The Arrangement
Ashley Warlick, 2016
Penguin Publising
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525429661
Summary
She’d made it sound as though her husband would be joining them for dinner. She’d made it sound that way on purpose, and then she arrived alone.
Los Angeles, 1934. Mary Frances is young, restlessly married, and returning from her first sojourn in France.
She is hungry, and not just for food: she wants Tim, her husband Al’s charming friend, who encourages her writing and seems to understand her better than anyone.
After a night’s transgression, it’s only a matter of time before Mary Frances claims what she truly desires, plunging all three of them into a tangled triangle of affection that will have far-reaching effects on their families, their careers, and their lives.
Set in California, France, and the Swiss Alps, The Arrangement is a sparkling, sensual novel that explores the complexities of a marriage and the many different ways in which we love.
Writing at the top of her game, Ashley Warlick gives us a completely mesmerizing story about a woman well ahead of her time, who would go on to become the legendary food writer M. F. K. Fisher. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Where—Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
• Education—B.A., Dickinson College
• Currently—lives in Greenville, South Carolina
Ashley Warlick is the author of four novels. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship and the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Oxford American, McSweeney’s, Redbook, and Garden and Gun, among others.
She teaches fiction in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is the editor of the South Carolina food magazine edibleUpcountry. Warlick is also the buyer at M. Judson, Booksellers and Storytellers in Greenville, SC, where she lives with her family. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
If you love historical fiction, you'll fall hard for this one.... Filled with food and passion, this is the perfect book to accompany a candlelit dinner.
Bustle.com
If you occasionally partake in culinary pleasures, you'll probably enjoy digging into Ashley Warlick's novelization of beloved food writer M. F. K. Fisher's life.
InStyle
[Warlick's] writing is smooth and elegant. The love and anguish experienced as marriages unravel is palpable and painful to the reader.
Historical Novel Society
(Starred review.) This stellar novel...fictionalizes the beginnings of the seminal food writer M.F.K. Fisher...amid the triangle of her professor husband, Al, and their friend Tim Parrish in 1930s Los Angeles.... It’s a treat to find such a beautifully written treatment of love in its different forms.
Publishers Weekly
This reimagining of the life of legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher deals with appetites of all kinds. Mary Frances, as she is called as the novel opens, is married to uncommunicative Al and eager for a passionate interlude with Al's friend Tim. You can imagine what happens when she acts on her desires.
Library Journal
Blending fact and fiction, this historical novel covers nine eventful years in the life of legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher...: a beautiful, talented protagonist; lush settings; illicit sex; mouthwatering food. But the novel falls flat...it never makes us care about its star-crossed trio.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the first chapter, Mary Frances thinks of her night with Tim: "It wasn’t love, but rather an appetite’s demand: direct, imperative, true as love perhaps, but far more dangerous" (p. 13). What impact does Mary Frances’s appetite—for sex, for food, for success in her writing—have on her life? Do you see it as a dangerous force, or a more positive one?
2. M.F.K. Fisher is one of the most admired food writers of all time. Did the fact that the book is based on events from her life influence the way you read it? Why or why not?
3. What types of struggles does Mary Frances face as a woman, both in her career as a writer and in her personal life? How does she deal with them? Do you think she fully overcomes them? Which of these issues do you see as a product of the time, and which do you think she might still face today?
4. The book’s descriptions of food are just as sensual as its descriptions of desire. What role does hunger play in the book? In your opinion, does Mary Frances seek pleasure or sustenance?
5. How does his divorce from Gigi affect Tim? Do you think he would have given himself over to Mary Frances if Gigi hadn’t wanted a divorce? Discuss how marriage is viewed by each of the book’s main characters.
6. Mary Frances and Tim’s journey to France begins in the middle of the book. How does this section act as a turning point? What is different before and after this trip? How does travel change Mary Frances’s perspective?
7. Mary Frances and Al have a very complicated relationship. Do they really love each other? Who do you think holds more power in the relationship? How does each of their writing concern their relationship? What about their childlessness? Why do you think they stay married so long?
