The Moon And Sixpence: Students Edition
Ratings10
Average rating3.5
According to The Manchester Guardian review of 1919 (here quoted and contains spoilers) "Mr. Maugham has followed a recognised convention in this story of an imaginary artist of posthumous greatness. He treats him throughout with mock respect, and surrounds his affairs with contributory detail. Mr. Maugham's story is that of a respectable stockbroker who deserts his wife after seventeen years of marriage and goes alone to Paris to follow a new ideal - the ideal of great and for a time unrecognisable art. The break is succeeded by privation and industry, by long periods of work and outbursts of savage sexual conquest; and the artist at length dies, blind and leprous, in Tahiti". The book is told by a narrator and is said to be based on the life of the French 20th century painter Paul Gauguin.
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“...We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.” ― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
2.5 stars
Waste of time. The narrator was inconsistent in his character. The story dull and unimpressive and in some ways too fantastical. I don't like excusing evil men for the horrendous shit they do just bc they have a (1) singular talent.
The only thing that saves it is the writing style.
The Moon and Sixpence is a beautifully written novel about the personal cost of being an artist. W. Somerset Maugham has a very clear focus for this slim volume, intent on exploring what feels like an age old question - should we seperate the art from the personal life of the artist? It's a topic that has become increasingly relevant in the current era of online activism, accountability, and cancellation. Maugham makes his feelings clear from the novel's first chapter, suggesting that not only are the artist's personal failings a worthwhile sacrifice to make for their art, but indeed it's those failings that allow an artist to ascend from merely great to infamous.
I enjoyed a lot of the drama to be found in the novel, especially in the first 60% or so. The characters posed interesting dilemmas. There was tragedy, and comedy, and an unnamed narrator watching to relay each of painter Charles Strickland's sordid affairs to readers. However, just past the midpoint, I began to struggle with a dilemma of my own. Not as worthy of an entire novel like Maugham's, maybe, but a prickly one which, nonetheless, began to actively diminish the novel's hold on me. Am I capable of appreciating this novel, despite the language and ideas contained within that have aged horifically? Now, I'm no stranger to disagreeable social attitudes in books from before my time. It goes with the territory. However, for such a short text, Maugham has managed to pack in a lot to make the modern reader cringe.
I don't have a good answer to the question this novel gave me. I can't lie, however, and say the endless stream of misogyny and slurs in the book's back half didn't lower my esteem for it, nor that that fact isn't reflected in my rating. Maybe you will have a better stomach for these facets than me, and I don't begrudge any reader the experience. There's a good story to be had in these pages. However, for me personally, The Moon and Sixpence started out as a palette cleanser and transformed into an excercise in finding the line where a book begins to actively spoil in my hands. Despite that, I have a feeling this won't be my last book by Maugham (the prose really is that good), and it may not even be my final reading of The Moon and Sixpence. In fact, that may be the strongest endorsement of Maugham's thesis - the art above all else - that I can give.
