Book Reviews

Paola Ferrante & E.M. Forster: Compare & Contrast

Three recent books read make an interesting compare and contrast study:

• Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante (2023)

• Howard’s End by E.M. Forster (1910)

• A Room With A View by E.M. Forster (1908)

Apologies to Ferrante for possible awkward comparisons, but let’s begin by praising this awesome debut collection of weird and wonderful short stories: “When he changes to a dragon, I pretend that I don’t see it.”

Holy!

Most of the transformations in these stories are female bodies, but the dragon is a male, perhaps for obvious reasons. He has an anger management issue.

Ferrante’s stories are dense, imagistic, full of tensions inspired by fear and anticipated catastrophe. At the same time, there is a lot of action in the domestic sphere. Every day life, as it were, told by characters who are actually animals. Or are presented as animals. Or mythological creatures, in the case of the dragon. In other words, the action here is both other worldly and down the street realism.

Catastrophe, though, of course (?), is never far away. There are a couple of futurism stories, placed in a version of the world greatly diminished by climate change. Not completely uninhabitable, but getting close to that, and Ferrante’s characters are, as noted above, concerned with every day events, anxieties, desires. The world is warped (right now) and we do our best to carry on. In the catastrophic future, it’s the same, dude.

It if isn’t clear already, I highly recommend this book.

I followed Ferrante by reading two E.M. Forster classics I hadn’t yet. I read them as audio books, inspired to check out Forster by my recent research on Zadie Smith. I know if I had read these books, Howard’s End and A Room With A View, 30 years ago, I would have hated them.

Rich people problems, man. Good grief.

What struck me, now, was how Forster’s framing of the social dynamics, economic anxieties, political options, are strangely familiar — though, of course, in specifics very different — to our own early 21st century nutso world. Howard’s End, for example, tells the story of three families: one Capitalist new money, one old money traditionalist/progressive, and one poor, though “proper” (e.g., cultured, largely, tied to traditional mores). I read one critique that Forster wanted the traditionalist/progressives to represent the future, but really it’s the new money bores who now define the scene. The poor, as always, remain.

The old money family is represented by two sisters, apparently modeled on the Stephens sisters, later known as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. All’s well that ends well, and Forster’s enlightened liberalism is just the thing for achieving proper outcomes. Only a few years later, however, World War One blasted Europe apart, and enlightened liberalism went on to have a bit of a tough century. It remains an influence: Obama = Hope. But does it actually still assert an influence? Or isn’t Ferrante’s attempt to maintain some semblance of domesticity through catastrophe a more powerful representation of the status quo quotidian?

Great undergraduate last sentence there, eh? Take off.

Then there’s A Room With A View. It was recommended to me by a young person in my life who found it “delish.” That response works for me as well. I joked that one could summarize it by saying it’s about mansplaining. One hundred years early! An engagement happens, an engagement falls part, the true lovers, of course, end up together. The proper lessons are learned. The landscape is gorgeous. The banter is witty.

Rich people problems, man.

“When he changes to a dragon, I pretend that I don’t see it.”

The young miss in A Room With A View would concur. She is an enlightened sort, and sorts it out in time, in the end. Before Europe collapsed. She doesn’t know that, but we do. And us hosers live in the ongoing destroyed future.

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