8. The characters live in several unconventional "arrangements" in the book—Al and Mary Frances living with Gigi; Mary Frances traveling with Tim and his mother; then Mary Frances, Al, and Tim all living together in Switzerland. Are these arrangements a good idea? How do they affect the characters? How would they be viewed today?
9. The novel is set between two major historical events—the Great Depression and World War II. What effect do these events have on the story? The characters?
10. What do you make of the book’s ending? Is Mary Frances happy? Is she satisfied?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The High Mountains of Portugal
Yann Martel, 2016
Penguin Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812997170
Summary
In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomas discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that—if he can find it—would redefine history.
Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure.
Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomas’s quest.
Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee.
And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion.
The High Mountains of Portugal—part quest, part ghost story, part contemporary fable—offers a haunting exploration of great love and great loss. Filled with tenderness, humor, and endless surprise, it takes the reader on a road trip through Portugal in the last century—and through the human soul. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 25, 1963
• Where—Salamanca, Spain
• Education—B.A., Trent University, Ontario
• Awards—Booker Prize, 2002; Hugh MacLennan Prize, Quebec Writers’ Federation
• Currently—Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 of peripatetic Canadian parents. He grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario and Mexico, and has continued travelling as an adult, spending time in Iran, Turkey and India. Martel refers to his travels as, “seeing the same play on a whole lot of different stages.”
After studying philosophy at Trent University and while doing various odd jobs—tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard—he began to write. In addition to Life of Pi, Martel is the prize-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of short stories, and of Self, a novel, both published internationally. Yann has been living from his writing since the age of 27. He divides his time between yoga, writing and volunteering in a palliative care unit. Yann Martel lives in Montreal.
More
Sometime in the early 1990s, Yann Martel stumbled across a critique in the New York Times Review of Books by John Updike that captured his curiosity. Although Updike's response to Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats was fairly icy and indifferent, the premise immediately intrigued Martel. According to Martel, Max and the Cats was, "as far as I can remember...about a zoo in Berlin run by a Jewish family. The year is 1933 and, not surprisingly, business is bad. The family decides to emigrate to Brazil. Alas, the ship sinks and one lone Jew ends up in a lifeboat with a black panther." Whether or not the story was as uninspiring as Updike had indicated in his review, Martel was both fascinated by this premise and frustrated that he had not come up with it himself.
Ironically, Martel's account of the plot of Max and the Cats wasn't completely accurate. In fact, in Scliar's novel, Max Schmidt did not belong to a family of zookeepers—he was the son of furrier. Furthermore, he did not emigrate from Berlin to Brazil with his family as the result of a failing zoo, but was forced to flee Hamburg after his lover's husband sells him out to the Nazi secret police. So, this plot that so enthralled Martel—which he did not pursue for several years because he assumed Moacyr Scliar had already tackled it—was more his own than he had thought.
Meanwhile, Martel managed to write and publish two books: a collection of short stories titled The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios in 1993 and a novel about gender confusion called Self in 1996. Both books sold only moderately well, further frustrating the writer. In an effort to collect his thoughts and refresh his creativity, he took a trip to India, first spending time in bustling Bombay. However, the overcrowded city only furthered Martel's feelings of alienation and dissolution. He then decided to move on to Matheran, a section near Bombay but without that city's dense population. In this peaceful hill station overlooking the city, Martel began revisiting an idea he had not considered in some time, the premise he had unwittingly created when reading Updike's review in the New York Times Review of Books. He developed the idea even further away from Max and the Cats. While Scliar's novel was an extended holocaust allegory, Martel envisioned his story as a witty, whimsical, and mysterious meditation on zoology and theology. Unlike Max Schmidt, Pi Patel would, indeed, be the son of a zookeeper. Martel would, however, retain the shipwrecked-with-beasts theme from Max and the Cats. During an ocean exodus from India to Canada, the ship sinks and Pi finds himself stranded on a lifeboat with such unlikely shipmates as a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
The resulting novel, Life of Pi, became the smash-hit for which Martel had been longing. Selling well over a million copies and receiving the accolades of Book Magazine, Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, and, yes, the New York Times Review of Books, Life of Pi has been published in over 40 countries and territories, in over 30 languages. It is currently in production by Fox Studios with a script by master-of-whimsy Jean-Pierre Jeunet (City of Lost Children; Amélie) and directorial duties to be handled by Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).
