Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Delightful!
Review: Forster's wit, irony, and well-drawn characters make this an enjoyable read. If you're not used to reading pieces from this period, you may need to warm up to the style, but once you do, you'll enjoy this.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Book review
Review: Followed the PBS special almost to the word but the book's ending was much better.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Make room in your heart for Forster's delightfully frothy "A Room With a View"
Review: Edward Morgan Foster (1879-1970) lived a long life as a Cambridge don and world traveler. However, most of this author's fiction was completed in the first 20 years of the 20th century. "A Room With a View" is a gently satirical view of the English abroad and at home in the late Edwardian Age. Perhaps we can view England as the cozy room of normality and routine while the sunny Italian landscape provides us a view of a wider world outside our usual gaze.
The short novel is divided into two parts. In part one we are introduced to a group of English travelers in Italy. We meet Charlotte
an old maid aunt who is chaperoning the upper middle class young lady the fetching Lucy Honeychurch. (Charlotte reminds one of the governess types described with right on accuracy by Charlotte Bronte). The women want a good view of Florence so reluctantly switch rooms with Mr. Emerson (a dreamy transcendentalist like older man who reminds us of the philisophical musings of Concord sage Ralph Waldo Emerson) and his stra handsome son George. (George is to become a knight saving Lucy from the clutches of the effete snob aesthete Cyril Vise). On a sightseeing picnic Lucy and George kiss and then depart. Lucy goes to Rome meeting her future fiance the artistic and bookish Cyril.
Part II is set in England. After several complications the course of true love is finally set on its right course. Lucy jilts Cyril and finds true bliss with George. The novel is cyclicalbeginning in spring and ending with Lucy Honeychurch's honeymoon with George. This occurs in the same Florentine hotel in which they met. A year has passed and it is spring again for these young lovers.
Forster provides a gallery of colorful characters: Mr Beebe the clergyman who hopes Lucy dumps Cyril for George; Eleanor Lavish a comically drawn mystery writer; Lucy's brother Fred and a Cockney hotel owner in Florence.
Forster wishes to open the stuffy door of Victorian fiction with a new frankness on sexuality and freedom of expression. His scene in which the major male characters bathe in a pond is an example of this theme. Forster favors physical and intimate love to the aesthetic passionless p love which Vise has for Lucy. George is athletic and earthy while Vise is a nerdy bookworm. Forster's book is good in the use of witty dialogue. His understanding of the British class system leads him to satirical comments on its rigidity.
A quibble. The characters don't have much depth seeming to be actors in a stage presentation. Forster is worth reading for his advocacy of true love and emotion in a society of elaborate and often hypocritcal rules. He is a good author worthy of your time.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Modern school readers, STICK WITH IT!
Review: We are spoiled by modern fiction. As great as the writing is, it is more straightforward and literal. Do you ever find yourself starting a classic and not finishing it??? You weren't getting into it immediately and lost interest. It can be the same with old movies. We watch through different eyes than the time when it was written or produced. My book club did this book this month. We all struggled. I chose this one because I wanted us to try a classic, but I wanted it to be short and pleasant. The "flow" started later, and it was more laboured to get there.It is so worth it to keep with it. It is not that we are not capable of understanding the language. We are so used to graphic, and explicit, and straightforward language. We need to train our brains, and it can take up to half the book to get to the point where you are really drawn in, forgetting to concentrate and just enjoying the ride.This is truly a lovely story. I love Florence. It is a timeless city that infects you body and soul. So will this book if you let it.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Lovely Classic
Review: E.M. Forster does a remarkable job of illustrating the constricting social values of Edwardian England with humor and acute insight. Our heroine must decide: go along and get along or shirk her "dutites" and chose a life of remarkable rebellion (for the time).
You'll want your own trip to Italy when you're through reading! One of my absolute favorites.

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