Up At The Villa (Vintage Classics)

Another stylistically flawless tale from a great writer, it perhaps doesn't resonate as deeply as some would with the same material but its the old Apollo/Dionysus or even Pan conflict where human love of a workable almost urbane surface wins over passions that outside , and at first inside, the bounds of the story seem grander. As always we must make our own minds up about the possible irony of that conclusion. The storyteller has told his tale.

The writing is good, but the story struck me as the most preposterously fabricated melodrama. Patricia Highsmith or the Coen brothers would have done something interesting with the idea of people stupidly blundering into a hole of their own making and then not having the sense to stop digging. But instead we get this. The stuffy upper-middle-class English characters are so ridiculous that I wanted them to get the comeuppance they deserved -- and how odd that in a book written half a century after the novels of a writer like George Gissing, the characters come across as belonging to a century earlier.

If you are a fan of Somerset Maugham, this is a winner. A compact story that grabs your attention, dealing as it does with the position of women in the 1930s. Mary Panton is at a crossroads and needs to make a decision. We view the three main protagonists somewhat differently by the end of the book, each of whom have undergone a change in our, and her, perception. It has a very satisfactory end.

This book has an unexpected (and nightmarish) scene in the middle which alters what you might be expecting to happen. What I love about Somerset Maugham is the way he writes male characters, and the three in here are great. Although sparcely described, the feel you get for the places and characters is acute. If you want a good story, but don't have much time to read, this is ideal.

At 110 large-type pages, this is hardly more than a short story, but it has a plot and characterisation worthy of the best Maugham. The piece, set in 1940 in Florence, involves a young English widow who, about to accept the marriage proposal of a top-level imperial civil servant, finds her life and position turned upside down by the irruption of a young Austrian refugee. Nicely paced and well worth the couple of hours it takes to read.

This is a good story but it's a novella or short story rather than a novel.

Enjoyable...but not one of Maugham's best in my opinion

Quite slight in a way, but the undercurrent was well picked out.