Martel is now working on his third novel, a bizarrely allegorical adventure about a donkey and a monkey that travel through a fantastical world...on a shirt. Well, at least no one will ever accuse him of borrowing that premise from any other writer.
Extras
From a 2002 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Life of Pi is not Yann Martel's first work to be adapted for the screen. His short story "Manners of Dying" was made into a motion picture by fellow Canadian resident Jeremy Peter Allen in 2004.
• When he isn't penning modern masterpieces, Martel spends much of his time volunteering in a palliative care unit.
• When asked what book was most influential to his career as a writer, here's what he said:
I would say Le Petit Chose, by the French writer Alphonse Daudet. It was the first book to make me cry. I was around ten years old. It made me see how powerful words could be, how much we could see and feel through mere black jottings on a page. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Pack your bags: Fifteen years after The Life of Pi, Yann Martel is taking us on another long journey. Fans of his Man Booker Prize–winning novel will recognize familiar themes from that seafaring phenomenon, but the itinerary in this imaginative new book is entirely fresh. . . . Martel’s writing has never been more charming, a rich mixture of sweetness that’s not cloying and tragedy that’s not melodramatic. . . . The High Mountains of Portugal attains an altitude from which we can see something quietly miraculous.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Martel continues his quirky romance with ideas, using three interlocking novellas to chew over religious revelation, human mortality, and interspecies communication, among other notions.... [He] maintains his fascination with the porous borders between homo sapiens and other species.... [Martel packs] his inventive novel with beguiling ideas. What connects an inept curator to a haunted pathologist to a smitten politician across more than seventy-five years is the author’s ability to conjure up something uncanny at the end.
Boston Globe
In his whimsy-streaked, sometimes inscrutable novels, what the eye sees and what the soul experiences can be two completely different things.... Martel's blend of fable, magic realism, road comedy and religious philosophy never coheres. But there's no denying the simple pleasures to be had in The High Mountains of Portugal.
Chicago Tribune
Just as ambitious, just as clever, just as existential and spiritual [as Life of Pi] . . . a book that rewards your attention...an excellent book club choice.
San Francisco Chronicle
I took away indelible images from High Mountains, enchanting and disturbing at the same time: the motorcar hitting obstacle after obstacle as it gradually, comically falls to pieces (as does its driver), or the ape as he swings his way across the rooftops of a Portuguese village. As whimsical as Martel’s magic realism can be, grief informs every step of the book’s three journeys. In the course of the novel we burrow ever further into the heart of an ape, pure and threatening at once, our precursor, ourselves. You must change your life.
NPR
We’re fortunate to have brilliant writers using their fiction to meditate on a paradox we need urgently to consider—the unbridgeable gap and the unbreakable bond between human and animal, our impossible self-alienation from our world.... [Martel’s] semi-surreal, semi-absurdist mode is well suited to exploring the paradox. The moral and spiritual implications of his tale have, in the end, a quality of haunting tenderness.
Ursula K. Le Guin - Guardian (UK)
Written with nuanced beauty; not for nothing has Martel established himself as our premier writer of animal-based fiction.
Toronto Star
Gleefully bizarre, genuinely thrilling and entirely heartbreaking.... While The High Mountains of Portugal is an exuberantly narrative novel, it is even more so a contemplative, philosophical one.... The book’s prose [reminds] us of how subtle and elegant a craftsman Martel is.... High Mountains resists the reader at every turn in the most pleasing way possible: it does not seek to offer you absolute truth, though it contains much wisdom; instead, it seeks to evade you, and in doing so deepens your sense of its mysteries, and the mysteries of the world we share with it.
Toronto Globe and Mail
His depiction of loss is raw and deeply affecting—but it’s the way in which he contextualises it within formal religion that gives this book an extra dimension. Martel’s writing is enriched and amplified by the abundance and intricacy of his symbology (touching on Job, St. Peter, Doubting Thomas and the parables of Jesus) and his probing of religion’s consolations. Martel is not in the business of providing us with answers, but through its odd, fabulous, deliberately oblique stories, his new novel does ask some big questions (four stars).
