The Razor's Edge

Having suffered just through the moon and sixpence, imagine my disappointment when starting this book, finding it oddly familiar, and then reading the words "many years ago i wrote a book called the moon and sixpence"

So yeah, my expectations weren't high.

But? I'm happy to report that this was a much more engaging reading experience - we seem to have figured out how humans work (:'D) while some elements of the characters remain unrealistic, it happily blends into the rest of common fiction where the unrralostic traits of these characters seems to drive its story. The book doesn't set itself out to be a grand story, but much more like a casual observation through casual life, and there's something oddly engaging about that. I imagine it would not have been much at the the time of publication, but fifty+ years on, it's an intricate window into how it may have been. The author remarks that while the story does not have a conclusion, every character has their success in some ways. Each character also never truly gets what it wants, and while depressing, I guess it's a realistic message about life.

Though again, no razors nor edges in this book.

Man runs away from partner to go to paris to do something different with their life that their partner cannot understand AND is stubborn and cannot be convinced by anyone else that they should not do that... AGAIN? Can we not write about something else lol

Young, wealthy, and bored
the loafing life's not enough
be a coal miner.

One sentence synopsis... Tracing the lives of American expats in Paris and India, ‘The Razor's Edge' explores the dichotomy between materialism and spirituality during the Great Depression.

Read it if you like... Westerners seeking enlightenment in India (Larry is the original ‘Eat Pray Love', George Harrison has nothing on this guy), Paris novels (though the book spans Chicago, Paris, and India it's primarily set in France), or pondering the meaninglessness of modern life.

Dream casting... the cover of my copy of the book has Bill Murray as Larry so I thought I'd have to work hard to imagine anyone else but in reality, the whole vibe of Larry - affluent, charming, traumatized from his experiences in WWI, setting off in search of a transcendent meaning of life - would be perfectly captured by Andrew Garfield.

When I try to describe this book to others, it always sounds like I'm relating some soap-opera drama, but the experience of reading it is so much richer than most anything I've ever read. I only picked it because a reading challenge task required me to choose a book with a character with a first or last name that is the same middle name as one of my parents, and so “Larry Darrell” showed up in a search for “Darrell”. How serendipitous!

Larry Darrell's life is followed by the narrator, who is Maugham, the author, but it is a fictional story. Larry ends up searching out questions about life through experience and travel, and many of his answers are found in the practice of Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. But, the other characters in the novel are also fully realized and lived through the narrative and it was simply a very satisfying experience to read. I will definitely but Maugham's other novels on my TBR list.