From the Bookshelf of The Next Best Book Club…

Maurice

E.M. Forster

Start date: May 1, 2017

Finish date: May 30, 2017

Why we're reading this: Most votes for May's "LGBTQ" theme…more
[close] Most votes for May's "LGBTQ" theme

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Jul 18, 2010 Edan rated it really liked it

This was such a beautiful and moving book, and felt particularly modern for Forster--and not just because of the gay relationships depicted therein. There was something spare to the writing here, it felt less embellished to me than the prose in his other novels. It also did away with the comedy of errors and parlor room dramatics of A Room with a View or Where Angels Fear to Tread, and that felt modern, too.

I appreciated how Maurice could be quite frustrating, and that he wasn't all that smart. This was such a beautiful and moving book, and felt particularly modern for Forster--and not just because of the gay relationships depicted therein. There was something spare to the writing here, it felt less embellished to me than the prose in his other novels. It also did away with the comedy of errors and parlor room dramatics of A Room with a View or Where Angels Fear to Tread, and that felt modern, too.

I appreciated how Maurice could be quite frustrating, and that he wasn't all that smart. It's difficult to write a character like that, and still make the reader care about him. I also loved that he took a definitive stand at the end of the novel, his mind finally nimble enough to connect the self to what mattered to it--I loved to see "the muddle" of his mind fall away as he embraced his long-suffered-over sexuality.

I can't give the book five stars because there were whole passages that confused me. At the beginning especially, Forster speaks in the abstract to the point of confusion. I felt like I wasn't getting a joke. Later, there were plot points or emotional shifts that I didn't understand as they were happening. For instance, I didn't realize until the very end that Maurice and Clive hadn't actually had sex--I assumed they had until it was revealed in the final chapter that they'd kept their relationship platonic. I had wrongly assumed the sex scenes had simply been implied. Silly me! I fault myself for his mistake, but even so, I was bothered, and there were other interactions and details about his schooling or whatever that went over my head. It's weird to read a giant talent like Forster and think, "This needs an edit" or "This could use some elaboration" but there you have it. Perhaps writing a book privately will produce a work of raw honesty and power, with the occasional obscure passage.

The rhythm of the prose in this book took my breath away: "Drawing the curtains, he gazed long into the rain and sighed, and struck his own face, and bit his own lips." This reminds me a little of Thomas Hardy's sentences, and makes me swoon. ...more

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Jul 16, 2015 Elizabeth (Miss Eliza) rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

*Special Content only on my blog, Strange and Random Happenstance, during Forster Fall. (September 2015)

Maurice Hall leads an unexceptional life. He is neither brilliant nor dense. He is comfortably middle of the road. But ever since his teacher took him aside one day to tell him about the facts of life due to Maurice's father being dead, Maurice has known he was different. He spent years lost in the fog of puberty and adolescence to one day find a hand reaching out of the mist to him making eve ...more

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