Telegraph (UK)
[An] extravagant smorgasbord of a novel.... If fans of [Life of Pi] have been feeling deprived, they will be happy to know [that The High Mountains of Portugal] deals in many of the same fundamental questions of life, love, family and faith.... At every turn Martel’s deft observations and quiet compassion for human suffering shine through.
Saturday Paper (Australia)
(Starred review.) Highly imaginative.... Martel’s narrative wizardry connects three novellas set seven decades apart in the eponymous region of Portugal.... Martel is in a class by himself in acknowledging the tragic vicissitudes of life while celebrating wildly ridiculous contretemps that bring levity to the mystery of existence.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In three distinct yet connected parts, each centered on the high plains in northern Portugal, the narrative describes an innovative arc of endings and beginnings.... An enjoyable journey that brings meaning and discovery. —Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Library Journal
[A] by-the-numbers connections of incidents and family relations that obscure Martel's much more interesting musings on how we deal with tragedy and find our true home. Provocative ideas straitjacketed in an overdetermined plot.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The High Mountains of Portugal...then take off on your own:
1. In The High Mountains of Portugal as in, say, Life of Pi, Yann Martel explores the discrepancy between reality and myth. How do you see this discrepancy play out in this novel? Talk about the ways in which what the eye sees differs from what the soul knows.
2. What is the title's significance? Consider the fact that Tomas arrives in Portugal to find a "treeless steppe" and Peter Tovy finds a "barren savannah," There's not a peak in sight for either man.
3. Why does Tomas decide to walk backward? Talk about this passage:
Walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object??
Does this statement ring true...or is it misguided?
4. Once Tomas finds his crucifix, how does it reveal or reflect his personal anger toward God?
5. Follow-up to Question 3: What are the consolations for profound loss and grief explored and hinted at by Yann Martel in The High Mountains of Portugal?
6. Martel combines pathos with humor, especially with Tomas and Peter. Where in the text does he do so...and, most of all, why? Why the juxtaposition of sadness with laughter.
7. Of the three quests, which did you enjoy reading most?
8. What is the symbolic significance of the chimp in each of the stories? How are each of the men changed by the chimp?
9 Discuss how religious faith is considered in this novel. Consider, for instance, these questions asked by Lozora's wife:
Why would Jesus speak in parables? Why would he both tell stories and let himself be presented through stories? Why would Truth use the tools of fiction?
How would you answer her? What is the connection between faith and storytelling? How does this novel link them?
10. How does Peter Tovy's life and story finally weave all three stories together? Or does it? Do you feel satisfied with the way the novel ends?
11. Do you enjoy Yann Martel's whimsy and his heavy dependence on metaphor? Or do you find his work difficult to grasp, perhaps even arcane? Does his use of symbolism and magical realism deepen your understanding of his themes...or confound you?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, 1818
Penguin Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780141439471
Summary
The world’s most famous work of horror fiction: a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.
Mary Shelley’s timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness.
How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror.
Based on the third edition of 1831, this Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle, contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preface to the first edition. It also includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with "A Fragment" by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori’s "The Vampyre: A Tale." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 30, 1797
• Where—London, England, UK
• Death—February 1, 1851
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—home tutored
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (nee Godwin) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
After Wollstonecraft's death less than a month after her daughter Mary was born, Mary was raised by Godwin, who was able to provide his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his own liberal political theories. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbour, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have a troubled relationship.
In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.
In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumour that was to kill her at the age of 53.
Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements.
Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837).
Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46), support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life.
Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/24/2016.)
Discussion Questions
1. The horror story is just as popular today as it was in Shelley’s early nineteenth century England. What is the appeal of this genre? Discuss elements from Frankenstein that parallel characteristics of modern horror tales such as Stephen King’s, or contemporary films such as Nightmare on Elm Street. What are the effects of these elements on the audience, and how might that explain our fascination?
