Of Human Bondage
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) has been always considered a scarcely original writer, with his much simple, straightforward style, always uncompromised. Maugham himself agreed he didn’t experience or risk and he really didn’t care. He was never held in higher esteem among readers like Joyce or Virginia Woolf, but around 1930 he was the most famous and the best paid in the world. Maugham was everything but a failed writer. I like this very well-known novel because a good part of the events takes place in Paris, in an effervescent artistic atmosphere during the impressionist age, when Manet’s Olympia is exhibited in the Luxembourg. Paris is a dream destination for all those who had felt ‘the call’. The British young man, Philip Carey, is one of those people. He is born…
