A Room with a View by E. M. Foster

 A Room with a View by E. M. Foster

Delightful classic

It is the second time that I am rating A Room with a View.

That is because I have finished listening to it again.

This time, it was a BBC production.

An adapted, abbreviated version.

Generally, this is to be avoided.

When the original is an acclaimed masterpiece, it is wrong to go to an abridged format.

But one cannot listen to or read War and Peace so many times.

Actually, I intend to listen to a BBC version of the mentioned chef d'oeuvre and a good deal more.

Hearing again the story is generally a good entertainment.

It does flop, like the recently heard Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, that had Elizabeth McGovern spoiling my pleasure with her artificial, over the top efforts.

A Room with a View has a somewhat simple story line.

Without giving details out, a man falls in love with a girl in the sensational setting of the Italian countryside near Florence.

Or maybe it all started with A Room with a View ...

Lucy Honeychurch, the main female character is talking to her companion, Charlotte Bartlett about their room in this pensione of Florence.

Charlotte is a rather artificial, pretentious character in the first place, but may take an unexpected turn later in the story.

She is complaining that they have no view.

Mr. Emerson and his son George offer to change their rooms, that have a view.

From here on, we have clash between authenticity and artificiality.

I would say that this book is a poignant criticism of a number of aspects of British mentality in the nineteenth century.

Only I must say that I am an unrepentant admirer of that very way of life.

At the upper level obviously.

If I were given to choose other periods for my life, I would choose Victorian Britain.

Not the gutter if possible, but a mansion, a sumptuous location in the Far East, the South Seas maybe.

So I disliked the character of Cecil Vyse, with his pomposity , falseness, snobbishness, stiffness.

But if he represents a caricature of British upper class unnatural behavior I still opt to favor those gentlemen.

That's because I probably am snobbish and unnatural

The film based on the book is also a good way to approach the original.

It won Academy Awards, Golden Globes and BAFTAs