Arctic Summer
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4.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This “beautifully written and utterly compelling” novel by the acclaimed South African author traces E. M. Forester’s journey of self-discovery (The Times, London).
The year is 1912, and the SS Birmingham is approaching India. On board is Edward Morgan Forster, a reserved man taunted by writer’s block, attempting to come to terms with his art and his homosexuality. During his travels, the novelist confronts his fraught childhood and falls in unrequited love with his closest friend. He also finds himself surprisingly freed to explore his “minorite” desires as secretary to a most unusual Maharajah.
Slowly, the strands of a story begin to gather in Forster’s mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. But it will be another twelve years and a second stay in India before the publication of his finest work, A Passage to India.
Shifting across the landscapes of India, Egypt, and England, Forster’s life is informed by his relationships—from the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el-Adl, to the Greek poet and literary titan C. P. Cavafy. Damon Galgut’s reimagining of Forster’s life is a clear and sympathetic psychological probing of one of Britain’s finest novelists.
“Galgut inhabits [Forster] with such sympathetic completeness, and in prose of such modest excellence that he starts to breathe on the page.” —Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Talented South African writer Galgut (The Good Doctor) returns with a well-researched if occasionally leaden novel about E.M. Forster. Set mostly between Forster's first trip to India in 1912, during which he visits the caves that play so great a role in A Passage to India, and the 1924 publication of that classic, the novel explores Forster's intense, sexually tinged friendships with an Indian lawyer, Syed Ross Masood, to whom he dedicated Passage, and the Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed el Adl. Galgut chronicles Forster's struggle to complete his "Indian novel" and his "invisible, double life" as a homosexual. The avidity of what were then termed Morgan's "minorite" desires are effectively conveyed, as is the timidity that often frustrates them; Morgan is 37 when he loses his virginity to a British soldier in Alexandria. Unfortunately, some hammy descriptions of Forster at work weigh on the prose ("In one moment, as if lit up by lightning, he had seen the whole arc of events"), and the cameos made by the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and a fulminating D.H. Lawrence seem perfunctory. Any flatness stands out: the cost of fictionalizing a great writer.
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