Mostly unreadable except for his little discussion of flat vs. round characters and his many literary allusions and interesting observations. But it was really stuffy. ( )

A side read to Anna Karenina... some interesting transcribed lectures. ( )

If you've been working your way through academic papers, college textbooks, etc, then you will truly love reading this clearly written book on how the inner technical aspects of how novels are created. For anyone curious as to how writers go about their work, or if you're just looking for inspiration from a seasoned author, I highly recommend reading Aspects of the Novel. You may not agree with all of the statements but I'm sure they will be illuminating and help you formulate your own opinion on how stories reach us.

The first few pages are rather annoying and quite unlike the rest of the book which was created from a number of lectures by E.M. Forster. Usually people use the excuse that complicated things can't be made understood with simple language. Forster demonstrates this can in fact be done and does so gloriously. In this slim little book he gives us his perspective of why stories work and why they touch us.

Forster discusses such logical constructs as plot and narrative shape, but he manages to interweave that with a wonderful explanation on how fictional characters live in these strict models. What you take away from reading this is not a deeper understanding of how narrative works or how to create a masterpiece of fiction. Neither will it help you to pick apart a book such as War and Peace but it will form an excellent foundation and guideline to find further readings and understanding.

Most importantly Forster leaves every reader of his lectures the choice on what parts of his explanations to accept or reject and he does so himself of aspects of many famous novels. If anything this book provides clarity and a way to start thinking of why we like stories so much. ( )

I've been wanting to listen to something educational about the novel, but not often such things are on audiobook, so I was excited when this popped up.

Written by a novelist with impeccable authority to teach me something.

And I was surprised it was chatty with personal opinion.

The narrator, Jonathan Keeble, says, on behalf of the author, that he is delivering the book in a lecturing style, however, and he is. But Keeble is reading not lecturing. He is speaking much faster - he is absolutely racing through the words - than he would if he were lecturing. Annoyingly so. I cannot take it all in and must listen several times to get what I want from this book. ( )

Occasionally interesting.(25) ( )

With little patience for long introductions, one sentence stands out:

"Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time);
it is the only way of discovering what they contain."

Unfortunately, Forster adds little more humor and strands us with:

"History develops, Art stands still." Hmm or Huh.
Well...not for the brilliant art and music and words which have been created
in his time and since...

The author proceeds with examples dominated by negativity,
maybe so he can reinforce his own critical judgements, with
disturbing "tapeworm" imagery.

Toward the middle, he makes a memorable point:

"...the inherent defect of novels: they go off at the end."

With "round' and "flat" characters, he immerses into his cycle
of supremely tedious verbiage, with little relenting. ( )

This is great! Even without having read all the authors mentioned or even having heard of a couple whose reputations have faded out since 1927 when this series of talks were given, there is so much here! And it is so lightly delivered. Forester does underestimate Austen's capabilities, but then as a man perhaps what he didn't see displayed he assumed didn't exist. ( )

E.M. Forster's book, "Aspects of the Novel" is fascinating.
The book has been compiled from a series of lectures he delivered on the topic.

It harks back to a time when writing was lyrical, compared to the things we read today. You must create time to read books like this. I am going to repeat - you must create the time, and not merely have the time.

He has covered various aspects of the novel - the characters, the plot, fantasy and more. While doing so, he has also compared how different writers have dealt with these aspects.

It helps if you have some familiarity with Dostoevsky, Proust, Tolstoy, Bronte, Joyce, HG Well, Henry James etc.

Read the book, because of way he has dealt with the subject, and also because of the sheer joy that you will get from the book. ( )

For those of my friends who have read CSL's [b:An Experiment in Criticism|80007|An Experiment in Criticism (Canto)|C.S. Lewis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347790855s/80007.jpg|77261] and Tolkien's [b:On Fairy-Stories|1362112|Tolkien on Fairy-stories|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1326706200s/1362112.jpg|1351902], this makes an interesting companion. Although Forster doesn't really address things in quite the same way, he does have chapters on "Fantasy" and "Prophecy," each of which I think has some confluence with CSL and Big T. ( )

I remember a time, roughly ten years ago, when I had heard of Forster but never read him. I have now read almost everything he published in book form - and I adore his writing and his sensibilities. This too I adore, and my only reservation about his study of the novel and what works - and doesn't - in literature is that it is too short. Originally a series of lectures, this fine volume scratches at the surface but would have been better at twice the length. Perhaps Forster felt that he had said enough of what he wanted to say, and that it fell to others to continue the work he had begun. ( )

In the 1920s, the lecture series appears to have been the equivalent of today's serial podcast, or at least that's how this collection reads to me. Forster is casual but erudite, and through his thorough and sometimes humorous analysis, he conveys his deep understanding of and love for the novel as a literary form. There was much more to this book than I expected, and I very much enjoyed it. ( )

Let's get this out of the way immediately: I've never read an E.M. Forster novel, only his short stories. It might seem odd, then, that I chose to read his guide to good novel writing. A bit like taking a cookery class from Jamie Oliver having enjoyed one of his mince pies. Fortunately it wouldn't really have mattered whose guide to novel writing I read since I'm not planning on writing a novel.

