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Search tags: e.m.-forster
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review 2019-04-23 07:31
Literary introduction to early 20th century homosexuality
Maurice - E.M. Forster



Maurice Hall comes from a middle-class family, going to public school then Cambridge and finding love with two men during his early lifetime. The plot deals with the conflicts ensuing from this "criminal" behaviour and the mixed emotions felt by the main protagonists. There are a few well-developed characters and a lot of inevitable introspection. Not fun like A Room with a View and earlier than A Passage to India, this novel reads easily but is not hugely inspiring. Good as far as it goes.

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review 2019-01-11 20:42
Day 5 of the Great Gaudy Book Hangover...
Where Angels Fear to Tread - Audible Studios,Edward Petherbridge,E.M. Forster
Having finished Gaudy Night on Monday morning, I haven't read anything new since I finished the book. 
 
And this isn't the usual book hangover. I'm actually enjoying that I can't move on to another book right now and the I keep thinking back to the book (and Strong Poison and Have His Carcase).
 
So, instead,  I've been tumbling down several rabbit holes on YouTube and, because one thing leads to another, I somehow ended up re-listening to Edward Petherbridge's out-of-this world narration of Where Angels Fear to Tread (his narration of Howards End - my favourite Forster -  is equally fantastic but I am saving up that one for a real need of comfort).
 
However, it did get me to think about certain similarities between Sayers and Forster that I hadn't considered before - even if the theme of "only connect" does somewhat stand out for me at this point.
 
Anyway, Where Angels Fear to Tread is still Forster's weakest story, but it does improve on the second re-read in that the satirical character stands out more than before. 
 
All the stars for Mr. P's narration, 3 stars for the book.
 
(Link to previous review of the book.)

 

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review 2018-12-10 03:06
Howard End by E.M. Forster
Howards End - E.M. Forster

These days I often find myself appreciating classics more than contemporary fiction – but not all classics; there are still books whose quality doesn’t quite live up to their reputation. This is one of those.

Set in early 20th century England, this book follows the adventures of Margaret and her younger sister Helen; these two are certainly appealing characters to a modern audience, being intelligent, thoughtful, socially-conscious youngish women who inherited sufficient funds from their now-deceased parents to live independently and comfortably for life. So they travel and enjoy social and intellectual pursuits and worry about what they should be doing for those less fortunate than themselves. Their liberal guilt is dramatized through two families they encounter: the wealthy Wilcoxes, a sporty family whose focus on their own financial interests lives little room for even basic politeness to anyone else, and the lower-middle-class Leonard Bast, a clerk struggling on the edge of poverty, and his unfortunate wife.

It’s an interesting premise, and the issues of the role of money in people’s lives and of liberal guilt are fairly well-developed. It’s also a reasonably interesting portrayal of England before the First World War; the sisters’ father was German and the determination of both their German and English relatives that their own country is meant to rule the world is treated with gentle irony. Unfortunately, the first half of the book – after a strong opening – loses momentum fast and is almost entirely lacking in plot. Nothing much happens to these characters for a long time; Margaret, our protagonist, glides through the story without struggle; there’s nothing she needs or wants and doesn’t have. The true plot appears around the halfway point, but unfortunately so many character decisions lacked believability that I can’t say much for it in the end. Meanwhile, while some of the issues Margaret ponders remain interesting and relevant today, its philosophical maunderings often left me underwhelmed, and the ideas about the superiority of England haven’t aged well. The rest of my criticism contains a lot of SPOILERS, so beware.

The second half of the book rests on two big eyebrow-raising decisions, and the story finally wraps up with a third. Margaret receives a marriage proposal from Henry Wilcox, and the book never gives any particular reason that she should marry him, aside from the fact that he expresses a liking for her: he’s a smug, self-satisfied conservative old enough to be her father, who embraces self-serving platitudes on both gender and economic inequality and has a nasty tendency to use Margaret’s moments of weakness as evidence of the inferiority of all women. And in the single scene portraying their physical relationship, he leaves Margaret disappointed and confused. And then it turns out that his track record for fidelity is not great. Margaret doesn’t need Henry, yet she gives up her autonomy to be with him – why?

Helen’s encounter with Leonard is equally baffling: she’s presumably a virgin, living in a society where women who have premarital sex are shunned; he’s probably never slept with anyone other than his wife, who is asleep in the next room at the time; he’s in awe of her as his benefactor, and he’s probably none too clean or well-fed; at no point in the story does there appear to be any romantic or sexual attraction between the two. And yet they have sex?

