E. M. Forster
6 books
- You feel the friendship between Dr Aziz and Cyril Fielding strain under the absurd pressures of colonial India, while the Marabar Caves leave everything morally unsettled. It’s thoughtful, occasionally slow and prickly, but rewarding if you like novels that refuse easy judgments about people or cultures.
- Watching Lucy Honeychurch slowly admit what she actually wants, despite her chaperone and the insufferable Cecil, is quietly satisfying, and Forster is funnier than you'd expect. A gentle book, honestly, but the kind that leaves you wanting to say yes to things.
- Aspects of the Novel non-fictionForster basically chats you through how novels work, coining flat versus round characters and grumbling that story ("and then, and then") is the novel's most primitive part. If you like fiction but want to see the machinery, his lecture-hall wit makes criticism feel like gossip.
- Margaret Schlegel is one of the few people in fiction who tries to be genuinely good without being insufferable about it, and watching her navigate the blunt, moneyed Wilcoxes is quietly absorbing. It moves gently, more conversation than event, but Forster's warmth sneaks up on you.
- These are stranger than his novels, half fantasy, half satire: a boy catches an omnibus to heaven, Pan panics tourists in an Italian wood, and in The Machine Stops people live underground and talk only through screens. Odd, short, quietly unnerving, and they stay with you.
- It's short and funny about English snobbery abroad, until it suddenly isn't, and the turn will knock the wind out of you. Watch Philip Herriton, sent to Italy to tidy up his widowed sister-in-law's scandal, slowly realize he might be the ridiculous one.