That being said… I was in Manchester a few months ago to give a talk at the University. While catching up over tea and biscuits with the faculty someone asked me how my novel was going. I was rather bewildered by this, since I've never so much as started writing a novel. Had he got me confused with someone else? Had I gotten drunk at a conference and told him I was writing a four hundred page thriller about a handsome young Englishman who has to save the world from a nuclear-weapon-wielding arts student using a cunning mix of wit, maths, and did I mention his handsomeness? Because I'm really not ready to start writing my memoirs yet.

But no, I (and he) had fallen victim to a whimsical joke on my department website. Once upon a time I threw in some placeholder text to the effect of “I'm working on a novel, but till then here are my papers”, except I forgot to ever replace it with something less, you know, utterly fallacious.

Fortunately, and despite it being ostensibly a guide to novel writing, you don't need to have plans to write any novels in order to enjoy Aspects of the Novel. In fact if you are planning on writing a novel I'd recommend Stephen King's On Writing as a much more useful and practical guide to the business. This book of Forster's is more of a vague wander through the landscape of prose fiction, pointing out what makes a novel a novel and what properties good novels should possess. And a jolly nice wander it is too. ( )

Let's get this out of the way immediately: I've never read an E.M. Forster novel, only his short stories. It might seem odd, then, that I chose to read his guide to good novel writing. A bit like taking a cookery class from Jamie Oliver having enjoyed one of his mince pies. Fortunately it wouldn't really have mattered whose guide to novel writing I read since I'm not planning on writing a novel.

That being said… I was in Manchester a few months ago to give a talk at the University. While catching up over tea and biscuits with the faculty someone asked me how my novel was going. I was rather bewildered by this, since I've never so much as started writing a novel. Had he got me confused with someone else? Had I gotten drunk at a conference and told him I was writing a four hundred page thriller about a handsome young Englishman who has to save the world from a nuclear-weapon-wielding arts student using a cunning mix of wit, maths, and did I mention his handsomeness? Because I'm really not ready to start writing my memoirs yet.

But no, I (and he) had fallen victim to a whimsical joke on my department website. Once upon a time I threw in some placeholder text to the effect of “I'm working on a novel, but till then here are my papers”, except I forgot to ever replace it with something less, you know, utterly fallacious.

Fortunately, and despite it being ostensibly a guide to novel writing, you don't need to have plans to write any novels in order to enjoy Aspects of the Novel. In fact if you are planning on writing a novel I'd recommend Stephen King's On Writing as a much more useful and practical guide to the business. This book of Forster's is more of a vague wander through the landscape of prose fiction, pointing out what makes a novel a novel and what properties good novels should possess. And a jolly nice wander it is too. ( )

A study of an art form which has remarkable fluidity, and thus, is hard to set rules for....good within its necessary limits. The book has been often reprinted, so it seems of value. The text was first printed in 1927. ( )

This is an amazing book for everyone who wants to pursue any career related to literature and analysing it. It was a great ground work for my lit class later this year. I loved that every proposed criterion was accompanied with examples from novels. ( )

I remember seeing this one on the shelves when I was growing up. I loved flipping through it and reading what Forster had to say about developing a novel (what makes a good one). It contributed to all sorts of imaginations of eventually writing a book one day, and I imagined I would follow Forster's tips. I did write a novel but I didn't use this book. But it holds good memories, and it's E.M. Forster. ( )

This book is a collection of lectures given at Harvard in 1927. Forster discusses the novel’s aspects such as story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, patter and rhythm, which is great to read so long as you aren’t looking for a how-to-book. It has plenty of advice, offering up personal likes and dislikes from literature. A few things stood out as really important ideas to keep in mind: “The novel tells a story” is as basic as it gets, but the reminder stopped me in my tracks and had me rethinking how I was writing my novel.
( )

There is something unerringly endearing about Forster's way of expressing himself that makes this series of lectures on the makeup of the novel so easy to read. His disarming admission of his own unscholarly nature ("True scholarship is incommunicable, true scholars rare. There are a few scholars, actual or potential, in the audience today, but only a few, and there is certainly none on the platform.") puts him firmly on a par with the reader, and his conversational, nay chatty style, opens this little book to anyone who appreciates a good read.