All of which leads to the final confrontation, which is believable enough – and then Forster skips right to the aftermath, perhaps knowing that tracing out these events would strain credibility too much. Helen decides to stay in England even though she’d enjoy more social acceptance in Germany; Henry abruptly loses all concern about Helen’s wayward behavior; Margaret’s magical influence apparently convinces everyone to live together happily every after. Um, okay.

So I didn’t really buy this one. The writing is fine, and many of the issues it raises are important and remain timely. But Forster’s plotting and ability to get the characters to the places where he needs them to be in a believable way left something to be desired.

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review 2018-11-12 19:27
A Room with a View
A Room with a View - E.M. Forster

After having listened to the audiobook, excellently narrated by Rebecca Hall, my feelings towards this book haven´t changed a bit. Okay, maybe I liked Mr. Emerson senior more this time around. But everything else is as it has been two years ago. So here is my review from back then once more:

 

A coming of age story about a young Englischwoman named Lucy Honeychurch, who during her travel to Florence realizes that she is trapped in her rigid upperclass life and yet isn´t able to escape it. Soon she has to make a decision whether she is going to do the things that everyone is expecting from her or whether she is going to follow her own heart.

 

A Room with a View didn´t win me completly over, even though I really liked how E.M. Forster adresses the issues of stiff, victorian society in the beginning of the 1900s. But the characters lacked developement, the writing confused me more than once while reading this novel and the love story could have been more fleshed out. And Lucy Honeychurch is a lying, spoiled brat and most definitely not a heroine that I could root for.

 

Not one of my favorite classics, but there were some chapters that I adore (the scene at the lake is one of them). A solid three star read.

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review 2018-07-22 23:11
E.M. Forster: A New Life
E.M. Forster: A New Life - Wendy Moffat

Before judging my reading experience of this book based on my star rating, let me say this:

 

This was not a bad book and there are aspects of this biography that provide a valuable insight into Forster's life and work. However, this biography really follows Forster's life from one angle only, depending on what you expect from a biography, mileage on this may vary.

 

Moffat starts the book with an explanation of her approach, which in turn is based on something Christopher Isherwood said when looking at a stack of biographies about Forster:

"Of course all those books have got to be re-written," he said. "Unless you start with the fact that he was homosexual, nothing's any good."

That is, Moffat is quoting from an Isherwood biography by John Lehmann here, and whether this is a true account or was written as a dramatic embellishment, I could not say. 

It does, however, go straight to the heart of Moffat's biography ... and also to one of the criticisms I have.

 

Moffat does an excellent job presenting Forster in the context of his sexuality, or more precisely his initial struggles with it and the immense pressure he felt of not being able to live openly for fear of persecution and, indeed, prosecution. Being a young man at the start of the 20th century, Forster would have only been too aware of the trials of Oscar Wilde and would himself witness the arrest of friends and acquaintances over the decades. 

 

His resentment over not being able to tell the stories he really wanted to tell and over having to work within the expectations of societal conventions lead to Forster stopping to write major works of fiction after A Passage to India (1924). That is, he did write another major novel, Maurice, but insisted that it should not be published until after his death as the story tells of the relationship between two men and he feared the repercussions. (Btw, Maurice apparently includes a game-keeper scene that may have inspired D.H. Lawrence - one of the few people who were aware of the manuscript - to mock it in Lady Chatterley's Lover)   

 

Moffat explores Forster's diaries - including his "locked" diaries, which he also only allowed access after his death - in detail and we do get a clear picture of the anxieties and of the passions Forster had, and Moffat does well to connect Forster's diary entries with the lives of his friends, peers, and with perception of homosexuality in society through the decades. 

 

However, this is also the main point where this book fell down for me. Moffat goes into a lot of detail. Salacious detail. Lots and lots of it. At times, I felt like whole chapters were focusing about who bedded whom more so than Forster's life and work. Rather than developing an argument, it felt like some of the descriptions merely served to provide a sensationalist hook. 

 

I really should have liked this more than I did, but the meandering descriptions of relationships (not just Forster's but also of his friends and acquaintances) made me skim over quite a few paragraphs. There was little point to most of them.

 

The other criticism I have is with Moffat's writing style. It did not work for me. Her narrative sounded dramatised in a way that made the book read more like fiction than non-fiction and some of the descriptions, as a result of the narrations, did not sound factual even tho they may have been. This was not helped by the way that references were not clearly marked in the text. They were there, of course, but I should not have to check the reference section in the book to see if a certain line on a page is actually backed up with a source of research. 

 

All in all, this was interesting, but I would not recommend the book without some hesitation.

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