Word: maugham
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...FERNANDO-W. Somerset Maugham-Doubleday, Doran...
When William Somerset Maugham was 23, he wrote a little book on Spain called The Land of the Blessed Virgin. Having escaped uncongenial work in a London hospital, free for the first time, he fell pleasantly in love in Seville, where he was made a "pretty fool of." An inexperienced author, he hesitated about writing the story of his love affair, compromised by turning out a book of sketches the mature Maugham was to dismiss as "crude and gushing." Despite his impulse to try again, despite his deep love for Spain, he could never find a Spanish character or theme...
Unmindful of literary bores who tell the plots of stories they hope to write, Author Maugham in Don Fernando subtly recreates the atmosphere in which his unwritten novel was to have been laid. A master of indirection, he begins unobtrusively with an account of contemporary Don Fernando, fat, dirty tavern keeper who forced on him a biography of Saint Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius, who disappointed a noble family, sacrificed his influence with the great, and in the flower of his youth went to live among the poor, captured Author Maugham's imagination. He visited the town where Loyola had suffered...
...Anglo-Saxons, Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham are the authorities, as far as novels go, on the East Indies. For Dutchmen, Madelon Lulofs tells the tale. Born in Sumatra, she writes of Holland's "other world" with first-hand knowledge...
This story of a Dutch rubber planter during the pre-War boom and the post-War gloom will not seem to U. S. readers so colorful as Conrad's nor so mordant as Maugham's. But as a straight report of a planter's life from A to Z it is a first-rate job. As a novel it cannot be rated quite so high...