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Loading... Aspects of the Novelby E.M. Forster
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Much is obvious, much misleading. (  ) AlexAustin | Dec 22, 2009 |  This little book is an extremely well-written and interesting exploration of the art of the novel, which Forster defines as a prose work of more than 50,000 words. An explanation of this seemingly arbitrary definition, along with examinations of "aspects" of the novel such as plot, people, pattern, fantasy, and story, comprises the book. Forster made a lot of statements with which I don't necessarily agree, but his style was so good that I almost forgot about my disagreement. This book should be interesting to literature students, avid readers in general, and writers too, because it deals with craft as well as criticism. I particularly enjoyed Forster's examples from literature: to illustrate a point, he often quotes or summarizes passages from famous works. Where I'd actually read them, I found his interpretations fascinating. This is definitely worth reading. christina_reads | Mar 12, 2009 | No one can complain of false advertising here: the book is Aspects of the Novel, and that's what it covers: aspects of the novel, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe that's its greatest strength. Reading Forster, you will not find yourself wallowing in an exhaustive attempt to define the novel, once and for all. There is no grand historical review here. It's straightforward and unpretentious throughout. But at the same time, you may find yourself hoping for more, for a more in-depth treatment of plot, for example, or of other topics completely absent. 1  ajsomerset | Sep 26, 2008 | literature  Budz888 | May 31, 2008 | SeriousGrace | Jun 21, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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Forster's book is not really a book at all; rather, it's a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as "People," "The Plot," and "The Story." It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Aplogetic Mumble: "Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster's critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that we often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably leads us through. As he himself points out in the introductory note, "Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows."
And Forster does paddle into some unlikely eddies here. For instance, he seems none too gung ho about love in the novel: "And lastly, love. I am using this celebrated word in its widest and dullest sense. Let me be very dry and brief about sex in the first place." He really means in the first place. Like the narrator of a '50s hygiene film, Forster continues, dry and brief as anything, "Some years after a human being is born, certain changes occur in it..." One feels here the same-sexer having the last laugh, heartily.
Forster's brand of humanism has fallen from fashion in literary studies, yet it endures in fiction itself. Readers still love this author, even if they come to him by way of the multiplex. The durability of his work is, of course, the greatest raison d'être this book could have. It should have been titled How to Write Novels People Will Still Read in a Hundred Years. --Claire Dederer
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400)
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