The Razor’s Edge (1944) - W. Somerset Maugham

Written by W. Somerset Maugham
Read by Frank Muller
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
Release date: 1988
Publisher: Recorded Books

A compelling novel of self-discovery and the search for meaning.

The Great War changed everything and everyone, and Larry Darrell is no exception. Though his physical wounds from the war heal, his spirit is changed almost beyond recognition.

Larry Darrell goes in search of the absolute, he leaves his betrothed, the beautiful and devoted Isabel; studies philosophy and religion in Paris; lives as a monk, and witnesses the exotic hardships of Spanish life. All of life that he can find - from an Indian Ashrama to labor in a coalmine - becomes Larry’s spiritual experiment as he spurns the comfort and privilege of the Roaring 20s.

The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham’s most brilliant characters - his fiancé Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob.

The most ambitious of Maugham’s novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.

Like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, etc., W. Somerset Maugham is a “need to know” modern classics writer.

William Somerset Maugham , 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965
A British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.

During World War I, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he traveled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.

He had a miserable childhood. His parents died before he was ten and he was raised by a dysfunctional family of relatives. He was bullied in school because he couldn’t speak proper English (he was born in France), he stammered. A family member put him in medical school and he did finish but with the success of his first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) that he based on his practice of medicine, “I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief …” he dropped medicine and embarked on his 65-year career as a writer. He later said, “I took to it as a duck takes to water.”

He had a lot of scandals and escapades during his life. Look him up.