William Somerset Maugham, CH (January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was one of the most popular authors achieving recognition as the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.
Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could.
Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.
It seems equally likely that Maugham was underrated because he wrote in such a direct style. There was nothing in a book by Maugham that the reading public needed explained to them by critics. Maugham thought clearly, wrote lucidly, and expressed acerbic and sometimes cynical opinions in handsome, civilized prose. He wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and won critical acclaim. In this context, his writing was criticized as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way"[16].
Maugham's homosexual leanings also shaped his fiction, in two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for distinguished authors of his time. "Liza of Lambeth," "Cakes and Ale" and "The Razor's Edge" all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result.
Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he traveled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in 1938: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."
Maugham's public account of his abilities remained modest; toward the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters". In 1954, he was made a Companion of Honour.
Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War and continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club[17]. In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and from 1951, some 14 years before his death, it began its exhibition life and in 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.
Shallow, poorly educated Kitty marries the passionate and intellectual Walter Fane and has an affair with a career politician, Charles Townsend, assistant colonial secretary of Hong Kong. When Walter discovers the relationship, he compels Kitty to accompany him to a cholera-infested region of mainland China, where she finds limited happiness working with children at a convent. But when Walter dies, she is forced to leave China and return to England. Generally abandoned, she grasps desperately for the affection of her one remaining relative, her long-ignored father. In the end, in sharp, unexamined contrast to her own behavior patterns, she asserts that her unborn daughter will grow up to be an independent woman. The Painted Veil was first published in 1925 and is usually described as a strong story about a woman's spiritual journey. To more pragmatic, modern eyes, Kitty's emotional growth appears minimal. Still, if not a major feminist work, the book has literary interest. Sophie Ward's uninflected reading is competent if not compelling.
在看这本书的前90%的过程,我都在想凯蒂怎么可以如此的愚蠢,可是看到最后,我瞬间想通了,释然了。 这世界上形形色色的人,每个人有着不同的价值观世界观人生观,这些观点与他们的生活环境、从小到大的教育息息相关,怎么能够奢求每个人都和自己的想法一样呢。这本书讲述的故...
评分Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song; And if you find it wondrous short, It cannot hold you long. In Islington there was a man Of whom the world might say, That still a godly race he ran— Whene'er he went to pray. A kind and gentle hear...
评分 评分在看这本书的前90%的过程,我都在想凯蒂怎么可以如此的愚蠢,可是看到最后,我瞬间想通了,释然了。 这世界上形形色色的人,每个人有着不同的价值观世界观人生观,这些观点与他们的生活环境、从小到大的教育息息相关,怎么能够奢求每个人都和自己的想法一样呢。这本书讲述的故...
毛姆的笔力之精湛 就在于着墨不多的人物也不平面化 几组对比与对照意象的设置非常工整 然则结尾新生活的曙光并不能照亮这个不快乐的故事啊
评分毛姆笔触真的很冷静犀利,但是书中的人物一个都不喜欢。感觉毛姆笔下的男人都是一个类型啊。
评分毛姆的小说读来总是有种很轻松的感觉。很复杂的故事却能让人读得很轻松。或许就是make the readers feel clever的典型?
评分这种“无法逃避的命运”的话题真是被毛姆偏爱啊,所以其实全书也是Kitty揭开面纱的过程吧。说真的最后实在是过于诚实了。
评分喜欢同名电影的可以来看原著~
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