Don Fernando

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At the start I thought that may be this was his research or journal that had been published but Maugham makes it clear that he has an audience in mind for the book but it does also seem to be research for a work of fiction. An odd book that I would not recommend. Somerset Maugham is my favourite author, but this is very untypical. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to someone new to Maugham, in fact, I wouldn’t recommend it at all! I found it to be Maugham's weakest book - in fact it's so all over the place as to be little more than an unfocused notebook.Each review score is between 1-10. To get the overall score that you see, we add up all the review scores we’ve received and divide that total by the number of review scores we’ve received. In addition, guests can give separate ‘subscores’ in crucial areas, such as location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value for money and free Wi-Fi. Note that guests submit their subscores and their overall scores independently, so there’s no direct link between them. The result was "Don Fernando" a book that has something of an off-kilter reputation among all his works; most modern readers dismiss it as a mere collection of sketches written when he was conducting his research for "Catalina" and yet it was Graham Greene's favourite book from the author and with good reason too. If you are about to open the cover, expecting a thrilling travel book awash with sights, sounds, scents and sensations, you would be disappointed; if, on the other hand, you are expecting a series of brilliantly penned, well-researched, even annoyingly didactic, pieces on the country and everything about it, well, you will be rewarded. On the positive side, there were glimpses of humour that did make me smile. Maugham, being born into the upper classes of Victorian England and writing in the first half of the 20th Century, exhibits the typical bluntness of the old aristocracy in saying precisely what he thinks and not particularly tempering it for anyone else's benefit. Dotted through the book are various examples of not mincing one's words, such as "The Church is uglier than any church I have ever seen" and "I cannot believe that religious art has ever sunk lower than this; and that an earthquake has not levelled it with the ground must seem to the good Catholic a very signal instance of the infinite patience of God". William Somerset Maugham, famous as novelist, playwright and short-story writer, 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 a view to practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to letters. 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. His position as a successful playwright was being consolidated at the same time. His first play, A Man of Honour, was followed by a series of successes just before and after World War I, and his career in the theatre did not end until 1933 with Sheppey. It has been described as a travel book, but I don't think that's entirely accurate, though there are a few scattered sections that could be described as travel writing. The premise is that Maugham long planned to write an historical novel set during Spain's Golden Age. He traveled extensively and read 200-300 books on the subject, but was never able to get the book past the initial planning stage.

Ideally, we would publish every review we receive, whether positive or negative. However, we won’t display any review that includes or refers to (among other things): These guidelines and standards aim to keep the content on Booking.com relevant and family-friendly without limiting expression of strong opinions. They are also applicable regardless of the sentiment of the comment. It makes for wonderful reading, from cover to cover, but there is a touch of an overbearing didacticism in some of these sketches and writings; too often, Maugham labours hard his points and conclusions, not only about the figures he sets out to deconstruct and discuss - Loyola, Cervantes, Lope De Vega, Saint Teresa, Luis De Leon and, most of all, El Greco. The accomplished craftsman of words that he was, even this didacticism is mostly easy to swallow, provided you have the patience and time to sit on each of these pieces. But what particularly seems a little preachy is when Maugham is getting ahead of himself, trying more to deconstruct our perceptions and ideas about writers, artists and the like, which also makes the entire volume a little self-indulgent.

The longest chapter, I believe, is devoted to El Greco. Though Maugham admires El Greco's work, he also criticizes it. According to the Maugham biographies I own, the book is most famous for the El Greco chapter, chiefly because Maugham claims that he suspects El Greco, notwithstanding the fact that he had a mistress and a bastard son, was homosexual. (Maugham, despite the fact he was once married and had a bastard daughter, was himself predominantly homosexual.)

I realised later that if I read about them in a different book I may not have been so interested. Probably we will only listen to facts from people we like.Contributions should be appropriate for a global audience. Please avoid using profanity or attempts to approximate profanity with creative spelling, in any language. Comments and media that include 'hate speech', discriminatory remarks, threats, sexually explicit remarks, violence, and the promotion of illegal activity are not permitted.