A Room with a View

Rating:
Summary: Lovely, Life Affirming
Review: This elegant little novel totally swept me away. It is so perfect from any angle I look at it. I know that this will be one of those novels I will always keep in a prominent place on my bookshelf and return to my whole life.

This exquisite novel primarily concerns Lucy Honeychurch. The novel begins with Lucy on a trip in Italy. She is accompanied there mainly by members of her own society, the upper class of England among which she has been raised. While in Italy, though, Lucy is confronted by the Italian society where she notices the classes seem to mix easily. She is also confronted with George Emerson. George is simple, direct, and of a lower class, and he is having existential worries. Despite themselves (or their pasts), the two begin to fall in love with one another, and their experiences eventually lead to their realizations of what their hearts really desire.

As it is with all of my favorite novels, I really cannot do A Room With a View justice with this review. This is a truly lovely book. The prose and the pace is perfect. There are so many sentences which are just perfect little gems by themselves. The characterizations are complex. The plot is romantic and funny. The thought behind the novel is meaningful and life affirming. There's not much more that any novel can do. A Room With a View is perfection.

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Book
Review: This is the best love story I have ever read. You fall in love with the characters the moment you meet them. I have recommended this book to everyone I know, and everyone who has read it adores it. Just read it to find out what I mean. =)

Rating:
Summary: one of the best "period pieces" I have ever read
Review: I usually don't go for novels like this but I read it at the urging of a friend. It starts in Italy with two Englishwomen, Lucy and her spinster cousin Charlotte, complaining their rooms at the Pension Bertolini don't have views. The Emersons, an old Englishman and his grown son, overhear this and insist they trade for their rooms which do have views. And hence the travelers' lives become intertwined, even when they return to England and Lucy proceeds to get engaged to a man she thinks she is socially suitable.

The book is about Lucy using Italy as a springboard to think for herself instead of just doing what English society, her mother and her fiancee think she should. But even when she is "breaking free" from them, she does it because other people think she should! so I never did see Lucy ever really think for herself. But you could easily translate that into many modern relationships today -- that is what makes the book so great!

Rating:
Summary: When the Universe doesn't fit
Review: This book is still a classic. The fact that this book can still be entertaining nearly a hundred years after it's conception is testament enough to it's quality. It's the story of Lucy, struggling to find a comfortable place in adulthood, struggling to understand herself, struggling with the jarring influences of the unhappy people that surround her. And then she meets Mr. Emerson and his son George. Mr. Emerson is an old man who is disliked among the society folk because his kindness is more genuine than tactful. And his son George, raised free of all the prejudices and narrow-mindedness that plague nearly all the people he meets, is depressed because the universe doesn't seem to fit.

Learning to love a pair like the Emersons would seem to be easy for Lucy, but that is the struggle of this whole novel, how she creates such a muddle out of a simple thing and ends up, for the first time in her life, to begin to see clearly.

Forster finds a nice balance in this novel - engaging plot, unique and well-developed characters, and a fair dose of philosophy to lighten the burdens of your mind (all good philosophy should lighten your mind instead of weighing it down).

I would recommend this book on the simple fact that Mr. Emerson is, in many of his traits, the type of human being we should all strive to become(good-hearted, thought-provoking, devoted to expanding his mind instead of narrowing it, welcoming to all, poetic and deep). That alone recommends it. This may not be Forster's best, but it's one of them, and is more than worth the time (I finished it in three days, awfully fast, hungry for more when it was done).

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: Although I don't know many people who have read this book, I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in great literature. Despite what you're probably thinking, the book is a quick read, very interesting. Forster (as always) did a wonderful job writing about the human condition. The characters felt v. real to me- it's the type of story you can get pulled into, and the sort of thing I'd love to be able to write. ;)

Rating:
Summary: a beautifully written, not very intesting drone
Review: I didn't like this book. Short, written as gorgeously as anything else Forster wrote, there just isn't anything worthwhile going on.

A comedy only because you laugh at how annoying everyone is, the story verges on outrage because nobody seems to matter. Oh, sure, they care desperately about everyone and everything they're supposed to be involved with, but the characters are pompous, the resolutions are forced or indifferent, and I can't say I recall much of anything that actually happened shortly after completing the text.

Another thing to draw it down is the fact that I tended to think of other things while still reading this book. Not while it was set aside, waiting to be vaguely experienced, but while it was in front of my eyes going on.

