Of Human Bondage (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: A Hunger for the Soul
Review: "If equal love cannot be," W.H. Auden wrote, "then let the one who loves more be me." After reading Maugham's "Of Human Bondage," Auden's line either crumbles as so much tripe or attains a renewed gravity.

This is so because for Maugham love is a violent, destructive force, a prison full of tortures for those held in its bondage. Maugham writes of his realization of love as "that ceaseless aching of his soul," so different from the "ecstatic happiness" he had presumed it to be. "This was not happiness," he writes, "it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish."

Having crashed his protagonist on the shoals of love, Maugham deserts him to search for nothing less than the meaning of life. Maugham writes beautifully of Philip's progress: "He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see...that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands." The meaning of life, Maugham's characters explain, might be found in the design of a Persian rug. As for what is meant by the metaphor, Philip's mentor explains that the answer is meaningless unless you discover it for yourself. Even as Philip lands upon an answer to the riddle that he decides to be good enough, you get the sense that Maugham is less certain. Indeed, Maugham seems at odds with the proposition that there is a proper answer, seeing instead a world in which one lives only in submission to the tyrannical futility of creating art, of loving, of existing, even. You get the feeling that Maugham wrote the novel in hopes of deciphering the Persian rug, but can only see it in those flashes of lightning. Still, that he squints into the storm is more than most attempt. What is the meaning of the rug? Writing not too long before Maugham, Polish Romantic Juliusz Slowacki explains, "The world is like a carpet seen from the reverse side, and all we see are threads which appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. On the other side, however, there are beautiful flowers and coherent patterns." Maugham paints a less bright picture, perhaps, but is nonetheless equally illuminating.


Rating:
Summary: Great if you can hold out till the middle
Review: Don't ask me why I read OF HUMAN BONDAGE. I guess it looked lonely on the shelf and I wanted to see what it was all about, and to my surprise this was actually an entertaining, yet semi-tough book to endure till around page 350.
Early on W.S.M sets up Philip's life: where he started, and the underlying motivations and convictions that caused him to make the tragic decisions he ultimately does. In a nutshell, Philip is this orphan who is raised by his uncle and aunt a Vicar 60 miles from London. Philip is very unhappy, yet very impressionable at the same time. As Philips grows older we see how he will react to Religion, Management, Friends, the arts and his loves. It is not till Philip meets Mildred and begins to date her, that Maugham gives Philip free reign of the novel. It is from this point that Maugham makes Philip a pathetic predicable fool for love. I personally know many people, both male and female who went through exactly what Philip endured during the beginning of his relationship. Maugham's dialogue was so raw that I was cringing when they argued.
It is in my opinion that many people who wrote prior reviews, had a hard time with this book because either they were on the receiving or giving end of this very neurotic love affair themselves and it instilled in them the same feelings of anguish.
But ultimately what I got from this novel, was that life is not perfect. There are alot of directions we could take life, and sometimes we have to do what we want to do, even if our piers are dead set against it. Yet we must throw caution into the wind and see if our decisions are the right choice. We must learn from our mistakes, we must get lost before we can find ourselves.

Rating:
Summary: Intense, Insightful, Sensitive, and Unforgettable
Review: For me, the sign of a truly great book is that finishing it leaves me sad to know I will never again feel the thrill of reading it for the first time. After finishing Of Human Bondage, I hungrily started The Razor's Edge to recapture the experience of reading Of Human Bondage. The Razor's Edge was good, but not comparable.

The portrayal of hopeless love for which this book is famous is gripping, but I was even more impressed by the insight and sensitivity with which Maugham describes the different social groups the main character Philip Carey moves through in the novel. I found the chapters where Philip lives in a working class environment especially interesting for Maugham's knowledge of that culture and his awareness of how people from other walks of life misunderstand the hopes and wishes of working class people.

Maugham also seems to have been nearly alone among writers of his generation in his ability to see through the shallow posturing of bohemianism with astuteness and wit but without malice.

I have never read a better novel.

Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: I cannot understand anyone who says that Philip is not a character they like. He is of course not a character you like *continually* - your relationship with the protagonist blossoms and wanes and blossoms again as it would with any non-fictional human. At times his actions seem deeply pathetic, but he would be the first to acknowledge it. When he pays for Griffiths and Mildred to go away together - an act which one reviewer saw as scraping the bottom of the most miserable barrel - I have to say I saw it as an act of power. And an ironic one, since the novel thematically contrasts the ease with which he shrugs away his Christian beliefs and the iron bond between Philip and his Christian ethics. As he pays for Griffiths and Mildred to holiday, isn't he honoring Christ's most difficult command? His enemy (and Mildred IS his enemy) strikes him on one cheek, he offers her the other.

