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Bezig met laden... W. Somerset Maugham (1970)door Ivor BrownBezig met laden...
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.9Literature English English fiction Modern PeriodLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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This work consists of five chapters. Chapter 1, "The Life," is a serviceable but brief (12 page) biography that summarizes the life and accomplishments of the author. While containing no obvious errors, it offers no more (and perhaps less) than one might find at Wikipedia or other online sources. Chapter 2 "The Writer" focuses on the historical context of his fiction. I enjoyed and learned from the brief account of the literary mileu in which Maugham was writing. Of particular note is how many of the writers who were highly regarded during Maugham's career (including Meredith, Galsworthy, Wells, and Kipling) are seldom read today. However, I was surprised at how little attention was given in this book to the content of Maugham's work, and the fact that his travel writing and other non-fiction was ignored.
Chapter 3, "The Playwright" deals with Maugham's career writing for the theatre. Knowing relatively little about drama, I learned from this chapter as well. I enjoyed Ivor Brown's sardonic comments about how the pretensions of capital- D "Drama" evolved from "plays," a trend resisted by Maugham (who saw the theatre as a form of entertainment, not education). One excellent feature of this chapter is the included photographs of the characters on stage for each of a number of the plays. On some pages, the author juxtaposed photos of a single play or film as shown in different productions over the years. Thus, on one page we can see "Rain" in the 1928 version with Glora Swanson in the leading role, the 1932 version starring Joan Crawford, and the 1953 film with Rita Hayworth.
Chapters 4 and 5 are respectively entitled "Belief and Opinion" and "The Man". These are the weakest chapters in the book. Mr. Brown engages in too much amateur psychologizing, seeking to explain Somerset Maugham's personality by reference to his early life, and trying to read his fiction as autobiographical. I found his attempts at analysis pretentious and even arrogant (he judges Maugham as wretched and miserable from his appearance in photographs and paintings; he informs us that in Maugham, "emotional disturbance" was a lifelong condition; and so on). What's more, he informs us about Mr. Maugham's sexuality (which in 1970 was not widely known). The final pages of the book are of no value; they contain an extremely brief "Summary of Events" that fails to mention Maugham's literary accomplishments, a haphazard list of his books and plays, and a minuscule bibliography.
Whether the few positive elements of this small work balance the negative ones will be a matter of opinion. There are more definitive sources of information available, although the photographs herein are rather good. ( )