In spite of all this, three stars is accurate because sometimes Forster comes up with an accute anatomization of why these people act this way. A stirring, psychological portrait of people I couldn't care less about.

Rating:
Summary: A novel for the ages
Review: As a gentle comedy of pre World War I manners and sensibilities, set in Florence and England, E. M. Forster's "A Room With a VIew" is a 20th century masterpiece. The novel shares some of the conventions of works by Forster's contemporaries Galsworthy and Hardy, but with a lighter touch. I suspect that this is one of a small handful of British novels of the last century which will continue to be read and enjoyed a hundred years from now..

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite!
Review: Reading this book is a joy. The prose is beautiful, and the characters are interesting. But the most wonderful aspect is Forster's breathtaking descriptions of first the Italian, and then the English countrysides. I would also highly recommend the film version by Merchant and Ivory -- its a perfect adaptation of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Room for improvement
Review: In modern terms, E.M. Forster's "A Room with a View" is a romantic comedy, and as such, it follows the typical formula of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl. This basic plot is, of course, embellished with a lot of comical characters, exotic settings, and convenient misunderstandings, but none of this mollifies my opinion that the novel, although well-written, is not very interesting.

Two fussy English women, the nubile Lucy Honeychurch and her older cousin Charlotte Bartlett, are staying in a small hotel (a pension) in Florence, Italy. There they meet the Emersons, a father and son, who do not seem to have much money and are hinted to be "Socialists," which reflects a prejudice on the part of the allegers and doesn't even really mean anything within the novel's scope. Lucy has a brief romance with the son, George, even though she knows he is not quite suitable for her social status. A few other characters also are introduced in Florence, including two clergymen, Mr. Beebe and Mr. Eager, and a romance novelist named Miss Lavish.

The action shifts back to England, where we meet Lucy's doting mother and frivolous, immature brother Freddy, who could be a progenitor for P.G. Wodehouse's aristocratic loafers. Lucy is courted by a snobbish young man named Cecil Vyse whom she has known for a few years and accepts his proposal for marriage. Trouble arises when George Emerson and his father show up as tenants in a nearby cottage, and Lucy must decide whether she is going to submit to social convention and marry Cecil or follow her heart and go with George. Care to take a wild guess about the outcome?

Forster obviously intended this novel to be a comedy, but his humor is stilted and contrived. There are subtle jokes about English class distinction, blatantly symbolic surnames that sound like they came from the board game "Clue," juxtaposed sentences that purposely contradict each other for the sake of painfully overt irony, and satirical snippets that affect Oscar Wilde-style wittiness. The novel's humoristic tour de force is a scene in which Cecil remains oblivious to the fact that Lucy and George had a fling in Italy, even though he reads a direct account of it in a novel penned by Miss Lavish, who fortunately has disguised the names of her hero and heroine. Simply put, the book is as funny as burnt toast.

Colorful but predictable and simplistic, "A Room with a View" may have been an important Edwardian novel, but it seems innocuous compared to the hard realism and bold sexuality of D.H. Lawrence's imminent works. Even the author himself acknowledges the novel's fabrications when he allows Mr. Beebe to state, "It is odd how we of that Pension, who seemed such a fortuitous collection, have been working into one another's lives." Funny, I was thinking the same thing.

Rating:
Summary: I advise sticking to A Passage to India
Review: Britain's answer to Henry James here provides us with the tale of Lucy Honeychurch and her forbidden love for George Emerson, the unsuitable young man she meets in Italy. While social mores dictate that she make a match with the more proper gentleman, Cecil Vyse, who is courting her, Lucy is torn between passion and propriety. Ultimately, she chooses Emerson who reminds her of "a room with a view" offering her a new vista on life.

This is a comedy of manners, as we can see from the subtlety of characters names: Vyse represents the constricted vice-like society, Emerson is "nature" a la Ralph Waldo & Thoureau. And, of course, the lesson we learn is that the entrenched morals of society should be thrown away in favor of passion & the natural. This common theme of the top 100--we've seen it in Edith Wharton, & others--seems even more moronic as we close the century, the elevation of passion over morality has never looked worse than in the wake of the Clinton scandals. Further, as we now know, this admonition must be read in light of Forster's own homosexuality, adding an altogether different cast to the call for discarding social convention.

If you feel compelled to read Forster, I advise sticking to A Passage to India.

GRADE: D