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3.47 AVERAGE
3.47 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Some parts were tedious and boring, other parts were lovely. Some parts I couldn't put it down. Some parts were thought provoking -I know I'm going to be thinking about this book for years. I might give it a 3.5 to be more precise in my rating.
I read this in college but remember nothing about it other than that I didn't really care for it. Since then I've read and loved A Room with a View and Howard's End so I wanted to reread to see if I would like it now. I can see why I didn't like it in college - I would have just been annoyed at Miss Quested and thought everything was boring. Now I can appreciate how he portrayed Indians vs. the British and how shocking this probably was when it was published. Forster did quite a bit of traveling and you can tell he learned to appreciate other cultures and races and wanted to share that with the British people. He also weirdly predicted that India would gain freedom while England was distracted by war, quite the prediction for 1924. I liked Mrs. Moore and think Forster might just write the best female characters by any male writer - and he outshines many female writers in that area too.
Didn't even bother to finish, and will not bother in the future.
adventurous
challenging
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
OMG - assumed it was a stuffy period piece. But no, what a drama! One of the best narrators I’ve heard, too.
One of the best books I have ever read. I would give it a six star rating if I could. Forster is an amazing author and brings up some interesting tensions between England and her former empire in a way I had not previously been exposed to. Can't rave enough about this one.
This idea of an echo is fascinating to me. This inability to establish meaning until the event has past seems to be a main theme throughout the novel, and that can be seen especially through Aziz and his perspective on the friendship he had with Mrs. Moore, the English woman. The thought that "most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence" is profound (125).It seems depressing really, but there is something to this, especially in terms of the authenticity of travel writing.
Everything is always one sided, one limited perspective, and once you get something like this you are bound to see cropping and magnifying of themes that will make a good story. I am really interested in problematizing creative nonfiction as a genre in terms of being authentic, and I think this book not only has a good commentary on it, but it was also influenced by Forster's experience in India. This edition I really enjoy because it footnotes some of Forster's journal entries while he was abroad and where they have slipped into his work. Granted this is now a fiction work, but I wonder if he was making some commentary on the limit of his own experience throughout it. It is something I keep in mind whenever I go through my journal entries and field notes of my latest adventures in Ghana, knowing that the lasting meaning will be something that I have yet to establish.
As I have caught a little bit of a travel bug, I was slightly mortified to see how similar I felt to the young outspoken Adela Quested. Sometimes I worry that I want to see "India" and not "Indians" with every place I've targeted on the map (245). It is something I think a lot of people are guilty of, especially in the tourist industry. Something to be mindful of, that is for sure.
This idea of an echo is fascinating to me. This inability to establish meaning until the event has past seems to be a main theme throughout the novel, and that can be seen especially through Aziz and his perspective on the friendship he had with Mrs. Moore, the English woman. The thought that "most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence" is profound (125).It seems depressing really, but there is something to this, especially in terms of the authenticity of travel writing.
Everything is always one sided, one limited perspective, and once you get something like this you are bound to see cropping and magnifying of themes that will make a good story. I am really interested in problematizing creative nonfiction as a genre in terms of being authentic, and I think this book not only has a good commentary on it, but it was also influenced by Forster's experience in India. This edition I really enjoy because it footnotes some of Forster's journal entries while he was abroad and where they have slipped into his work. Granted this is now a fiction work, but I wonder if he was making some commentary on the limit of his own experience throughout it. It is something I keep in mind whenever I go through my journal entries and field notes of my latest adventures in Ghana, knowing that the lasting meaning will be something that I have yet to establish.
As I have caught a little bit of a travel bug, I was slightly mortified to see how similar I felt to the young outspoken Adela Quested. Sometimes I worry that I want to see "India" and not "Indians" with every place I've targeted on the map (245). It is something I think a lot of people are guilty of, especially in the tourist industry. Something to be mindful of, that is for sure.
The only action in the book is talking, but no one can communicate. If you can't communicate with your neighbor or even your own family, what hope is there of communicating across cultures? The passages I found difficult (like the Indian religious ceremony at the end) contributed to that theme.
A couple parallels to Dune struck me: the empire occupying a foreign land setting is the obvious one. The style of switching perspectives and hearing the thoughts of different characters within the same scene is distinctive enough to make me wonder if Herbert copied it from here.
Forster wrote beautifully. Here's how he opens Part II:
The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India we call immemorial came into being. But India is really far older. In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed, and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea. They are older than anything in the world. No water has ever covered them, and the sun who has watched them for countless æons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom. If flesh of the sun’s flesh is to be touched anywhere, it is here, among the incredible antiquity of these hills.
A couple parallels to Dune struck me: the empire occupying a foreign land setting is the obvious one. The style of switching perspectives and hearing the thoughts of different characters within the same scene is distinctive enough to make me wonder if Herbert copied it from here.
Forster wrote beautifully. Here's how he opens Part II:
The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India we call immemorial came into being. But India is really far older. In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed, and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea. They are older than anything in the world. No water has ever covered them, and the sun who has watched them for countless æons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom. If flesh of the sun’s flesh is to be touched anywhere, it is here, among the incredible antiquity of these hills.
Lovely writing and an interesting topic, but I found it suffered from too many dragging sections of spiritualist philosophy and poetic romanticism. Can't give it five stars because I only found about a third of the book to be genuinely great, and the rest of it good but unengaging.
had effects on my psyche that cannot be understated. i am an aziz loyalist first and foremost. his values are like mine; his ideas of loyalty are just like my ancestral ones.