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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"You are an unmitigated cad!", 31 Oct 2005
When he first meets Charles Strickland, a London stockbroker, the young narrator of this novel thinks of him as "good, honest, dull, and plain." Anti-social, and feeling no obligation to observe even the smallest social decencies, Strickland becomes increasingly boorish as he practices his art. >Basing the novel loosely on the life of Paul Gauguin, Maugham creates an involving and often exciting story. His narrator is a writer who feels impelled, after Strickland's death and posthumous success, to set down his memories of his early interactions with Strickland in London and Paris. Because the narrator never saw Strickland after he left Paris, he depends on his meetings with a ship captain and a woman in Papeete for information about Strickland after Strickland's arrival in Tahiti. The ship captain is described as a story-teller who may be spinning tall tales, a constant reminder to the reader that this is fiction, and not a biography of Gauguin. By depicting Strickland as a "dull, plain" man suddenly gripped by an obsession so overwhelming that nothing else matters to him, Maugham involves the reader in his actions, which even the narrator claims not to understand. The least convincing aspect of Strickland's characterization is the narrator's observation that Strickland is completely indifferent to his wife of seventeen years and his children. No confrontation between Strickland and his wife appears, and one wonders if perhaps Maugham found himself unable to depict such an abandonment realistically. The story moves quickly, however, and whatever is sacrificed in the characterization is more than recouped in the plot and its development. Straightforward in its story line, the novel is romantic in its depiction of the artist in the grip of an obsession, his subsequent abandonment of civilization and return to nature, his suffering of a long and terminal illness (during which he paints his masterpiece), and the fate of this creation. Good, old-fashioned story-telling at its best, this uncomplicated story, written in 1919, still has broad appeal.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hardy breathes life into Maugham's artistic odyssey., 12 Jun 2000
By A Customer
Robert Hardy gives a wonderful reading of Maugham's intense study of artistic desire. His crisp, deep and elegant tones bring to life both the bustling cafes of Paris and the remote jungles of Tahiti. The book tells of artist Charles Strickland, who becomes a slave to his creative desires, desires that he compulsively pursues at the cost of all those around him. Hardy manages to convey the sheer emotional power and strength of feelings with which the book often deals, moving between characters and places with ease, from tormented lover to jovial tramp, from the drawing rooms of London, to the sun drenched South Sea islands. However, in the end it is the sensitivity and wisdom of Maugham's prose, which is brought to the forefront by Hardy's delivery, leaving the tale of Charles Strickland's tormented, horrific but ultimately triumphant life lingering in your thoughts long after you, have finished listening.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beware the English department, 30 April 1999
By A Customer
Very nice little novel based on the life of a sort of English twentieth-century Gauguin who eventually dies of leprosy in Tahiti. Maugham is very impressive. His is a modest, quiet talent, but he is a magnificent storyteller, a natural-born writer, and he is gifted with numerous insights into the complex subtleties of the human heart. He is a writer with a lot to teach about life. But he was no ground-breaker technically, and so is not considered all that important in the English departments of the world. This is my second Maugham and it is not painted on as large a canvas as the earlier Of Human Bondage, which is very nineteenth-century in tone.
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by W. Somerset Maugham
by Margaret Forster
by William Somerset Maugham
by William Somerset Maugham
by W. Somerset Maugham
