CompleteMartialArts.com - The Moon and Sixpence (Dover Value Editions)
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List Price: $5.95
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Manufacturer: Dover Publications
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN: 9780486446028
ISBN: 0486446026
Label: Dover Publications
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: 2006-01-20
Publisher: Dover Publications
Studio: Dover Publications
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Editorial Reviews:
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An uncompromising and self-destructive deserts his wife, family, business, and civilization for his art. Shedding harsh light on an artist's ego, Maugham reveals the lengths to which one man will go to focus on his art. Written in 1919, this unforgettable story is timeless in its appeal.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: An easy bit of second-tier literature to devour...
Comment: The Moon and Sixpence is a short, intelligent, well-written, sophisticated, episodic piece of second-class literature written by a first-class (though not genius-level) writer.
It is not featured on the MLA's list of the hundred best novels of the 20th century, and I can see why--withal its superiority to inferior works that ARE on the list.
Maugham has a very pleasing (though not dumbed-down) style, which makes for swift and pleasurable reading. This book is not as good as The Razor's Edge or Of Human Bondage, but it is not something one would be ashamed to have on the resume either. It's a book that can be read in a day, and which probably won't change your life...but it should enhance you nonetheless.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good point, horribly bland execution....
Comment: What makes the book so unbearably boring is precisely its insight: In the recesses of Strickland (a stand-in for Paul Gauguin), far beneath his brutish public trace and gamut of personae, far beneath anything observable, lies an artistic genius that, for most of the characters, isn't even manifest in the artist's work. How's that? It's hard to tell whether Maugham is circuitously disdaining the posthumous and arbitrary obsession we all have with artists or with boyish persistence reaching for that which, though veritable, none of us are great enough to discern and appreciate, a kind of absurd communion with inspiration that necessarily morally outcasts the inspired. Either way, even when Strickland is biographically tethered to history, it's hard to find him compelling, as a man (or madman) or symbol.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Obsessive
Comment: Painting, even if it uses codes, is the art of showing, whereas the writer, limited to words, can only proceed by allusion, by tickling images from the minds of his public. This was the challenge in Maugham's novel-length portrait of the cursed painter, loosely based on Gauguin's life. The result is a powerful and haunting depiction, as directly powerful as any painting.
The story follows the downward spiral of Charles Strickland from the moment he decides to leave his stockbroking job and conventional English family, or rather his upward spiral, towards artistic zenith. The victims fall one after the other around him as he sacrifices everything to painting, not just wealth and security, but all regard for fellow humans and decency physical and moral. Yet this is no stereotype of the crazed genius. Strickland is coldly conscious of his choices, pragmatic in his idolatry, clear-eyed in his determination on a ride to hell; this is what makes The Moon and Sixpence so convincing and so creepily fascinating.
Maugham avoids delving into the unknowable reasons for his protagonist's change of life. Neither does he waste time in ponderous commentary on painting or the nature of genius. At the same time, the narrator's tale, with its inevitable hearsay and conjecture, contrasts the ambiguity of storytelling with the absolutes of pictorial art. But this is essentially a white-knuckle ride from London to Paris, on to the dodgier suburbs of Marseille, and destruction in the Tahitian jungle. Almost as obsessive as Strickland's own passion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: not Maugham's best, but still very good
Comment: The book revisits a theme that Maugham took up several
times - that of an artist completely devoted to his art.
Interestingly, there is no attempt to look for the causes
of the destructive behavior of the main character, or even
to pass judgment on it. Strickland's life and actions
are examined, sometimes in great detail. However, after the author's
initial disapprobation, he comes to some sort of acceptance of
Strickland strange way of life.
W. Somerset Maugham is best when he writes about
relationships. While this book seems a bit forced at times,
Maugham had such a unique view of the topic that always makes
his writing interesting.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I'd suggest cakes and ale
Comment: This is very far from Maugham's best (to me, his short stories and novellas). The character, Strickland, genius painter perhaps based on Gauguin, is just not believable. Real great artists (such as Gauguin) may be odd in their personal lives, but they do spend time with other artists, they do discuss art; they don't seem to be the ignorant brutes this fellow is. The book feeds off a popular idea of the artist as outsider, and certainly there have been many who were. Yet even Van Gogh, exemplary nutter genius, talked to other painters, including Gauguin. Strickland's art comes out of a personal vacuum, which seems unrealistic.
So unlikely is the main character that before the book ended I lost interest and stopped reading. For a better book by Maugham on the unexpected personal life of great artists, read Cakes and Ale instead.
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