These series of lectures were not an investigation into the history of the novel, nor a prescription of how to write good prose, but an attempt to describe the novel as an art form. Starting from the rather open definition of the novel as "a fiction in prose of a certain extent", Forster tackles a different component each lecture. The story, that satisfies our thirst to find out what happens next, is covered distinctly from the plot, which is the embodiment of our curiosity as to why things happen. He covers a novel's characters, explaining how they can be 'flat' or 'round', and how they differ from real human beings. The realm of 'fantasy', the author's rights in his own universe, are considered, as are matters of pattern, rhythm and viewpoint, with one particularly interesting heading of 'prophecy'.

In terms of whether the book is still relevant, Forster ended his lecture series with some conjecture on what the future may hold for the novel form, whether television would eventually make it even disappear altogether (thank goodness for Riepl's Law). His conjecture that whilst history and society move on, art remains static, is extremely interesting in light of the fact that these lectures were being given at the height of the modernist period, and pertinent works are only lightly touched upon. Furthermore, whilst he provides plenty of written examples, there are of course many references to classic works, which it probably helps to have read, but also references to authors who have been buried by posterity or are no longer so accessible.

On the whole, however, Aspects of the Novel remains fundamentally readable today. It is not a high-brow scholarly affair; rather a well-thought out observational piece, taking a broad look at that vast field of literature we call the 'novel'. Forster makes some extremely astute remarks, and his witty and conversational style bring these across in an easy and comfortable way, that makes you feel his observations are frankly obvious. He does not encompass the full gamut of literary inquiry, but instead picks and chooses to highlight his points and support his argument that there are no fast and steady rules for what defines 'the novel'. This is probably required reading for students of English literature, but it's easy accessibility and thought-provoking titbits should appeal to just about all keen readers with a fascination for the novel form. ( )

Feels quite old fashioned now. Two things struck me whilst reading it:
1. This is the 'modernism' that all the post- lot were pushing against. When you hear the first half of the debate, the retort makes more sense.
2. At its worst, it reminds me of that excellent line from Michael Scott in the US Office: "There are four kinds of business: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales. ...And hospitals/manufacturing. And air travel." ( )

A rather loose, treatise on the novel that explains the difference between a "flat" and a "round" character, for example. Interesting, but rather dry at times. ( )

[From Cakes and Ale, Heinemann/Doubleday, 1930, Chapter 16:]

A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr. Evelyn Waugh[1] in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. I wish he had explained why, but he merely threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he made his celebrated observation about parallel straight lines. I was much concerned and forthwith asked Alroy Kear (who reads everything, even the books he writes prefaces for) to recommend to me some works on the art of fiction. On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr. Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr. E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr. E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr. Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all. In none of them could I discover anything to the point at issue.

[From Traveller’s Library, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933, pp. 7-8:]

Though I do not share many of the prejudices that many people have, I naturally have prejudices of my own, and they will be obvious to anyone who reads this book through. I am a writer and I look at these things from my professional standpoint. This is the difference between the writer and the critic, that the critic, the good one, can look upon productions from the vantage-ground of the absolute and putting himself in the author's shoes can judge of the success of his efforts without the hindrance of predisposition. I do not think that many writers can do this. However good a book may be we can difficultly find merit in it if it is not the sort of thing we do, or think we can do ourselves. Mr E. M. Forster not very long ago wrote a book called Aspects of the Novel. In a novel of mine I ventured on a little gibe at its expense, but Mr Forster is a man of great disinterestedness, generous of soul, and with a delicate sense of humour; I think he forgave me my jest for he was good enough to write and tell me that he liked my book. His, nevertheless, is a good one, interesting not only to the novelist but also to the novel-reader; but I speak of it now to suggest that an. acute reader could certainly divine from it what sort of novels Mr Forster would write. He makes much of just those characteristics in which no one now writing is richer than himself, but holds cheap that element of the novel, the story in which, I venture to think, his own weakness lies. My private opinion is that if Mr Forster, with his gift for beautiful English, his power of creating significant, interesting and living persons, his emotion and humour, his poetic feeling, could or would submit himself to the indignity of devising a good story he would write a novel that would make his eminent talent manifest to the whole world. But my opinion is neither here nor there.

[From Great Modern Reading, Nelson Doubleday, 1943, p. 336:]

E. M. Forster is best known in this country for his novel A Passage to India. It is generally considered the best book that has been written about that unhappy and divided country. He too is a novelist of great gifts who has never won the fame his merits demand. He writes beautiful English, he has wit and humor; and he can create characters that are freshly seen and vividly alive; then he makes them do things that you know very well, so roundly and soundly has he set them before you, they couldn't possibly do. You don't believe, and when you don't believe what a novelist tells you, he's done. E. M. Forster has written two volumes of short stories, but I have preferred to give you here the interesting and timely piece I now invite you to read.[2]

[From The Summing Up, The Literary Guild of America, 1938, lix, 220:]

There are a number of clever writers who, with all sorts of good things in their heads to say and a gift for creating living people, do not know what on earth to do with them when they have created them. They cannot invent a plausible story. Like all writers (and in all writers there is a certain amount of humbug) they make a merit of their limitations and either tell the reader that he can imagine for himself what happens or else berate him for wanting to know. They claim that in life stories are not finished, situations are not rounded off and loose ends are left hanging. This is not always true, for at least death finishes all our stories; but even if it were it would not be a good argument.[3]

______________________________________________
[1] Fictional! The three books mentioned later are real. Ed.
[2] “What I Believe”. Ed.
[3] Reference to E. M. Forster? Ed.

