reading (A Passage to India)
Dec. 19th, 2010 08:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eorI finished "A Passage to India" on Tuesday. It's the first Forster I've read.
Forster can turn on that over the top poetic description mode that saturates the colors and textures or a scene or a society to the point they drip. Done too heavily, it becomes intolerable, but Forster seems to have a knack for stopping just before that tipping point. His descriptions are rich as double chocolate cake but don't quite turn to purple prose.
You can choose to like all these characters or none. Each of them is endearing and despicable, which I suppose expressed as "human". You can say they are products of their society or that they are trapped by their circumstances. Endearing and despicable humans.
The underlying current of conscious hatred in this book is hard to take. That was, afterall, the point of writing the book. It's surprising Forster wasn't strung up in England when the book was published. It's hard to believe the situation limped along with very little progress for another 30 years after the book was published. Then again, social changes around attitudes always take much longer than changes caused by technology or economics.
38. E.M. Forster "A Passage to India"
Forster can turn on that over the top poetic description mode that saturates the colors and textures or a scene or a society to the point they drip. Done too heavily, it becomes intolerable, but Forster seems to have a knack for stopping just before that tipping point. His descriptions are rich as double chocolate cake but don't quite turn to purple prose.
You can choose to like all these characters or none. Each of them is endearing and despicable, which I suppose expressed as "human". You can say they are products of their society or that they are trapped by their circumstances. Endearing and despicable humans.
The underlying current of conscious hatred in this book is hard to take. That was, afterall, the point of writing the book. It's surprising Forster wasn't strung up in England when the book was published. It's hard to believe the situation limped along with very little progress for another 30 years after the book was published. Then again, social changes around attitudes always take much longer than changes caused by technology or economics.
38. E.M. Forster "A Passage to India"