2.Dr. Frankenstein finds himself unable to "mother" the being he creates. Why does Shelley characterize Victor in this way? What does this choice say about the role of women during Shelley’s era? Discuss the significance of parent-child relationships and birth references throughout the novel.
3. Dreams and nightmares play a recurrent role throughout Shelley’s novel. Trace the use of dreams throughout the book, with emphasis on how they relate to changes in Victor’s character.
4. Why are there so many references to sickness and fever in Frankenstein? Trace these references throughout the novel. What broader theme might Shelley be expressing?
5. Re-visit some of your pre-reading activities, such as the journal entry on the "Philosopher’s Stone" and the anticipation guide on parenting. Now that you have completed Frankenstein, have your views changed? Why or why not?
6. Ice is a prevalent image and an integral plot device in Shelley’s Frankenstein. How is it appropriate that the novel ends in ice? What is the symbolism of ice for the characters and the story?
7. In his afterword in the Signet Classics edition of Frankenstein, Harold Bloom asserts that "all Romantic horrors are diseases of excessive consciousness, of the self unable to bear the self." Does this Romantic characteristic apply to Victor and his treatment of the creature? Explain. Consider the fact that Victor never gives the creature a name.
8. Place Frankenstein’s creature in modern times. Suppose he had a family that raises him, includes him, and even enrolls him in school. How might today’s society treat Victor’s creature differently? How would it mimic the time period of the novel?
9. Consider the character of Justine Moritz. While her story only takes two chapters of Shelley’s novel, her role as a secondary character is significant. What is Shelley’s purpose in telling Justine’s story? What truths about her time is Shelley revealing?
10. The patriarchal society of Frankenstein is one in which men pursue their goals against hopeless odds. In light of this work ethic, is Robert Walton a failure when he turns his ship around at the end of the novel? How would Victor Frankenstein answer this question? What would Mary Shelley say? What do you think?
(Questions from A Teachers Guide issued by Signet Classics.)
A Room with a View
E.M. Forster, 1908
Penguin Random
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780141183299
Summary
E.M. Forster's vision of love struggling to assert itself in spite of the rigid class boundaries of Edwardian England.
Visiting Florence with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, Lucy Honeychurch meets the unconventional, lower-class Mr Emerson and his son, George.
Upon her return to England, Lucy becomes engaged to the supercilious Cecil Vyse, but she finds herself increasingly torn between the expectations of the world in which she moves and the passionate yearnings of her heart.
More than a love story, A Room with a View is a penetrating social comedy and a brilliant study of contrasts—in values, social class, and cultural perspectives—and the ingenuity of fate.
In his sparkling introduction Malcolm Bradbury notes that A Room with a View...
was the work where Forster laid down most of his key themes, the place where he displayed both his warmth and sharpness, and developed his famous light style.
This edition also contains suggestions for further reading and explanatory notes. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1879
• Where—London, UK
• Death—June 7, 1970
• Where—Coventry, UK
• Education—B. A., (two: in classics and in history); M.A., Cambridge University
Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect." His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.
Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (nee Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.
He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2013) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.
At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.
After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt.
Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
After A Passage to India
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.
Forster was a closeted homosexual and lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.
From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving in 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.
Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1946 and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry on June 7, 1970. He was 91.
Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel Arctic Summer.
His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted to film in 1991.
Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.
Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy." The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by the Merchant-Ivory team.
Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.
Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.
Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.
Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.
Critical reception
In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began:
E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something. (Trilling 1943).
Key themes
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society.
His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay "What I Believe." When Forster’s cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics—curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."
Two of Forster's best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.
Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.
Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox in that novel and Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/25/2013.)
Discussion Questions
1. How are Lucy’s character and mood captured in the descriptions of her piano playing throughout the novel? Why does she refuse to play Beethoven in Mrs. Vyse’s well-appointed flat? What compels her to sing, after breaking her engagement with Cecil, the song that ends with the line "Easy live and quiet die"?