Must we murder to dissect? Must we explain why some books are better than others? I suppose. Some of his views I respect, but some of his views on Dickens I can barely tolerate. Valuable in highlighting books and authors I haven't read. The world of 'Classic Literature' really is limitless. ( )

I hoped one of my favourite authors might have been more forthcoming on how to write quality, especially given the renown of this work. Exactly as the title promises, he shares a fairly straightforward categorization of the essential components/aspects of novel writing. He did put into words some things I only felt instinctively about those aspects, lending my instincts some credence, and labelled obscure others I hadn't identified. I felt the last chapter was strongest where he defines pattern and rhythm, but mostly for its good analysis of Henry James. I don't rate myself anywhere above the 'pseudo-scholar' these lectures were aimed at, but I'm sorry there wasn't more quantity of takeaway. Or maybe I'm just too dense to see it yet. ( )

Aspects of the Novel is a reproduction of novelist E.M. Forster’s lectures on the novel, given at Cambridge in 1927. It stands admirably as a text for writers, but I think it is just as valuable, and entertaining, as a record of Forster’s wonderfully warm and fussy conversational voice. In his series of talks on subjects like Story, Plot, Pattern and Rhythm, Forster grumbles amiably about upstarts like Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Melville and Stein, some of whose works were still not published in England at the time of his lectures. Highly recommended for fans of the Modernists, and for writers of fiction. ( )

It's not an easy thing to eschew "hard" answers in favour of impressionistic observations. You worry about looking foolish, about feeling at the mercy of those who do have hard to purvey, about meandering your way into the grave after an uninspiring life. This is one reason that literary study, in the fifty or so years after EM Forster's series of lectures under the title Aspects of the Novel, clove to hard, hermetic, sealed, overdetermined systems of many unexpected sorts--still does, to a great degree. Your structural and poststructural analysis stops you from having to take the giddy leap and engage too closely with the Real--which, ironically here, is also the false in the sense of the artificial, the created: the novel.

It was an age of heroes, when your subjective impressions, maybe a couple of digs at donnish friends or foes, and above all lines, traces, forward motion, strings of character development or plot action or changing features of the language used, could in fact poesis make. I'm not convinced that that's not what responses to art shouldn't always be. But some people are tidiers-up by nature, and others feel the bourgeois pressure to put out a spread--so, after rightfully mocking and dismissing Hamilton's "nine types of fictional weather," Forster, for what seems purely hospitality's sake, comes at us with his own interpretative structure--the old Aristotelian standbys: character, plot, story, "rhythm and pattern", which are ill-defined but very much in the same superficially systematizing vein (by "rhythm" he seems to mean something I'd have called "choreography"). It'd be nice to know Aristotle better so I'd have a stronger sense of what here is his and what modern--certainly, everyone who's tangentially aware of this book seems to know it first for the distinction between round and flat characters, which is fine as far as it goes, I suppose, and nice in terms of the focus it puts on the necessity of flatness and of accessibility in fiction, and how the difference between fiction in reality is that access--fictional characters can sing their internal lives out, whereas we never really know what our real-life loved ones are like on the inside. Fine, fine. Good for a public lecture series.

But mostly it doesn't really turn my crank too hard, and when it does it's when he gets down to specific works--a hard-data supplement that stands in happily for the rigid-theory buttress that he works hard and mostly successfully to avoid. Open this for Forster's readings of Moll Flanders and DH Lawrence and Melville and most of all, The Ambassadors, which granted all my (extensive) complaints about James's method and then said "but after all, is there not something unique and pretty in that sensitivity, which not all its artifice and troubling implications about its author"--I always have the feeling that James would fretfully but gladly see you consigned to a prison camp for the poor and insensitive (the same thing, let's face it) if you were so berserk as to throw a frisbee near him or snicker at his ascot or call him "Hank"--but he wouldn't order it with curled lip, he would just observe in his Strong Sad voice that a cheap disc perhaps used by the tawdry in upsetting games had been rumoured to have entered his proximity. And then liveried servants or the Hand of God would snap to and whisk you away.

Enough about Hank James! Forster forced me to concede that there is a legitimate, albeit distended, art in James's discouraging prose, and he pulls off similar tricks with others, notably in the chapters on "fantasy" and "prophecy", which are where most of the good is in this b, as opposed to the no doubt noble efforts to say something interesting about "plot" and "story". ( )