![]() ![]() Galgut’s Forster behaves as if he’ll never have - never could have - a companionship as deep and loving as the one he has with his mother. His protagonists are hungry for love, but they’re hampered by fear and apprehension. His characters tend to travel - and feel - alone, and when they approach connection with a stranger, or even with a friend, the result is a new kind of loneliness, one fraught with mixed feelings and regret and the mysteries of otherness. Galgut’s abiding theme in his previous novels (all of them excellent), and again here, is the persistence of loneliness. He particularly is focused on the years from 1906, when Forster met and fell in love with his 17-year-old Indian student Syed Ross Masood, to 1924, when “A Passage to India,” his first novel in 14 years, was published to wide acclaim. Galgut seems to have absorbed it all, and he relies on this detailed information as the basis for his novel. ![]() In addition to his novels, stories and nonfiction books, we have his copious letters and journals and several biographies, including, most recently, Wendy Moffat’s “A Great Unrecorded History” (2010). ![]() We know a lot about Forster, who died in 1970. Its epigraph quotes Forster at age 74: “Orgies are so important, and they are things one knows nothing about.” Forster was a virgin at 37, and his tortuous path toward sexual maturity is a main plotline of “Arctic Summer,” Damon Galgut’s brilliant biographical novel. ![]()
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