It has been a while. Forgive me.
I just looked at my list to see what books I needed to buy next and it seems that the chronology has already been mixed up. It seems that Mrs. Dalloway and The Sound and the Fury come later than I first realized. I’m not really sure how I got them confused except that maybe I took a list of upcoming books to Half Price Books to find them and the order got confused on that list. So I was supposed to read A Passage to India first but that’s ok. I’ve read it now and I can review it. I have also read the books between it and Mrs. Dalloway so I’ll just repost that one in the order it should have been read (I’ve decided to repost the blogs for the books I’ve already read as they come up chronologically so that I can follow the flow of the literature when I look back). So for this time the order will be: A Passage to India, An American Tragedy, The Great Gatsby, and Mrs. Dalloway.
I loved A Passage to India. I have been thinking for the past few days why I liked it so much and I think it’s because I feel like I really got what the author was trying to say. I have to admit that with a lot of these books I can read them and appreciate the story but I don’t feel like I’m getting the underlying themes and messages. But this book was much more simple and straightforward with it’s themes (at least the ones I caught) and that definitely helps with my enjoyment.
This is the second book I’ve read by E.M. Forster and I really appreciate the way he develops his characters. In fact it took him about a third of this book to get to any kind of rising action. I was beginning to think nothing was ever going to happen. But when the action started taking place, I was very greatful for the strong character development.
In my view, the main theme of this book was the racial tension that was taking place. There was lots of racism or at least prejudice in this book and it was a new perspective for me to see it outside of the black/white conflict that you generally see. Instead conflicts centered around English/Indians and Muslims/Hindus within the Indian society. The way that people wanted to be together and be true friends but they just couldn’t because society would not allow it was very interesting and sad to me. I’m trying to be as vague as possible because I want other people to read this oneand I don’t want to ruin it.
A second theme that came up that was really interesting to me was that of death and the author’s philosophy of death. The most gripping example of this for me was when one character was trying to tell another character than a friend had died and the first character thought it was a joke. At this point the character that knows of the death (an atheist) comes to a realization that even if a person has died, if you don’t know about it, it is as if the person is still alive. Which is kind of like a type of immortality. I probably didn’t explain that very well but I was trying to be vague about the characters. Anyway, to me it was in one way a new perspective that I hadn’t really thought about before but makes sense, but in another way it is sad that this person had to grasp at something to find immortality because there was no hope for their life after death.
In conclusion I very much enjoyed this story and really felt like I understood what Forster was trying to say.
