"Do not be so ramshackly"

This is advice Margaret Schlegel gave her sister. And I was reminded of this because Forster uses the word enough times that it really feels like it's him speaking, and because even though this series of lectures is insightful enough that it can't possibly be for the purpose of correcting me, it felt like I might have been going about reading novels in a ramshackly way if I didn't quite understand what they were about.
Characters in novels are more real than the people you know. Imagine all the important writers around a table to start understanding that things don't change. Moby Dick is prophetic, expansive, it opens. Adam Bede shows the agnostic humanist George Eliot to be a preacher. So interesting all the way through, although, the person that wrote notes in the margins wouldn't agree. I can't say when the enthusiastic dashed underlines stopped because they annoyed me so much I only noticed when they were there bothering me, but at least one read lost interest before the end.

A collection of lectures full of Forster's musings about writing. Rambling, unfocused, and forgettable.

But a quote about character building struck me as funny:
"The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They 'run away,' they 'get out of hand': they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay."

3.5 out of 5
(I feel that Goodreads should have a 10 star rating system)

This book is a series of lectures delivered in 1927 at the Cambridge, with 9 chapters and obviously an academic book discussing the elements of any complete English novel.
Although this was written almost a hundred years ago, the ideas are still very fresh.
Forster mainly analyzed the novels written in the previous 200 years preceding his time, the era of literary modernism. Compared to the history of epic and drama, novel was (and is) still very new back then. Perhaps that was his reason to set a vantage-point for what a novel should have/ be/ look like. He defined novel as any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words for the purposes of his lectures; he discussed the seven different 'aspects' of the novel:
1. The Story
2. People (characters)
3. The Plot
4. Fantasy
5. Prophecy
6. Pattern and
7. Rhythm
Finally he concluded by saying that we don't need to worry about the past or future of the novel, or how it's nature might change, since it is independent of time or history and depends solely on the human nature. If human nature alters, only then there will be alterations in the aspects of the novel.

This is an interesting book which I will recommended to read if someone wants to write or understand English novels better.

E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel had the potential to make some very important and interesting points about how we categorise and understand the novel. In fairness, it contains very simple and helpful definitions of plot and story. Forster tells us that the two are distinguished by causality.
Unfortunately, the man is a total prick. The very personal, informal style of the guide reveals how hugely biased, defensive and uninformed Forster is. He believes only the intelligent with good memories can appreciate novels, movie-goers are no better than cavemen, and he chides the inquisitive – a reader should not ask questions of their novelist, simply read and brood.
Forster asks us in his introduction to imagine every novelist working in a single circular room at the same time, removing their works of any context, influence and chronology. In designing this room, he refuses to believe that social, medical, political or technological advances have in any way impacted the novel. He lost me fully on page 27 with the words: ‘As women bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too. Quite wrong.’ I refuse to believe that all the world’s novels could be written without any knowledge of one another. Nothing exists in a vacuum. I had borrowed my copy from the library, and so will finish up with a quotation from another student scrawled in the margins. ‘NO! STICK IT UP YOUR ARSE.’

This is the book version of a series of lectures Forster gave at Cambridge the year my grandmother was born, i.e 1927. I found it interesting, and Forster's casual style (since he was speaking rather than writing) and self-awareness of the slipperiness of the subject causing his inability to really grasp it in a masterful way made it a refreshing read despite the 90 years between him saying these things and me reading them.

That said, I think it was a bit muddled and I think sometimes he assumed more than he should've. While there was already plenty of criticism on the art of novels then, it was nothing like today in the copious amount of opinion we have on the subject and the ease of perusing it all by Google or ebook, and so Forster struck out on his own and through the jungle of darkness sought to give us his ideas for what 'aspects' to consider constitute novels. Despite its flaws, I would consider it a valiant and successful effort more or less.

It is illuminating in parts and bogged down in others. Sometimes he tries too hard to define and teach us something that he doesn't really (and self-admittedly) fully grasp either and the effect is of rousing the intellect yet wishing to just be past it as it feels like you're stuck in quicksand with someone lecturing you from the side who has some idea of how to get out but can't really say how they got out themselves, just that they did and it is somehow possible.

Am I being too harsh? Perhaps. The book is short, I did feel that I learned a few things and if one is interested in literary criticism and the novel as art, or in writing fiction, then this is worth taking a look at. Beware though, if you are leery of spoilers, that this book will spoil quite a few classics for you in its dissection of various aspects, if you haven't read them yet.

did I actually finish all of this? no. (*but I did read some chapters!)
am I gonna act like I did to help out my Goodreads challenge? yes

دیگه واقعا حوصله خوندن متن‌های قلنبه سلنبه رو ندارم.. نکات جالبی داشت برام ولی کاش ساده‌تر و روانتر ترجمه می‌شد.

My favorite take away from this is that people in books don't have to eat. They can exist, Forster says, without food. Following this logic, unlike actors on a film set, characters shouldn't need catering. So, when they sit down at a table, I take note. Something important is about to happen. Try to picture The Glass Menagerie without those dinner scenes. Meals are the last bastion of the mother's control. Tables, round as worlds, are under her rule. She presides over them into a collision course.

