It's difficult to say something really meaningful about a book like this, because more educated people can obviously be more eloquent and sensitive. I'll talk about three recurring thoughts:
Loneliness. This was what struck me about Maurice and what I think was the sentiment he felt more deeply than any other. Maurice doesn't have a likable personality, not at first. He's not the brightest or the most sympathetic of people, but he is sensual, affectionate and yearning. Being alone, not being able to express his passion and feeling doomed to not share it with anyone, all his qualities and quirks made him a young man for whom I cared. His inner pain was sincere and made him deserving of love, because he wanted it so much. I felt that he was probably the character with the most romantic soul in the book.
This story was clearly dear to Forster and I think this was both a strength and a limit. In the Final Notes of the book it becomes clear that the author was trying to write original characters loosely related to people he had met, probably more the secondary characters than the protagonists. Sometimes though I had the impression that Forster didn't want to immerse himself too deeply in them, that he was trying to reach a balance between what he knew, what he lived, what he was creating, therefore there was sometimes a detachment that made me think we were only allowed to see participate in the outer appearance of events, but not really penetrate them.
The ending is not the perfect happy-ever-after, but it has a strong feeling of affirmation that satisfied me. I felt that we were abandoning Maurice when his life was really beginning, but it was also a metaphor of what gay people did at the time: disappearing into the greenwood and trying to live their lives without attracting too much attention. Maurice, who is so average among his peers since the beginning, is very brave at the end, not in the sense that he outs himself to the world - which was impossible at the time - but in the sense that he is ready to sacrifice a lot to be himself.
...ContinuaThey say that each book has its moment, probably I have read this novel in a wrong mood and I could not appreciate it. The plot itself is touching but the reading was not easy: I found a lot of pages very "heavy": dull and boring.
I enjoy reading Maurice tremendously. The prose is simply beautiful. Sometimes it gets abstract and impressionistic, but please be reminded that Forster’s is one of the great modernists of the twentieth century. This novel reminds me of D. H. Lawrence sometimes since one common subject of investigation for them is desire. As a a gay bildungsroman, Maurice chronicles how the eponymous character confronts with his own sexual orientation, from its awakening, struggle, denial to the final reconciliation and acceptance. Nevertheless, while Lawrence is able to investigate it more or less openly, Forster can only do it in a more clandestine way and did not publish this novel in his lifetime. This, nevertheless, leads Forster to develop a special aesthetic of darkness toward the end of the novel. Darkness, night, disappearance and anonymity are preferred for the privacy and repose and security they bring to light, day and presence which draws calamity to themselves. Therefore in the end, both Maurice and Alec disappeared into the wilderness. In fact the ending reminds me of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which ends with the two protagonists as perpetual flaneur, and away from normative social mores.
...Continua...ma uno splendido inizio. Romanzo sull'omosessualità che mi è piaciuto molto. C'è tutto: amore, passione, delicatezza, tormento, inquietudine, ignoranza, perbenismo, arroganza, libertà.
Ho adorato il personaggio di Maurice :) Spocchioso ma estremamente coraggioso.
