Nicky Penttila

This month’s bookclub book was A Room with a View, so I read the book and watched both the theatrical film and the newer BBC version. Also found a great travel story in the New York Time on traveling through Florence the way E.M. Forster does in the book, not the way Baedeker’s (or Fodor’s, or Rough Guide) would have you do. 

The book brings pleasure whether you read it slow or fast, line by line like a sluggish fall stream or in great gulping chunks (unlike, say, last month’s Conrad, which forces you to move at his speed). The point of view is sort of a genial omniscient, not too interfering but every once in a throws a “meta” pitch directly in your face. And yet he manages to make it work. Two examples: 

Cecil entered. Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was mediaeval. Like a Gothic statue. Tall and refined, with shoulders that seemed braced square by an effort of the will, and a head that was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision, he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portals of a French cathedral. Well educated, well endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the mediaeval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism. (B&N classics edition, p. 85)

It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, “She loves young Emerson.” A reader in Lucy’s place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome “nerves” or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed? (p.136)

 Next month’s book is Lie Down in Darkness. Thinking it won’t be such a joyful trip.