Forster's point feeds more for me. What about sleep? Characters don't need it like you and I do. Yet, where would A Christmas Carol be if Scrooge hadn't gone to bed? Where, for that matter, would most ghost stories be? Forster nourishes my reading with this little book.

Though these were lectures at Cambridge, they come across in clear language not to mystify. Even if you don't know some of the novels he mentions, it won't matter. There is still so much to get from these pages for readers or writers or both. The author does, in many ways, just state the obvious. I admire that in someone who dares. Common sense is here. And a century later, the points he makes still have weight.

Standing on the cliff of one's own vanity, the fortunate ones are those who get gently pushed off the edge. No, it's not an act of revenge. It's an act of kindness. One has no choice but to acknowledge their own insignificance and try to open the wings that have frozen with years of cold arrogance. Everyone is destined to the same end; only some get the chance to savour the fall.

Fly, I shall.

hay! rất hay! trời ơi, hay đến phát khóc lên được. tôi yêu làm sao các tiểu thuyết gia nói về văn chương và tiểu thuyết. tôi yêu cái tông giọng khiêm nhường và háo hức của Forster, yêu sự gãy gọn trong dịch thuật. sau Italo Calvino, mãi mới có một người viết về văn chương làm tôi xúc động đến thế. một cuốn sách quá đẹp!

2.5 stars. First, I'm not a writer--but I do read a lot of books on craft. Mr. Forester is a brilliant writer, and he definitely knows more about writing a novel than I do. Unfortunately, I didn't really learn anything from him. I don't know if it was the dated language or what, but this book bored my socks off. Plus, what the heck is he talking about? Flat characters, round characters? I really didn't take anything useful away from this book.

Today’s post will be a little different from my usual content because I’ll try my best to review E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a collection of lectures he held at Trinity College in 1927. This book comprises of the author’s note, an introduction, a chapter on the story, two on characters, one on plot, fantasy, prophecy, patterns and rhythm and a conclusion.

In the Introduction, Forster defines the novel and its length, then, he compares famous English novels with masterpieces of French and Russian literature and states that “No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy” because “No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.” (p. 7)

Through the image of all the novelists writing in the same room, at the same table, Forster wants to demonstrate that each great novel is valuable due to its literary merits and not by scholarly periodisation. By pairing writers from different time periods and comparing their works, Forster shows the similarities between them even when more than a century separates the novels from one another. For example, he pairs Samuel Richardson with Henry James, H.G. Wells with Charles Dickens or Laurence Stern with Virginia Woolf. Through these examples, Forster illustrates that chronology is not that important.

In the first chapter of the book, we learn that the basis of every novel is the story because our curiosity to know what happens next is ingrained in our being from prehistoric times; The suspense keeps the listeners attentive and sometimes story-telling may save lives if we think about Scheherazade’s stories which delayed her fate. Though story and plot seem similar, they are actually not and Forster explains why is it so in the fourth chapter.

The second and third chapter revolve around characters. Unlike real people who have private thoughts and secrets, characters’ hidden side can be revealed for a better understanding of their actions, if the author chooses to do so. However, some of the five basic elements of ordinary life (birth, food, sleep, love and death) rarely appear in novels because a work of fiction has its own set of rules and eating or sleeping may not be relevant to the story.

Later on, Forster makes an important distinction between flat and round characters. Flat characters are one-dimensional, easy to recognise and don’t surprise the reader. Well written flat characters appear in Dickens’s novels and Forster considers Pip and David Copperfield as being flat characters who attempt to become round. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the round characters who grow throughout the novel and surprise the reader. Round characters appear in Jane Austen’s novels and Forster praises her for being a “miniaturist” because all her characters are rounded and can adapt to a more complex plot. Other round characters populate all of Tolstoy’s and Dostoyevsky’s novels.

The fourth chapter focuses on the plot, which is “also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” (p. 86) The story only fulfils the reader’s curiosity, while the plot forces them to use their intellect and memory to put together each piece of the puzzle the writer provides. The intelligent or ideal reader doesn’t expect to understand everything at once, they have the patience to read until the end to discover the mystery, which is essential to the plot.

The following chapters are about fantasy and prophecy. For Forster, fantastic stories have supernatural elements, whether they are obvious or subtle. Here, he considers fantastic the stories that deal with the unfamiliar or the uncanny, which wouldn’t make sense in real life. Prophecy, on the other hand, is linked to the tone of a novel that sends powerful and profound messages of faith, love, humanity and so on. The best examples of prophetic writers are Dostoevsky, Melville, Emily Bronte and D. H. Lawrence.

The last two aspects of the novel are pattern and rhythm which are strongly linked to the plot. The pattern has an aesthetic function in the novel, while. rhythm is a recurring phrase or theme, which, according to Forster, is similar to a motif in a symphony.

Though the book is a bit dry and Forster talks in metaphors, it was an informative read for me because I recalled what I learned in college about the novel and its essential building blocks. I see the importance of reading Forster’s lectures if someone studies literature or the craft of writing.