D. H. Lawrence and Italy: Sketches from Etruscan Places, Sea and Sardinia, Twilight in Italy (Penguin Classics) by D. H. Lawrence (PDF)

Description

In these impressions of the Italian countryside, Lawrence transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty.Twilight in Italy is a vibrant account of Lawrence’s stay among the people of Lake Garda, whose decaying lemon gardens bear witness to the twilight of a way of life centuries old. In Sea and Sardina, Lawrence brings to life the vigorous spontaneity of a society as yet untouched by the deadening effect of industrialization. And Etruscan Places is a beautiful and delicate work of literary art, the record of “a dying man drinking from the founts of a civilization dedicated to life.”

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐If you love Lawrence’s fiction then don’t miss the chance to get on board with him as he searches out the last of the soulful and wild places that may be found beyond the contagion of civilization. Even a century ago he knew that the chances were slim to come upon a place of primal vitality yet he pushes on sensitive to the faintest glow, reaffirming life. Weary of traveling, at times he is cynical, repetitive, even boring but that’s just the set up for the great writer to deliver the goods.The author is so painfully self centered, under fierce mental stress, that he rarely gets out of his cage to engage this environment. When he does, he shows some fine desriptive abilities, though in very wordy form. For a free thinker he is extremely provincial in his attitudes. This was a tough slog.These essays are classics. Etruscan Places almost single-handedly revived “modern” interest in the Etruscans and was essential to the preservation and study of their tombs and paintings. Throughout, Lawrence is sensitive and insightful. An added patina to these works is the fact that they were written in the 1930s during the build-up toward WWII. There is an immediacy mixed with nostalgia here that is compelling.The book arrived perfectly in time, I have nothing to say about it (I chose the most expensive way, but I needed it in few days!).The only thing that I can report are the conditions of the book. It seems old or at least treated in a bad way, the coverture is fold and I don’t like when my new books seem like old ones!The book was not quite what I expected. It did not add much to my store of knowledge, and did not sharpen my perceptions. It is one of those “must” books, which is generally thought to be of importance, and nobody dares argue with the decree. I did not mind reading it, but I lacked the necessary enthusiasm for it.I haven’t started reading it but the book is very ligth and soft. well printedThree travel narratives chart the growth of Lawrence as well as introducing his takes on Italy. “Twilight in Italy,” from 1916, looks at Italians trying to evade the wartime draft by working in Switzerland, as well as Lawrence’s journeys around Lake Garda and the town of Gargnano. It’s full of his denunciations of the industrial world, paeans to the Not-Me, the phallus, male energy, female life-forces, and affirmation of the darker forces within, under the complacent or cowed civilization. Therefore, depending on one’s predilections for DHL, this may deter or reward you as a reader today.The highlights are in the quiet moments. He observes a shy, awkward, nearly silent woman caring for him in a gloomy inn. He listens to Italian anarchists imagine their better world, but he cannot join them. He watches the landscape, tries to fit in, and he laments the loss of the lemon groves to foreign competition. Paolo and Maria epitomize a young married couple whose future does not bode well, in DHL’s prediction. As Tim Parks notes in his introduction (which compiles, skillfully, all of the best lines or most telling scenes from these three books), DHL makes out of a passing vista of two monks pacing outdoors a magisterial summation on the decline of modern man in the past century. He shows by a weary hiker from a London suburb, on too-quick a holiday, how vacations hurry us all today.After WWI, “Sea and Sardinia” was published after a week’s visit in January 1921. DHL and Frieda (“the q-b”) are the companions who find themselves fending off the locals. “I am not the British Isles on two legs.” (184) So he splendidly sums up his predicament, as he resents being tagged for the loss by the Axis and the problems of Empire. But he also writes of his hope that the stocking-capped men on the island rise up and burst into exertion based on their fiery blood, rather than capitulate to the American order and its wholesome wishes for peace. So, like in book one, there’s some contradiction.But the complaints about the voyages, the poor service, the bad meals, the dreary villages, entertain. One realizes DHL engages in this sour mood for fun, and he sets himself up as a bit of straw man. Tallying his costs, he jots how much he paid for every meal, accommodation, and ticket. He depicts the woeful inn where chickens parade outside, he complains of tiresome priests, and he wishes for pagans to return to the enchanted isle. However, it’s obvious DHL preaches to himself, not us. He manages to eke two-hundred pages out of his journals, even if not much in Sardinia “really happens.””Whenever one is in Italy, either one is conscious of the present, or of the mediaeval influences, or of the far, mysterious gods of the early Mediterranean. Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genius.” (250) Lawrence goes on a lot like this, if less so than in the first or last accounts here. He contrasts the post-war ennui with the crackdowns of the new “regime” in Italy. He is sick of museums, artifacts taken out of context, “Carpaccio and Botticelli”: he’d rather watch a peasant. “The horrors of barbarism are not so fearful, I verily believe, as the horrors of strangulation with old culture. Beauty as we know it is a millstone around our necks, and I am fairly choked.” (276) “And as for the Italian good-nature, it forms a sound and unshakeable basis nowadays for their extortion and self-justification and spite.” (310) He knows enough Italian to hear what is said when his back is turned from those who wait upon him. Those readers who come to this volume expecting light effusion and fulsome anecdotes will be thwarted. These episodes are full of contempt for our time, as they appeal to a romantic, unhinged, and more innocent era of fewer inhibitions.His last section, “Sketches of Etruscan Places and other Italian Essays,” appeared in 1932, after his death. Written among those Tarquinian tombs with mortality in mind, these 1927 excursions naturally edge into seriousness. The Penguin Classic does not include all the “other essays” of co-editor Simonetta de Fillipis’ 1992 Cambridge edition, so this is a concise hundred pages, mostly below ground in Tuscany. Lawrence reminds us how the ancients built out of wood, so all that survives is under the earth, the stone tombs. “So that the etruscan cities vanished completely as flowers. Only the tombs, like bulbs, were underground.” (335) He continues in this vein: “Italy today is far more etruscan in its pulse, than Roman; and will always be so. The etruscan element is like the grass of the field and the sprouting of corn, in Italy: it will always be so. Why try to revert to the Latin-Roman mechanism and suppression?” So he asks, as the Fascist rule tries to refurbish the ancient, imperial, ruthless legacy that crushed the Etruscan spirit.Lag B’Omer bonfire smoke.Lag B’Omer tears flow.That custom granite.This past visit.A song is needed today.What impression has always been the dawn.What would the children had space.Lag B’Omer is important it is.Independence, freedom.After all, for each the ode.Parallel Worlds.People should live in friendship.Languages penetration.This friendship inspiration.How important customs.This ancient castle.Forget them should not.The world is one world love.All you we will keep.As always, the desire of love.It gives us all faithfulness mood.And the blessing of love.Gallery![…]http://www.amazon.com/Haifa-academy-talent-responsibility-Academy/dp/153338617X/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1464502238&sr=8-1&keywords=Iliyan+Yurukov”So that for us to go to Italy and penetrate into Italy is like a most satisfying act of self-discovery – back,back down the old ways of time.Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness”. Thus Lawrence acknowledges his debt to Italy. This trilogy is drenched with the most exquisite prose and ravishing metaphors (” And looking down the hill,among the grey smoke of olive leaves, pink puffs of smoke are rising up. It is the almond and apricot trees, it is the Spring”) and similes (“The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape”).He,typically,repeats and artfully re-works his ideas to enhance the effects. “And cork trees! I see curious,slim oaky-looking trees that are stripped quite naked below the boughs standing brown,ruddy…They remind me of glowing,coffee-brown,naked aborigines of the South Seas. They have the naked suavity,skin-bare and intense coffee-red colour of unclothed savages”. I therefore enjoyed this book far more than the novels. And I was impressed by how this working-class boy peppered these Italian dishes with Biblical, classical and literary references.Of course, his philosophy and view of history is flawed. as is his attempt to penetrate minds and cultures with so little acquaintance, yet they do tell us a great deal about what was going on in his very original mind. Lawrence is not scientific. His heightened perception is subjective, idiosyncratic and anti-rational. He is physically aroused by nature and the ancient blood and life forces, the consequence of his fragile health that kept him out of the army, obliged him to give up his job and brought him to a premature death. But this was also the young man who walked from Switzerland to Italy. His account is conversational, humorous and sarcastic at times.”I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras.No man can hear ten words of Italian today without two thousand or two million or ten or twenty or two liras flying like mosquitoes round his ears. Liras – liras- liras-nothing else”. His prophetic and major theme, shared with Blake, Ruskin and others, is the corrupting and impending threat of the machine and industrialisation.”It is the hideous rashness of the world of men,the horrible desolating harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of nature that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing. If only we could learn to take thought for the whole world instead of for merely tiny bits of it” . In his ‘Italy’ we are led through art, beauty ,thoughts and reflections – rather as Lawrence was , by a guide,through the Etruscan Tombs.I agree with the previous reviewer on the quality of the book’s production, which is horrible in my case not because of the transparency of the pages but because of the indistinct print. Not that the words are not recognizable (actually they are), but that there is such a blurry quality to it that I almost believed it was a pirated copy. It is the first time I have seen Penguin degenerate into such such sub-quality productions. (A side point to make: For those of you who do not get my point about this book, refer to one of those Vintage Classics copies printed on yellowish paper.)A beautifully written book that is a necessary companion to anyone visiting the parts of Italy covered.v goodExcellent, efficient service. Thank you

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