Finished: The Razor's Edge (Maugham). A good book. A book with several well-developed characters and lots of character interaction and dialogue. I wouldn't put it on the favorites list, but I also wouldn't put Maugham on the list of authors I can check off and never read again. :-) His masterpiece is supposed to be Of Human Bondage, but the summary of this one appealed to me more, so I read it instead. I will probably put Of Human Bondage on the list to read later. I mostly liked the character interactions between Elliott and the narrator, and Isabel and the narrator. I wasn't really taken with the "protagonist" of the book, Larry.

Larry was one of the main characters who would weave in and out of all the others' lives...but he was always on this mission to find out the meaning of and/or existence of God. His own personal journey was certainly his own business, but when he first started out, he was a bit selfish in thinking that his fiance, Isabel, should wait for him while he figured things out, and then later, marry him suddenly and trek with him into poverty as he kept searching for all the answers. I much preferred the realistic and no-nonsense Isabel. And, I also liked her uncle, Elliott...who, though appeared to be all about the surface, was really the best person at heart.

Anyway....here are a couple of passages to show the writing I liked.

The British narrator was discussing with Isabel how, even though she finally married someone else, Gray, and had children and a stable life, she still truly loved Larry:

"Have you never thought of divorcing Gray?"

"I've got no reason for divorcing him."

"That doesn't prevent your countrywomen from divorcing their husbands when they have a mind to."

She laughed. "Why d'you suppose they do it?"

"Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."

I like that! :-) And, when the incomparable Elliott, in ill health, is contemplating his death, he has a conversation with the narrator:

"I'm getting on, you know, and to tell you the truth I shan't be sorry to go. What are those lines of Landor's? 'I've warmed both hands...' "

Though I have a bad verbal memory, the poem is very short and I was able to repeat it.
      "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
       Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
       I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
       It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

"That's it," he said.

I could not but reflect that it was only by a violent stretch of the imagination that Elliott could fit the epigram to himself.

"It expresses my sentiments exactly," he said, however. "The only thing I could add to it is that I've always moved in the best society in Europe."

"It would be difficult to squeeze that into a quatrain."

I'd have to type pages and pages to get the appropriate rhythms of the conversations, but I did enjoy these parts of the book the most. :-)