A Room with a View

My book club met last night, so I feel free to blog about this E.M. Forster book now. (It was a little weird when I first arrived last night, because I had just read my version of a book club meeting on this book that I had fanfic'd a little over a year ago. Wanted to refresh my memory on what I had thought then on some of the main points. Lisa says I'm a nerd.)

I love this book. Love it. (I think I've mentioned that.) There was somebody there who pretty much hated it, which is always a little punch-to-the-gut for me because I identify so strongly with certain fictional characters and books and movies that somebody saying they like or dislike it is immediately equivalent in my mind to people saying they like or dislike me. To the point that when people say something like, "My favorite character in the Harry Potter series is Hermione," I have to remind myself that other people do not think like I do and so very likely this is not a compliment or oblique reference to what the person thinks of me. 

A Room with a View is strongly themed around personal honesty. Lucy is a young woman raised in a fairly conventional society, and she has been accustomed to accepting everyone else's view of her. On a holiday to Italy, she finds herself rebelling internally, urged on by a pair of travelers with whom she falls into easy comradeship. This disturbs her so much that she runs (personal honesty is a frightening thing when you're not used to it), but of course you can't run from truth your whole life, at least not often in books, and by the end everything has sorted out, or she has.

Lisa said that a room with a view is a place from which you can see things, thus the title for a book about broadening horizons and seeing things as they are. (She said it better last night, but I didn't write it down.)

Quotes, quotes, quotes, quotes....

"He has the merit--if it is one--of saying exactly what he means. He has rooms he does not value, and he thinks you would value them. He no more thought of putting you under an obligation than he thought of being polite. It is so difficult--at least, I find it difficult--to understand people who speak the truth."

"By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself." 

"She had refused, not because she disliked him, but because she did not know what had happened, and she suspected that he did know. And this frightened her."

"I'm always right. I'm quite uneasy at being always right so often."

"Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not."

"For the only relationship which Cecil conceived was feudal: that of protector and protected. He had no glimpse of the comradeship after which the girl's soul yearned."

"But Lucy had developed since the spring. That is to say, she was now better able to stifle the emotions of which the conventions and the world disapprove. Though the danger was greater, she was not shaken by deep sobs.... Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it."

"She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors--Light."

"Yes, for we fight for more than Love or Pleasure, there is Truth. Truth counts."