2. Forster’s use of light and darkness, vision and blindness, day and night has transparent meaning in many passages: Lucy throws open the window of her room with a view while Charlotte closes the shades. Cecil is best suited to a room, while George is in his element in the naked sunlight of the Sacred Lake. Discuss the variations on the theme of clarity and shadow in the book, for example the twilight on the Piazza Signoria before Lucy witnesses the murder, or her attempts to flee "the king of terrors—Light" in the novel’s second half.
3. Lucy and George both stand outside Britain’s traditional class structure. George is a clerk, the son of a journalist and grandson of a laborer. Lucy is the daughter of a lawyer and her social status is "more splendid than her antecedents entitled her to." What role does social class play in the novel? Why did Forster choose Cecil to deliver the statement: "The classes ought to mix.... There ought to be intermarriage—all sorts of things. I believe in democracy."?
4. Mr. Beebe is portrayed early in the novel as an observant, thoughtful counselor with a good sense of humor and an unusually open mind for a clergyman. Soon after meeting Lucy he predicts that "one day music and life shall mingle" for her. Why does he fail, in the end, to support her decision to leave Cecil for George?
5. In comparison, Charlotte Bartlett is absurdly prudish, forbidding her cousin even to sleep in the bed where George Emerson had slept. If George’s surmise at the novel’s end is correct, what motivates her to help bring the lovers together by facilitating Lucy’s fateful meeting with Mr. Emerson? What does this turnabout suggest about the repressive forces in society? Is she, as George jokes, made of the "same stuff as parsons are made of"?
6. "Muddle" is one of Forster’s favorite words and seems to carry more weight in his work than in current colloquial usage. Lucy declares at the end of Part 1, "I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly." What does Mr. Emerson mean when he uses the word to describe Lucy’s state of mind near the novel’s end, saying, "It is easy to face Death and Fate.... It is on my muddles that I look back with horror"?
7. Lucy and George’s final happiness is clouded by their severed relations with those she left behind. The Honeychurches "were disgusted at her past hypocrisy," and Mr. Beebe will never forgive them. Do you think Forster believes, as Lucy asserts, that "if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run"?
8. What is "medieval" about Cecil’s attitude toward women in general and toward Lucy in particular? What role is she allotted in his notion of chivalry? Why does Lucy feel, after George throws her blood-stained photographs into the Arno, that it is "hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man"? What kind of companionship and protection does George offer in exchange?
9. Forster, who was greatly influenced by the art of Italy during his first visit there, not only explores the proper relationship of life and art in A Room with a View but also uses art to illuminate his characters. What do we learn about the inner lives of George and Mr. Emerson from their views of Giotto’s fresco in Santa Croce (Chapter 2)? Why is Lucy’s outburst over Mr. Eager like "Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine"?
10. A frequent criticism of Forster’s plots is his reliance on coincidence and chance. What improbable circumstances are required to unite Lucy and George? Is George right when he says of their reunion in England, "It is Fate. Everything is Fate"? Does the novel suggest an external force that brings the lovers together?
11. There are many kinds of deceit in the book: betrayal by friends, secrets between lovers, and most importantly Lucy’s self-deceit. Four of the last five chapters show Lucy lying to nearly everyone else in the book. Which kinds of lies are most harmful to the "personal relations" that Forster cherished?
12. Though sparing in his descriptions of physical love, Forster often expresses the physical component of spiritual passion indirectly, as in his description of Lucy’s piano playing: "Like every true performer she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire." What balance between the physical and emotional expressions of love does Mr. Emerson suggest in his statement, "I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.... I only wish poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body"?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Girl Through Glass
Sari Wilson, 2016
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062326270
Summary
An enthralling literary debut that tells the story of a young girl’s coming-of-age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet—a story of obsession and perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.
In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet.
Enduring the mess of her parents’ divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism. Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory. It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her friend and mentor.
Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet, run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness. As she ascends in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.
In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsize the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self.
When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.
Moving between the past and the present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, perfection, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; Stanford University (Fellowship)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Sari Wilson grew up in a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn Heights in New York City and has also lived in San Francisco, Chicago, and Prague. She now lives in Brooklyn, again, with her husband, the cartoonist Josh Neufeld, and their daughter.
