The Longest Journey (Penguin Classics)
by E. M. Forster
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Book Summary Information
Author: E. M. ForsterIntroduction: Gilbert Adair
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-31
ISBN: 0141441488
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of The Longest Journey (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: Painful
Summary: 5 Stars
Forster's The Longest Journey is painfully bad: painfully awkward, painfully closeted, painfully dated, painfully class-conscious, painfully defiant of the norms of story-telling, painfully sententious at times and preachy. It's also painfully true.
It's a "college" novel, like many others depicting the lives of its characters fatally determined by the inherently contingent friendships one forms in the nursery of one's college circle. I read it first in 1962, when I was living in painful intimacy with my "peers" in a painfully cloistered House at a painfully famous university. I suppose I had to write a painfully trivial paper about it. Now I've read it again, and I find that, seen backwards through the telescope of years, it's uproariously funny. I don't remember having that impression the first time. I imagine I found it more serious when I was living in it.
I wonder why novels of the early 20th C seem so much more dated and mawkish at times than, for instance, Trollope or Fielding or Smollett? Perhaps it's the embarrassment that teenagers feel about their parents when those parents claim to have been young once and reveal the turmoils that only the current generation can take seriously. Anyway, I suspect that many readers will underrate this novel because of that uneasiness. All I can say is, if you're not reading it for homework, nobody will make you enjoy it. But if you give it a chance, you may find that it's painfully moving and beautiful.
Summary of The Longest Journey (Penguin Classics)
E. M. Forster once described The Longest Journey as the book "I am most glad to have written." An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent. He sets out full of hope to become a writer, but gives up his aspirations for those of the conventional world, gradually sinking into a life of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.
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