Hot Forster Summer

Hot Forster Summer

    I'm the type of reader who believes my new favorite book is the one I'm currently reading. But I also believe in the seasonality of books—that the right one will find you at the right time and in the right month. As problematic as the late Tom Robbins was, he had one whimsical thesis that matches my lived experience: inanimate objects have a pulsing purpose and books have a pulsing, spiritual purpose on steroids.

    So begins my love affair with E.M. Forster during a London heatwave. It was our children's librarian, my dear friend, C.N.,  who described E.M. Forster as her comfort, go-to author. In particular, she sang the praises of A Room with a View and then further sang the praises of all the classical Merchant Ivory films, many of which captured Forster in moving images. I've heard about Forster of course, but he had been buried at the bottom of my reading list. But all it took was one warm recommendation to make my new, favorite writer emerge.

    The key word is warm; warm is telling—for there is a warmth and wisdom in his treatment of characters and, more obviously, warmth in his settings. Think bucolic England, the Italian hills outside Florence, and steamy India.

    In A Room with a View, his light, witty romance, the setting is in spring in the Tuscany countryside where our intrepid heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, has a magical encounter with a working-class English lad. Blanketing the landscape of their first foray is a field of wild violets, signifying surprise and wild beauty. Penguin Classics even has a cover art celebrating this motif:

    What I like about Forster is he maintains his omniscient, calm, and wise narrator voice over the action and the exposition. You can even hear his counsel during the sinister, hot weather in A Passage to India, a setting complete with its beasts and illnesses and hallucinations. You then hear him again, more gently, in the verdant gardens of Howards End. I am about half-way through this writer's canon and hope to finish up with Maurice, the first printed gay novel with a happy ending that was published posthumously in 1971, a year after Forster's death. He said he tired of penning heterosexual situationships but I have yet to find another author who captures women so exquisitely.

                                  On a recent evening where I took a room at an Oxfordshire retreat house.

                                                Another View of Stanton House in Oxfordshire

                                                            I literally had a room with a view. 💚

    For Forster, the season to read him is truly spring into summer. Forster belongs to spring just as Hawthorne belongs to autumn and Dostoevsky to winter.

    Do you have a go-to author for when the seasons change?