Force of Fiction

The New York Times Book Review, Colm Toibin reviewing a biography of E.M. Forster, July 25, 2010.

[...] novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors; because the lies and metaphors are chosen and offered shape and structure, they may indeed represent the self, or the play between the unconscious mind and the conscious will, but they are are not forms of self-expression, or true confession.

Consideration of Forster's Maurice launches this. But it is the reading of the pre-posthumous oeuvre that informs its character.

And so for day 610
14.08.2008