Word: forster
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
NONFICTION: A Distant Mirror. Barbara W. Tuchman∙American Caesar, William Manchester∙E.M. Forster: A Life, P.N. Furbank∙In Search of History, Theodore H. White ∙Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie∙ Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Gulag Archipelago III, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
...conductor taught him something else about the tenuous meetings of East and West. He got it all down in A Passage to India (1924), an unquestioned masterpiece. The novel's satiric anti-colonialism riled many; British civil servants sailing out to India threw the book overboard. Some of Forster's acid observations on the Raj were effectively challenged, but the art of the novel was beyond refutation. It sang with the poetry of its Indian settings, the hope that British and Indians could only connect. Its echoing conclusion came from the earth and the sky: the time...
...lived 46 more years and never wrote another novel. Furbank suggests several reasons for this long silence, including Forster's growing reluctance to portray conventional love (Maurice, his one explicitly homosexual novel, was written in his 30s and published only after his death). A Passage to India seemed to exhaust the theme that had stretched from his earlier work. Most important, Forster had exorcised most of his private demons. He began to find those friendships, physical and emotional, that he had desired for so long. One, with a happily married ex-London policeman, lasted some 40 years...
...Forster knew that his private life would become public knowledge with this biography, and he may have worried about the consequences. He need not have. He shines through Furbank's narrative as a gentle and courageous man. He has received the biography that he and his work deserved, one that is iust as decent, civil and humane as its subject...
...profoundly grateful for his praise and from now on became very dependent on his opinion. He intrigued her as a person, too. She was impressed by his penetration and vision, and amused by the contrast between them and his old-maidish way of life. 'I saw Forster, who is timid as a mouse, but when he creeps out of his hole very charming,' she wrote ... 'He spends his time rowing old ladies upon the river, and isn't able to get on with his novel' She liked him a good deal -rather more than...