'Arctic Summer,’ by Damon Galgut

“Have you any idea,” John Cleese asks Jamie Lee Curtis in “A Fish Called Wanda,” “what it’s like being English?” He laments the rigidity, the inevitable embarrassment, the threat inherent in opening one’s mouth to reveal something authentic. Cleese plays his anguish for comedy, an absurd plea to be rescued by this vivacious American, but the tragic burden of his conflict is unmistakable. When the novel opens in 1912, Forster, known to his friends as Morgan, is on a boat to India, surrounded by the English who fascinate and repel him with their narrow-minded class distinctions and racism. [...] a published author of some success, he’s ambivalent about his profession: “[T]he idea of being a writer felt like an ill-fitting suit on him, which he kept trying to shrug into, or out of.” In writing a novel titled the same as Forster’s final, unfinished work, Galgut pulls off the neat trick of trying on another writer with precision. In “The Good Doctor” and “In a Strange Room,” both candidates for the Man Booker Prize, he shows a genius for forceful interior intimacy. [...] self-consciously, he adopts for “Arctic Summer” an outmoded literary formality of dependent clauses and passive construction in an attempt to channel Forster, whose letters and diaries served as a foundation for Galgut. For most of his life he lived with his mother, and, although he traveled widely and had good friends, his erotic life was beset by false starts, fear and unrequited longing, bound inevitably by the provincialism of his society. There was a whole aspect of his character that was an unmentioned half-brother to his civilised side: drunk and disorderly and primitive.

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'arctic Summer,’ By Damon Galgut

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'arctic Summer,’ By Damon Galgut

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