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The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930)

Tekijä: W. Somerset Maugham

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
2197123,036 (3.83)17
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX Somerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with an urbane, wry style all his own. The Gentleman in the Parlour is an account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life.… (lisätietoja)
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Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 7) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
A marvelous work by Maugham. Even in something as pedestrian as one might think a travel book might be, his use of just the right phrase and his common sense humanity shine through. ( )
  KMcPhail | Nov 16, 2022 |
Interspersed in these observations of a sometime hard journey from Burma to Vietnam via Bangkok are a few of Maugham's short stories. They have been included with seamless ease into the narrative of his travels. The sad story of Masterson, abandoned by his native wife and kids, and the equally pathetic chapter about Grosely, a reappearance from student days, wasting away in Haiphong on opium, blend happily with the factual reportage.
The Maugham magic is at full flourish here. It's craftsmanship and high style on full display.
The only thing I missed is some explanation of how he managed the itinerary. I think though, that stooping to explanation would wreck the style that Maugham knew was his trade mark.
  ivanfranko | Sep 7, 2021 |
On a Chinese Screen described Maugham's journey on the Yangtze to the Chinese interior. Shortly thereafter, in 1922, Maugham took another journey, travelling from Taunggyi in the Shan state of Burma to Kengtung and then into Siam, trekking from Lopburi to Ayutthaya and on into Bangkok. From there, he sailed to French Indochina, with stops at Angkor, Saigon, Hue, and, finally, Haiphong. This book, The Gentleman in the Parlour, was the result, although it was several years after the trip before it was published.

In the Introduction to this edition, Paul Theroux comments on the perspective of Maugham's travel writings, noting that it is from a sole point view, while in reality Maugham travelled relatively comfortably and in the company of friends and associates. But that perspective of Maugham's, I suppose, is what makes this book work so well. As he describes venturing through mountain trails on the backs of mules, exploring the ancient ruins of Siam and Cambodia, and encountering the mysteries of Bangkok and Saigon, it all sounds more like an expedition, an adventure, rather than a mere traveler's report. And in all those places, Maugham captures the mysterious allure of the Orient he felt so strongly. In particular, he is at his strongest in describing the Moment, that time spent on a sampan during a Saigon night, the bewitchment of the ancient ruins of Angkor disappearing into the gathering gloom of evening, or the indescribably hidden unknowns of Bangkok that refuse to let themselves be known to the visitor.

I especially enjoyed his encounter with Bangkok. It has been almost a century since Maugham visited. I wonder what he would make of today's Bangkok with its eight million people? Back then, he already thought it populous like other Asian cities "with their straight streets, their arcades, their tramways, their dust, their blinding sun, their teeming Chinese, their dense traffic, their ceaseless din." The size of the city has certainly changed, becoming overwhelming with its populace. But the nature is the same as Maugham describes it. Only the Skytrain now substitutes for the tramways.

At the end of his journey, Maugham has brought his readers along on a metaphysical as well as temporal exploration of Southeast Asia. His vivid descriptions of people and places complements the insights into a different way of living and a different system of values for living in the Far East. Never did the divide between East and West seem more stark or beguiling than when examined through Maugham's eyes.

( )
  PaulCornelius | Apr 12, 2020 |
Not a fan of Somerset Maugham for the most part. This book was very uninteresting as far as a travel documentary, but the subplots/stories were what made the book as decent as it was. I especially liked the conclusion and finishing sentences.... ( )
  untraveller | Feb 18, 2018 |
[Preface to The Gentleman in the Parlour, Heinemann, The Collected Edition, 1935:]

I think it is very well for a novelist to give himself a rest now and then from writing fiction. It is a dreary business, to write a novel once a year, as many authors must do, to earn their year’s keep or for fear that if they remain silent they will be forgotten. It is unlikely, however fertile their imagination, that they will always have in mind a theme that so urgently demands expression that they cannot help but write; it is unlikely too that they can create characters, fresh and vivid, that they have not themselves used before. If they have the story-teller’s gift and know their craft, they will probably turn out an acceptable piece of fiction, but it is only by good luck that it will anything more. […] No doubt the greater the novelist the larger the number of persons he is capable of creating, but even with the greatest, the number is determined by his own limitations. There is only one way in which he can cope to some extent with the difficult situation: he can change himself. Here time is a prime agent. The writer is fortunate who can wait till he has effected such a change in him that he can see what is before him with fresh and different eyes. […] But change of scene also, on one condition, can do much. I have known writers who made adventurous journeys, but took along with them their house in London, their circle of friends, their English interests and their reputation; and were surprised on getting home to find that they were exactly as they went. Not thus can a writer profit from by a journey. When he sets out on his travels the one person he must leave behind is himself.