Rating:
Summary: Maugham's masterpiece stands the best of time
Review: I discovered Maugham almost ten years ago after buying a few of his novels at a second-hand bookstore. I knew the name, of course, but I had never read any of his novels or short stories since the French editions had been out of print for at least twenty years. It didn't take him long to seduce me, about the first three pages of The Razor's Edge (in French) did it. I was taken in by his precise writing, wihout ever a superfluous word, and his clinical, yet warm and sympathetic, understanding of his characters. They made that novel timeless like the best fiction by Balzac and Zola.

Immediately after finishing The Razor's Edge, I opened Of Human Bondage. I discovered that I enjoyed Maugham's prose even more in the original English (that man really had an original voice of his own) despite or because its simplicity and clarity. It's never florid but always luminous. There's subtle poetry in some of his descriptions and many of the events and characters are unforgettable (for example, I was deeply moved by Philip's meek little aunt's devotion to her selfish, unloving husband). I actually weeped (not a frequent event for me, at least due to fiction) when Philip, as an intern, meets the cheerful young boy who doesn't take himself or his clubfoot seriously. The tragedy in Philip's early life was that he had the opposite attitude, and I could only think: "If only..."

The first time I read the novel, I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for Philip's obsession with Mildred (I thought she was entitled to more pity than he was, the poor thing it wasn't her fault if she felt nothing more than gratitude for him and her destiny is simply horrible) since Maugham's makes it obvious that wounded pride, rather than actual love, is what attracts him to her like a magnet. I didn't think a passion like Philip's for Mildred, a girl he despises and finds unattractive, could be possible. Until I met "my Mildred" last year. I went through the same emotional rollecoaster that Philip did, my highs were so high and my lows so low, it was almost, at the worst of times, as if I were addicted to a crack-like substance. The first time I met that man, I found him unattractive and stupid, and my low opinion of him always remained unchanged. Yet, I needed him, was addicted to him, worshipped him. My passion remained unrequited because I wasn't his kind of woman, even though he liked me well enough as a friend. Like Philip, the wounds to my ego were like oil on my passion's fire.

I found very little sympathy for my suffering among my friends and co-workers. I became the butt of jokes because no one could understand my obsession with such a man. Of Human Bondage was a great help to me during that awful time, and thanks to Maugham, I felt less alone and ridiculous. OHB is the most realistic, harrowing, horrible depiction of unrequited love I ever came across in my 30 years as an avid fiction reader, save perhaps for Hulot's obsession with the avaricious, deceiving courtesan in Balzac's Cousin Bette.

Finally, I want to point out that there are so many fascinating events in this book, besides Philip's sick infatuation with Mildred. And it's that rare piece of modern fiction that concerns itself with a promising young man who learns from his mistakes and misfortunes and slowly grows into a self-sufficient, generally happy human being.

Rating:
Summary: A Roller-coaster Ride of Emotions
Review: I went through every form of emotional roller-coaster ride possible reading this book, which I couldn't put down.

This novel describes, through the life of the main character Philip, bondages that we all as humans have in some form or another and how we go about our lives dealing with them. Philip's forms of bondages were the loss of both parents, a clubfoot, and an obsessive and destructive relationship rooted in an unrequited love, which all saddle him, as he struggles in his own way to make a life for himself.

I found it a coincidence that I too have always believed as Maugham did: each of us in our own ways has baggage that we carry throughout our lives. Nobody leads a picture-perfect life of Pollyanna in Utopia, so our bondages affect us and ultimately make us the people we are. Despite these bondages, some people can be highly optimistic, cheerful, and caring; or because of them indeed, people feel entitled to use them as crutches or excuses to feel sorry for themselves and be cynical, depressed, and revengeful, as often time was the case of Philip.

Some autobiographical aspects of Maugham's own life are played out in Philip. One of Maugham's own bondages was heavy stuttering, for which he was ridiculed and teased; in the case of Philip it is a clubfoot. We see how Philip handled (or often rather poorly handled) these burdens that fate dealt him. Yes, he does have his share of regrettable problems, but because of them he develops a chip on his shoulder and a very poor and selfish attitude that don't make him a sympathetic or likeable person at times in my opinion.

One of the most captivating episodes is when Philip encounters a young boy who also has a clubfoot, but who unlike Philip is so well adjusted that he is impervious to his own deformity. This completely astonishes Philip, who instead of emulating the young boy, considers him a disgrace to all clubfoots who, according to Philip, have a born right to be vindictive, cynical, and surly because of their deformed limbs.

