A Room with a View – E.M. Forster

I read this book really rather distractedly because the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of it is one of my favourite movies, one that I watched countless times, and extremely faithful to the book, so the novel had very few surprises for me. I also met Julian Sands (George) at the Met in New York – he pretended not to notice me when I called him. No matter how much you are bothered by fans (and if you have been involved in the remarkably low number of acclaimed productions that Sands has over the last 20 years or so, the fans who recognize you are probably not many), I still think that if you don’t say hi in a (for once fairly empty) museum you are just an ass.

A Room with a View is a wonderful novel and, for once, one whose romanticized pictures of Italy and whose stereotyped portrayals of the Italian people don’t bother me (or not excessively, at least). Stories of similar forbidden loves have been told and re-told for centuries in faintly different versions, but Forster writes this one so beautifully that it is still, after more than a hundred years, a pleasure to read (probably also because of its shortness, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed 400 pages of this).