Word: forsters
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Despite the Forster references, “On Beauty” could have been titled “On Harvard.” Smith names her extra-Boston Ivy “Wellington,” but it’s a see-through disguise for a school with blustery winters, dramatic faculty meetings, and a Black Studies Department nursing a beef with the administration...
...just eaten a five-course meal. She tackles too much—affirmative action, aesthetics, and that thing called love—through the eyes of too many (five, in fact), each with back stories that would occupy the better part of a novel. In her desire to emulate Forster, Smith adheres too strictly to his plotline. What could have been inspiration is simply replication...
...Only connect the prose and the passion," wrote British novelist E.M. Forster, "and both will be exalted." Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty, does, and they are. Beautifully written, it is - like her debut best seller White Teeth - essentially a story about families, expansive enough to encompass questions of race, Rembrandt, aging gracefully (or not), love, fidelity and, as the title suggests, recognizing what is truly beautiful and how we make it a part of our lives. Smith, as she makes clear in her acknowledgments, is indebted to Forster for more than good advice. On Beauty is a rambunctious...
...himself accurately as "almost a corpse." It is miraculous that he had the wit and energy to remember, much less to create. Welch's world is barely larger than a sickroom, but its travel books intrigued some famous tourists, including Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen and E.M. Forster, who praised the author's "sensitiveness, visual and tactile." The style-struck critic Cyril Connolly described Welch's prose as ripening "like an October pear that measures every hour of sunshine against the inevitable frost...
...market, valuing impact over nuance, the gross over the gracious. If Merchant-Ivory wanted the old genres, they could have them for free. So they ransacked your auntie's library for stories by Henry James (The Bostonians, The Europeans, The Golden Bowl), Jean Rhys (Quartet) and, most sympathetically, E.M. Forster (A Room With a View, Maurice, Howards...