Even with this cynical attitude, Philip surprisingly demonstrates remarkable aptitude at ingratiating himself with patients whom he kindly treats when providing medical care as a student. But any kindhearted side he has is most grossly manifested in his obsessive and lavish treatment of Mildred, whom he is insanely in love with; but this love is totally unrequited yet burns so strongly in Philip that he is blinded by it. The storyline involving Mildred is terribly maddening. Did you ever read a book that got your blood boiling? Another book I can think of is Steinbeck's `East of Eden'. If Kate in Steinbeck's book made you fume, then you will definitely get your money's worth out of Mildred in `Of Human Bondage'.

This book provides a whole roller-coaster ride of emotions dealing with our human bondages, whether they be congenital or based on extenuating circumstances that later cross our lives' paths as we grow older. Maugham brilliantly and poignantly expresses how we as humans are forced to deal with them.

Lastly, it was interesting to read the sidelights about society, customs, mores, and lifestyles in the late 1800s. While the book has nearly 700 pages, the story will keep you too busy turning gripping page after gripping page to count, until when you finally get to the end you long for more. This is one book that I highly recommend you read at least once in your lifetime.


Rating:
Summary: Phillip Carey - Miserable Creature
Review: If you like Maugham's brilliant characterization (especially in The Razor's Edge), you will enjoy this book. He has a keen sense of human nature and is able to make you "feel" for the characters in his stories no matter how fleeting their time on the pages is. However, as another reviewer noted, the protagonist in Of Human Bondage, Phillip Carey, is a miserable rodent.

50 pages into the book, it's hard to like him. You begin to see that he's an overly sensitive, self-obsorbed ingrate. It was close to impossible for me to "feel" anything but contempt for this kid. By the time I got half-way into his relationship with Mildred I was sickened by his pathetic nature. He paid for her to go to Paris with his "best friend"!!! Horrible, just horrible...

While I suppose Maugham meant for Carey to be emotionally retarded, but it's pretty painful to read. However, I think this is a testament to Maugham's brilliance. I can't think of many characters I loathe as much as Phillip. I really hope this isn't as autobiographical as I think!

Rating:
Summary: Good stuff @ 1st, but bondage to finish the entire thing !!
Review: Im not about to completely bash one of the twentieth century's most celebrated novels. In fact, I did learn a good deal from this massive bildungsroman. However, before I get to the perks of the work, I have to admit that I absolutely waded and ploughed through the second half of the book, and I still couldnt finish it. I tried to exercise some self-discipline and force myself to read a few more chapters everyday, but at some point I felt I was battling against all odds, and I gave up. It is not the size of the work which irked me at all, but rather the repetitive tedium of the story and the unneccessary details. For example, the section covering Phillip's life in Paris...honestly, this was not autobiography by any means, it was just a long, endless dissertation on the art-world of the 19th century...every artist, every nuance of color and design, every stroke of the paintbrush, was spoken about ad nauseum....Cezanne versus El Greco, Manet versus Vermeer van Delft, this artist versus the other, I was losing my mind !!

And the petty details of the characters that surround Phillip...I learnt what Cronshaw ate every single day of his sordid life, how many times Griffiths visited the bathroom, how many bottles of beer Flanagan sipped, what their shoes looked like, their coats, their breath....all those details were such a distraction from the essence of the novel.

And Mildred !! Could there exist a more despicable person on the face of the earth?? She is so selfish and artificial and cheap to the point of being two-dimensional. Yes, it is true that humans can become infatuated with the people who mistreat them....such is our sorry nature. Those who are indifferent to us attract our attention, and this is often the basis of obsessive love, as was the case with Phillip. But Mildred is just too much. Every human vice is embedded in this "green"-skinned anorexic heroine. She is the epitomy of hypocrisy, materialism, shallowness, vindictiveness, stupidity, ignorance, etc, etc, etc.

Now to the essence of the story......the perks I mentioned earlier......as a novel of self-discovery there's much to commend in "Of human bondage". I learnt so so much, chiefly that over the course of the centuries, human curiosity has not altered much. What Phillip went through in his growing years is not much different than what we go through now in our own growing years. The doubts about authority and God, established rules and established religion, the discovery of love, the search for the meaning of our lives, well it has been the same cycle since the dawn of time !! It amazed me how much I could relate to a character like Phillip, a product of the 19th century, while I am now alive more than a 100 years later.