This book is not like On a Chinese Screen, the result of an accident. I took the journey it describes because I wanted to; but I had from the beginning the intention of writing a book about it. I had enjoyed writing On a Chinese Screen. I wanted to try my hand again on the same sort of subject, but on a more elaborate scale and in a form on which I could impose a definite pattern. It was an exercise in style. In a novel the style is necessarily influenced by the matter and a homogenous manner of writing is hardly practical. […] There are writers who attach so much importance to beauty of language, but which, alas, they generally mean the florid vocabulary and the purple patch, that they force their material, regardless of its nature, into a uniform mould. Sometimes they go so far as to make even their dialogue conform to it and ask you to read conversations in which the speakers address one another in balanced and carefully composed sentences. So life eludes them. There is no air and you gasp for breath. It is of course out of the question to be funny this way, but this disturbs them little, for they seldom possess a sense of humour. It is a trait, indeed, that they regard with impatience. The better plain a novel is to let the matter dictate the manner. The style of a novel is best when like the clothes of a well-dressed man it is unnoticed. But if you like language for its own sake, if it amuses you to string words together in the order that most pleases you, so as to produce an effect of beauty, the essay or the book travel gives you an opportunity. Here prose may be cultivated for its own sake. You can manipulate your material so that the harmony you seek is plausible. Your style can flow like a broad, placid river and the reader is borne along on its bosom with security; he needs fear no shoals, no adverse currents, rapids, or rock-strewn gorges. The danger, of course, is that he will be lulled to sleep and so not observe the pleasant sights along the bank with which you have sought to divert him. The reader must judge for himself whether in this book I have avoided it. I beg him only to remember that there is no language more difficult to write than English. No one ever learns all that there is to be known about it. In the long history of our literature it would be difficult to find more than six persons who have written it faultlessly.

[Preface to The Travel Books, Heinemann, 1955:]

The reader will find in this volume, scattered among incidents of travel, some of the stories, perhaps a dozen in all, that he may already have read in the three volumes in which are included pretty well all the stories I have ever written. The books here contained were written many years ago. On a Chinese Screen was published in 1922, The Gentleman in the Parlour in 1930, and Don Fernando in 1935. They have lost the flavour of actuality, and I never supposed that they would be reprinted. When I came to sort out the material for a complete collection of my short stories, it occurred to me that in On a Chinese Screen and in The Gentleman in the Parlour there were narratives which with a little arrangement might suitably find a place in it. This is not to say that they were fictional. They were straightforward recitals (almost what the French call reportages) of the impressions made upon me by the people I came in contact with and the circumstances of their lives as they disclosed them to me. If, with the addition of a few lines of introduction, the pieces I had written could well pass for short stories, that is because at one period of my life almost everybody I met, almost everything that happened to me and every incident I witnessed or was told of, shaped itself into a short story. In On a Chinese Screen and The Gentleman in the Parlour I was not writing fiction, I was relating facts; indeed, far from embroidering on the facts to make them more effective, as the writer of fiction is justified in doing, I took pains to modify them when I thought they were too fantastic to be credible. Let me give an example: In one of the chapters in The Gentleman in the Parlour I tell of a trip I took in a coasting steamer in order to get from Bangkok in Siam to Kep in Cambogia. My fellow-passengers were the oddest, the most absurd lot of people I had ever come across. They might have been characters in an uproarious farce. They were very friendly – with the exception of an Italian tenor who sat by himself in the bows, and at night, accompanying himself on a guitar, sang at the top of his voice fragments from operas. I briefly described him, but omitted to mention that he was a murderer fleeing from justice and seeking a refuge from extradition, since I thought it so improbable that I could not expect the reader to believe it. The present volume would have lost much of what interest it may have if, because they have recently appeared in my collected short stories, I had left out these true narratives; for indeed they belong to it and complete its shape.
  WSMaugham | Jun 15, 2015 |
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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX Somerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with an urbane, wry style all his own. The Gentleman in the Parlour is an account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life.

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