A PASSAGE TO INDIA

Book 5 on my list is A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. Yes, I had never read A Passage to India. I love Forster, have read all of his other novels multiple times and seen their film adaptations, have adored the movie of A Room With a View since middle school, wrote a college paper about Howards End and a mini-honors thesis comparing Howards End and Maurice, intensively studied the Bloomsbury Group and wrote my honors thesis proper on Virginia Woolf, but hadn’t read the most famous and acclaimed Forster novel.

Why I own this book: Obviously, I always meant to read it.

Why I hadn’t read it: No good reason. I saw the movie when I was perhaps too young to fully understand it (during the early days of my Room With a View obsession), and remember finding it boring and confusing.

The verdict: I’d really been looking forward to this book as the high point of the Project, but I do have to admit I had a hard time getting into the first 30 pages. Mostly that’s just because I didn’t have much uninterrupted reading time with it, but also I found the blatant racism of the British characters toward the Indian characters very off-putting. Even though I realize that’s the point of the book, it’s a bit hard to sit through without wanting to punch those damn colonial oppressors. But even though I struggled with it, in the end it was a damn fine book. I think Forster is just so relentless about capturing the weaknesses of human nature, so unflinching in portraying his characters’ flaws, that I found it difficult to really like any of them, and for me it’s hard to enjoy a book if I don’t like any of the people I’m reading about. I ended up either annoyed by them or embarrassed for them. It was masterfully done, and I adore how Forster manages to capture the delicate fumbliness of people trying to connect across vast cultural rifts, but still, that shit is harsh.