I was also amazed at how much connection there is between all fine literature across the realm of time. I saw a lot of resemblance between the character of Phillip in "bondage" and that of Dino in Alberto Moravia's "boredom." Both are obsessed by women whom they can not completely possess. They are driven to self-humiliation by the women who refuse to love them. I also found a similarity between Phillip's philosophy of life in this novel and the philosophy that Coelho was trying to put forward in "Veronika decides to Die." Phillip's philosophy is "follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman around the corner." In Veronika, Coelho also concedes that we should live our lives as we please, and satisfy our erratic needs, but with regard to the law and the harmony of society. Do what you want without harming others or yourself, in other words.

I think the bulk of the book is useful to read, I highlighted many quotes, and was fascinated with the way in which Maugham presents Phillip's foibles and weaknesses. Phillip is so human, so real, and therefore alive. I learnt a lot from him, most important of which is that though sometimes we err badly, there is no use in regret. Unless our mistakes are fixable, it is useless to brood over them....just forget, what happened happened and the past is unreturnable.

Another memorable quote in my head: "procrastination is the thief of time"......makes me want to get off my behind and start doing the things Ive been procrastinating my entire life, because time is always slipping from our hands!!

I also learnt one particular new word from this book, I could swear it was used at least 1000 times throughout the novel..."taciturn." X was taciturn, Y was taciturn, z was taciturn, everyone was pretty taciturn in this novel :)

PS: The ideas of the book are fabulous but Im just so angry with all the tedious descriptions and repetitions, because I really wanted to finish the novel till the end and just couldnt do it !! Thats why I only gave it three stars. I tried to read the last small segment, I swear I really REALLY tried !! But in utter vain. Already by page 400 I was at my wit's end. I think that the only way I could have finished the book is if someone had strapped me to my bed and held me at gunpoint. At the end of the day, intelligent literary ramblings teach us a lot, but, Mr. Maugham, entertainment value is important too !!!!

Rating:
Summary: Not an S/M book
Review: Mildred is the real main character of the novel. She is a woman who cannot stand any weakness in a man. To her weakness is repulsive. Mildred's is a way of female feeling that is very real and can be very dangerous for the woman herself and those who care about her. Mildred is unable to appreciate the fact that not really caring is the single quality of mind that most makes a person, male or female, appear strong. Mildred runs to men who do not care about her. And it destroys her life. Mildred is an expression of a very real kind of woman: a hatred for weakness, a love of excitement and fun, needing to float above meaning in words she utters or hears, repulsed by meaning, able to endure only words which are hollow. It is said that a sense of purpose is for most people a great need. Mildred wants with all her longing never to need a reason for being. (This is perhaps the most intoxicating of all human longings.) Mildred wants to keep it that way: not needing any purpose. She wants talk to be bar talk-- words which are spoken but are not reflected upon, which hide her from the real and permit her to float above deep emotions as above everyday mundane issues. Such a woman can be very exciting to a man, but exceedingly dangerous to love. The Mildreds of the world long to be dominated, but to fight the domination. To deeply love such a woman is very possible; to dominate her is very possible, but both to love and dominate her is exceedingly difficult. This is a Human Bondage.

I have read several reviews of this novel. I am surprised that no-one mentioned money. Money and the need to get it are constant notions in W.S.M's novels; as he says in this novel, "Money is like a sixth sense, and you cannot use the other five without it." This is one aspect, the most general and important, of human bondage; W.S.M has a constant obsession with this as being the barrier which separates the physical, locked-in world from the spiritual (meaning relationships among people and to beauty and emotions, not the relationship to God) life of unfettered action and motions. "Enough money to be generous with my friends".

Rating:
Summary: The Real main character
Review: Mildred is the real main character of the novel. She is a woman who cannot stand any weakness in a man. To her weakness is repulsive. Mildred's is a way of female feeling that is very real and can be very dangerous for the woman herself and those who care about her. Mildred is unable to appreciate the fact that not really caring is the single quality of mind that most makes a person, male or female, appear strong. Mildred runs to men who do not care about her. And it destroys her life. Mildred is an expression of a very real kind of woman: a hatred for weakness, a love of excitement and fun, needing to float above meaning in words she utters or hears, repulsed by meaning, able to endure only words which are hollow. It is said that a sense of purpose is for most people a great need. Mildred wants with all her longing never to need a reason for being. (This is perhaps the most intoxicating of all human longings.) Mildred wants to keep it that way: not needing any purpose. She wants talk to be bar talk-- words which are spoken but are not reflected upon, which hide her from the real and permit her to float above deep emotions as above everyday mundane issues. Such a woman can be very exciting to a man, but exceedingly dangerous to love. The Mildreds of the world long to be dominated, but to fight the domination. To deeply love such a woman is very possible; to dominate her is very possible, but both to love and dominate her is exceedingly difficult. This is a Human Bondage.