Product Description

"Far Eastern Tales" is a collection of short stories born of Maugham's experiences in Malaya, Singapore and other outposts of the former British Empire. Whether portraying a ship-borne flight from a lover's curse, murder in the jungle, or a marriage shattered by a past indiscretion, they all reveal Maugham at his best - sometimes caustic, sometimes gently comic, but always the shrewd and human judge of character and soul.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44420 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
If all else perish, there will remain a storyteller's world...that is exclusively and forever Maugham, a world of verandah and prahu which we enter as well as we do that of Conan Doyle's Baker Street, and with a happy and eternal homecoming The Times Maugham teases out buried secrets as mesmerising as the heat and as menacing as the surrounding jungle Observer Ideally you should listen to these stories lying in a long cane chair on the veranda of a dark bungalow sipping a gin and bitters - not that Maugham's writing needs any further atmospheric embellishment. Like Kipling and Conrad, Maugham transports us to a long-since-vanished and distinctly non-PC world of hard-drinking colonial planters and traders and their frosty memsahibs Guardian

About the Author
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to literature. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of several short story collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook. In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965

Customer Reviews

what SE Asia must have been like 75 years ago
This is a beautifully written work that really gives you the feeling of what SE Asia must have been like 75-100 years ago for the British (and other) colonials stationed there. In his various stories, Maugham puts us deep in the jungle, maintaining British traditions in order to stay "civilized" and shows us what happens when taken outside of our natural environment. After returning home from a year in Vietnam, I really enjoyed how this book transported me back to SE Asia.

An unexpected dip into a brisk pool of hidden passions
Despite being a Brit I have always been put off reading Maugham by his image as a Colonial raconteur. I expected a nostalgia for a way of life I have no sympathy for, tinged with occasional pomposity.

And how wrong I was! Maugham has turned out to be unexpectedly subversive, skewering the social and moral conventions of his period without remorse. In Mauham's world there is no God, except that of Society - an Old Testament God feared by his worshippers. Genuine moral concerns take second place to the correct appearance, and the usual moral platitudes have fatal consequences when followed.

Towering slightly beneath Society in wrath come Vengeful Women - disappointed wives who exact a price from their inadequate menfolk, or from themselves for bourgeois compromise. There are no male heroes in Maugham and the gentler sex is invariably ferocious beneath a calm demeanour.

Which is not to say Maugham is savage to read. His prose is cystal sharp, precise and bright. Yes, there is comedy, but at best it is laconic and often cynical.

Looking for rip-roaring tales, the romance of the East or a confirmation of conventional morality? You've got the wrong book.

Punchy, pungent tales
Far Eastern Tales isn't just for short-story readers - I normally only read novels. Maugham's characterisation and sense of the plot twist are such that these, most of them at novella length anyway, contain all the reward of full-length works. Perhaps the best piece in this selection is Neil MacAdam, in which a young biologist gets dragged into a doomed jungle expedition by the lusting, manipulative wife of his employer. Also in Borneo, Before The Party has the young wife of an older district officer murder her alcoholic husband. But all of these stories have dense plots filled with tension and feeling. And they are so well portrayed and credibly set that, this being my introduction to Maugham, I thought he was a colonial writer.

Indeed, the stories of Far Eastern Tales are principally about exile, about solitude and its consequences. They look at social and psychological questions under the lab conditions of communities or individuals culturally, and often physically, cut off from their surroundings. Finally, they are about what it is to be English, whether in the questionable, defunct imperial setting or generally, whether now or in the past. Though several of these Tales are contained in the fatter Collected Short Stories, this sample is well worth reading together for its coherence of theme and atmosphere.