The Painted Veil

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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.

出版者:Vintage; Reprint edition
作者:W. Somerset Maugham
出品人:
页数:256
译者:
出版时间:2004-2-10
价格:USD 13.95
装帧:Paperback
isbn号码:9781400034215
丛书系列:
图书标签:
  • 毛姆 
  • W.SomersetMaugham 
  • 小说 
  • 英国文学 
  • 英文原版 
  • 女性 
  • 英文 
  • 爱情 
  •  
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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.

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没想到,瓦尔特最后说的一句话的竟然是“最后死的却是狗”。《挽歌》中的一句诗,若是像凯蒂那样不知道这其中的典故,定会觉到莫名奇妙;一个男人的遗言怎会和狗相关?我一直在想,凯蒂知道了狗与主人的故事之后,心里会有什么样的感触。是在经历了波澜之后的真诚悔过,还...  

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“我对你不抱什么幻想,我知道你愚蠢、轻浮、没有头脑,但是我爱你。我知道你的目标和理想既庸俗又普通,但是我爱你。我知道你是二流货色,但是我爱你。”这是沃尔特对凯蒂的对白。 “这样说来,她不爱他,却爱着那个她已看穿的卑鄙小人,这就让人费解了。她想着,想着,用一个...  

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“我对你不抱什么幻想,我知道你愚蠢、轻浮、没有头脑,但是我爱你。我知道你的目标和理想既庸俗又普通,但是我爱你。我知道你是二流货色,但是我爱你。”这是沃尔特对凯蒂的对白。 “这样说来,她不爱他,却爱着那个她已看穿的卑鄙小人,这就让人费解了。她想着,想着,用一个...  

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2016年4月12日凌晨1点19分,有好几件事情混杂在一起:①困 ②刚刚过去的××岁生日 ③毛姆的《面纱》昨天付梓印刷 ④这篇毫无头绪的文章。这些纷杂无序的事情同时出现在这一精确的时间点上,也许包含着某种隐喻。正如《面纱》开篇所说的:“那描画的面纱,芸芸众生称之...  

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2016年4月12日凌晨1点19分,有好几件事情混杂在一起:①困 ②刚刚过去的××岁生日 ③毛姆的《面纱》昨天付梓印刷 ④这篇毫无头绪的文章。这些纷杂无序的事情同时出现在这一精确的时间点上,也许包含着某种隐喻。正如《面纱》开篇所说的:“那描画的面纱,芸芸众生称之...  

用户评价

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#每周一本英文书# 2018_17/54 死的却是狗……

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a man's death in exchange for a woman's growth

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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。

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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?

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a man's death in exchange for a woman's growth

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