Sometimes the feeling of a novel resonates so strongly with my current emotional state that it’s eerie. It’s that magical moment where consciousness becomes fused so tight with the narrative and the particular story becomes my own – particular and universal. True. I had this sensation as I got into the thick of this novel’s story. It seems an unlikely place and person to feel so connected to: Galgut’s fictional imagining of writer EM Forster. The novel mostly takes place between the publication of “Howard’s End” in 1910 and the publication of “A Passage to India” in 1924. Forster (or Morgan as he is commonly called) travels to India primarily to visit a man he's fallen in love with named Syed Ross Masood. He experiences first hand the strained racial relations and the way imperialism was transforming at that time. Having met in England when Morgan was tutoring him the pair became close friends, but never lovers as Masood denied Morgan's advances. When Morgan returns to England he continues to live with his mother who is both his closest companion and worst enemy. During the war Morgan takes up a position in Egypt and there meets the second great love of his life Mohammed. Galgut carefully reconstructs the tentative relationships Morgan builds with other people, elucidating the suppressed sexuality of Morgan and the complexity of racial politics. The story is overall a speculation on the events and emotions which fed into the difficult creation of “A Passage to India” as well as the novel “Maurice” which wasn't published until after the author's death.

Read my full review of Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut on LonesomeReader

You can see when an author falls in love with his subject matter, as Damon Galgut does with E.M. Forster in this ravishing and devastatingly sad account of the author’s sojourns in India.

Unable to express his true sexuality in his home country, where he was constantly under the watchful eye of his mother and the social barometer of English aristocracy, Forster’s tentative explorations in this regard occurred abroad, in much different circumstances, and with much different results, at the end of the day.

What I loved about Galgut’s book is how much insight it gives into both the writerly process and the lives of famous authors such as Forster, who we simply assume due to their fame that they were always confident in their sense of their own success and worth.

Not so Forster, who juggled the unpublishable [b:Maurice|3103|Maurice|E.M. Forster|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1361934128s/3103.jpg|2394184] with Arctic Summer (his only unfinished novel) and what was to be his eventual masterpiece, [b:A Passage to India|45195|A Passage to India|E.M. Forster|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1421883612s/45195.jpg|4574850].

Impeccably researched and written with an extraordinary depth of empathy towards and understanding of Forster, Galgut maintains a difficult balance of showing us Forster in context and simultaneously conveying a sense of his literary legacy and achievements. Magnificent.

This biographical sketch of E. M. Forster's -- who falls in that category of writers who I've read a lot less than I've read about, thanks to this and Zadie Smith's essay in Changing My Mind -- covers his time in India, Turkey, and back home in the aftermath of his first voyage to India, and more importantly the thought processes and the privations that gave rise to his book on India, among other things. It gives keen insights into Forster the writer, by providing the context on Forster the man. And indeed Forster could easily pass as one of Galgut's troubled fictional protagonists, struggling with identity, a sense of self. Highly recommended for those aspiring to write.

Quite a beautiful story, however one feels about Forster. A story, really, not so much about Forster but about love and its different shapes and forms.