Of Human Bondage: 100th Anniversary Edition (The collected edition of the works of W. Somerset Maugham) (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) (Contemporary Classics)

by W Somerset Maugham

Maeve Binchy (Afterword) and Benjamin DeMott (Introduction)

From a tormented orphan with a clubfoot, Philip Carey grows into an impressionable young man with a voracious appetite for adventure and knowledge. His cravings take him to Paris at age eighteen to try his hand at art, then back to London to study medicine. But even so, nothing can sate his nagging hunger for experience. Then he falls obsessively in love, embarking on a disastrous relationship that will change his life forever.…

Marked by countless similarities to Maugham’s own life, his masterpiece is “not an autobiography,” as the author himself once contended, “but an autobiographical novel; fact and fiction are inexorably mingled; the emotions are my own.” And although he based Of Human Bondage on what he knew, his is an “excessively rare gift of storytelling...almost the equal of imagination itself.”*

With an Introduction by Benjamin De Mott and an Afterword by Maeve Binchy

*The Sunday Times (London)

• ISBN10: 0451530179
• ISBN13: 9780451530172
• Publish Date: 2 January 2007 (first published December 1952)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Signet Classics
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 704
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780451530172

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Whoa. Really surprising, really really good. When I say surprising, not that it was good but that I couldn’t put it down. I flew through it, something I usually can’t do these days with a book that’s more Kent and Kensington than Arkansas and Kentucky. There’s a whole life in here, full of fight. And Maugham can write whip-tail emotions like nobody’s business. What you get to do, too, is watch Philip build his own person piece by piece. It’s fun and messy and you love him for all of it, you do, because you understand.

Plus a bunch of my favorite ideas are here, like how people aren’t all of a piece and how maybe there isn’t good and evil, just things adapted to an end, and how insignificance brings power and joy, the world robbed of its cruelty. The whole early-ish chapter on Philip’s belief in God/lack thereof could be strictly autobiographical. If I had read this years ago it might have put big ideas in my head but now, some happy skipped heartbeats to recognize a familiar brain. It’s just a good story, it’s not all preachy and revelatory, and man, there’s nothing too flashy here but all of a sudden it comes out and wallops you.

I’ve loved Maugham before and I’ve been meaning to read this forever, in fact I can’t believe I hadn’t so far, but anyway I owe Boyd Crowder big time for this one. Damn it, this would be Boyd’s book, wouldn’t it.