I fell in love with this book by the end of the first chapter. When I finished it, I wished I could go back and start all over again. There have been very few books that have made me feel this way.
Of Human Bondage is a bildungsroman which blew me away with the power of how simply Maugham had described life's intricacies and pains. Philip Carey is a physically deformed kid who goes through life, living from one terrible experience to the other, only to realize in the end that life has no meaning whatsoever. It is full of pain and bitterness with few occasional moments of joy.
For me, this novel was so incredible because it spoke to me on so many levels. The first that comes immediately to mind is that I too had to give up something which I wanted to do intensely but came to realize that I was painfully mediocre at it. Philip goes to Paris to study art but realizes that a life of poverty which would be the inevitable result of such a career choice would hardly be justified if all he was ever going to be was second rate. Just what I was thinking.
Second, Maugham says that at least once in life, everyone should love someone so completely as to be blind to all their faults. Philip loved Mildred just in that way. I too have been there. It's a sad, painful place to be.
Much before I read this book, I also read Maugham's Liza of Lambeth. What I have particularly come to love about Maugham is the simplicity of his writing. He describes everything so simply. He is not some mighty writer, talking in prose-in-the-garb-of-Greek. He possesses extraordinary skill of making the simplest and the most commonplace things sound like he has just discovered them, and as a reader, all we can say is "I know!".
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