ISBN: 0140033734
Godina izdanja: 1972
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

W. Somerset Maugham - The Merry-Go-Round
Penguin, 1972
340 str.
meki povez
stanje: dobro

Somerset Maugham was one of the world`s most prolific and popular authors. He wrote with great facility and at one time had four plays running simultaneously in four different London theaters.

He was trained as a doctor, and he must have been good: his observations are truthful and free of sentiment. His books are a tonic.

The `merry-go-round` was his term for London at the turn of the century. His narrator, Miss Ley, is a shrewd and amusing elderly spinster, something like Maugham in drag. A born commentator, she acts like a Greek chorus. The world may be mad, she seems to say, but it is amusing.

Quote: “Are you sure you don’t admire a little too much your heroic attitude?” she asked, and in her voice was a stinging coldness at which Basil winced. “Nowadays self-sacrifice is a luxury which few have the strength to deny themselves; people took to it when they left off sugar because it was fattening, and they sacrifice themselves wantonly, from sheer love of it, however worthless the object. In fact, the object scarcely concerns them; they don’t care how much they harm it so long as they can gratify their passion.”

With one of her relations only, Miss Dwarris found it need ful to observe a certain restraint, for Miss Ley, perhaps the most distant of her cousins, was as plain-spoken as herself, and had, besides, a far keener wit whereby she could turn rash statements to the utter ridicule of the Speaker. Nor did Miss Dwarris precisely dislike this independent Spirit; she looked upon her in fact with a certain degree of affection and not a little fear. Miss Ley, seldom lacking a repartee, ap peared really to enjoy the verbal contests, from which, by her greater urbanity, readiness, and knowledge, she usually emerged victorious: it confounded, but at the same time almost amused, the elder lady that a woman so much poorer than herself, with no smaller claims than others to the cov eted inheritance, should venture not only to be facetious at her expense, but even to carry war into her very camp. Miss Ley, really not grieved to find some one to whom without prickings of conscience she could speak her whole mind, took a grim pleasure in pointing out to her cousin the poor logic of her observations or the foolish unreason of her acts. N o cherished Opinion of Miss Dwarris was safe from satire - even her evangelicism was laughed at, and the rich old woman, un used to argument, was easily driven into self-contradiction.


Fiction, Classics, 0140033734