinning as somehow symbolising the universe in her simplicitly (in a disjointed, bizarre quasi-religious rant that goes on for pages and pages, while she clearly wishes Lawrence would piss off and stop staring at her).
These odd indulges in religious fervor seem to strike like a brief fever, and at one point Lawrence literally switches from a long diatribe on the holy trinity to a discussion on citrus fruit prices, which was disconcerting to say the least.
He also has a habit of depicting most men like lumbering muscle with steaming overtones of sexual preadator, women as wholely seperate creatures, and both prefer emotion to thinking. I'm not entirely sure where Lawrence gets the confidence to psychoanalyse an entire nation's sexual and emotional habits, especially when his evidence seems to be the theatre and small snippets of culture. There may be some accuracy in his observations of Catholic life, but I hardly imagine the burbling git a trustworthy authority.

Lawrence also has the habit of repeating the same word over and over again, seemingly for no reason other than he lost his thesaurus back in Geneva. Most of his text seems unnecessary, either for aesthetics or information, the most egrecious example of pointless words to me being: 'But Agamemnon, king and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible'. Yes, thank you, Lawrence, as I must have an IQ on par with a ham sandwich I clearly needed that clarification.
That painful prose 'choice' eases as the book goes on, thankfully, as does his ectasy sermons, but the Italy he creates doesn't really inspire or fascinate. Il Duro, a handsome man who claims he's 'seen too much' so now can't get married, and who Lawrence describes in the same way a primatologist would talk of the sad and almost human eyes of a gorilla, gets his own little section and Lawrence's borderline homoerotic admiration. The author repeatedly asks the poor sod the same question over and over in some search for an unstated meaning, all while recieving the same broken answer and meaningful stares, while I'm sitting there wondering if deleting a book from an e-reader will be as satisfying as frisbeeing a paperback from my window.

Lawrence gets some things right. I liked his description of a dance and the many odd crucifixes he discovers, including an eerie broken one which will likely stay in my head, but ultimately this feels like a very self-indulgent and solipstic pile of tosh.

My final take away is that Lawrence is less a philosopher and more that weird bloke on the bus soliloquising his gap year to you whether you like it or not, gargling the same sentences over and over, as he sups his Dad's Johnny Walker from an elaborately decorated canteen you know he bought in Minsk, because he gives you long, creepy speculations on the seller's psyche. Also he probably has an erection.
I remain not a fan.