Wilson's debut novel Girl Through Glass (2016) is, in many ways, a deeply personal book based on her early experiences in the classical dance world. As a child, she studied ballet at Neubert Ballet Theater, a once-storied Carnegie Hall studio.
Later, she studied at Harkness Ballet and as a scholarship student at Eliot Feld’s New Ballet School. She went on to study and perform modern dance with Stephan Koplowitz and at Oberlin College, where she majored in history and minored in dance.
In an NPR interview, Wilson talked about having to leave the world of dance:
It was my life, and I hit puberty and then sort of the dark side of things revealed themselves, and I struggled through for a long time, and then finally left that world after a second career-ending surgery. And then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what had happened, and [Girl Through Glass] is really my investigation into that.
After college—and after dance—Wilson attended Stanford University (1997-1999) as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, where she was a teaching assistance for Tobias Wolff.
She went on to work for some 10 years as a writer, editor, and curriculum developer. She has had a particular interest in interactive narrative and story design, championing graphic literature as an educational tool. Along with her husband, she started Dojo Graphics, a studio creating comics and motion comics for television, film, and the Internet. Their clients have included Lion Television/PBS, ABC, and Lifetime.
Wilson has also been a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has received a residency from The Corporation of Yaddo.Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in literary journals such as Agni, Oxford American, and Slice. (Adapted from the author's website. Retrieved 2/22/2016.)
Book Reviews
A tragic depiction of a girl adored far too soon by a grown-up world…. Artfully rendered through the viewpoint of an adolescent dancer who performs with great maturity while remaining fatefully naive.... So visceral, so real.
Washington Post
[T]he story is a uniformly engrossing look into the fabled world of hypercompetitive 1970s ballet. Mira and Maurice’s relationship has the fairy tale feel of Beauty and the Beast, but the pages brim with the realism of the gritty.... Wilson writes lovingly of ballet and elevates the coming-of-age story with a dark undercurrent about the cost of obsession.
Publishers Weekly
[A]n absorbing novel, rich with detail both about ballet and New York. Alongside the unusual setting of Mira's realm of dance are the more familiar emotional struggles of a young woman dealing with adolescence, complicated by precocious talent. —Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A nimble, nuanced psychological drama that leaps through time and place with an appropriate and assured agility.... Wilson speaks with vibrant authority and acute vulnerability as she exposes the conflicted and competitive behind-the-scenes world of professional ballet.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available. In the meantine, use these LitLovers talking points to kick-start a discussion for Girl Through Glass...then take off on your own:
1. Girl Through Glass alternates between two time frames, an adult Kate and young Mira. Describe "both characters—how does the older Kate differ from her younger self?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: How does Kate's past life, as Mira, shape her present life—including her bitterness, her lackluster career, and her current relationship with a student?
3. Talk about the world behind the scenes at the American Ballet Theater and/or the American Ballet School. How does Girl Through Glass portray the life of the dancers, including the competition among them and their physical ordeals?
4. Other stories, both books and film, have explored the obsessive, competitive, and sometimes seamy side of the ballet world—Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes (and film, 1948 ), Turning Point (film, 1977), Center Stage (film, 2000), Black Swan (film, 2010), Breaking Pointe (TV, 2012), Flesh and Bone (TV 2015), and Maggie Shipstead's Astonish Me (novel, 2014). If you have read or watched any of those, how does Girl Through Glass compare?
5. What does the world of dance offer Mira as she navigates her way through her parents' unraveling marriage? Talk about the ways in which the dance world saves and/or fails her.
6. What drives balletomanes and the character of Maurice? Does he make you feel uneasy, even queasy...or not? What does Mira gain from Maurice...and vice versa? What does Maurice's infatuation with Mira suggest about the power of a young body? Describe the nuances of the relationship between Maurice and Mira? Who is in control? Does the power equation change?
7. Maurice instills in Mira the "understanding of what you have to give up to be beautiful." What does Mira (and any other dancer) have to give up, and is the sacrifice worth it?
8. Where you surprised by what Kate uncovers when she returns to New York? Does the revelation address unanswered questions or tie up loose ends? Does the conclusion feel overly coincidental...or does it work?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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