Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, although it is only 1431st on the Greatest Books of All Time site – you have thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other lists on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html
Cakes and
Ale by Somerset Maugham is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, although
it is only 1431st on the Greatest Books of All Time site – you have
thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other lists on
my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html
8 out of 10
Somerset
Maugham https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-summing-up-by-william-somerset.html is one of my favorite authors, notwithstanding
the fact that I may find him less scintillating these days, case in point Cakes
and Ale was less exhilarating that I may have expected, especially years ago
In the
nineteen nineties I had to spend time in hospitals, for a duodenal ulcers and
other reasons – if I go into that, I will never come back to the note – and I
had some solace in that rather depressing atmosphere, and one support was
Somerset Maugham, there were some female patients, young and attractive, and
that was another panacea
"I am
willing enough to agree with common opinion that Of Human Bondage is my best
work...But the book I like best is Cakes and Ale...because in its pages lives
for me again the woman with the lovely smile who was the model for Rosie
Driffield." This is what the author declared, his main character is not a
favorite of mine
Kingsley
Amis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-kings-english-guide-to-modern-usage.html wrote ‘Maugham is the only bad
writer whose books you read to the end with interest, sympathy and enjoyment’ and
this has clearly has had an impact on my perception, I do not see the latter as
the Magister Ludi anymore
There are
some interesting passages in Cakes and Ale, one looks at beauty, and concludes ‘beauty
is a bit of a bore’ also you have to see it, “I do not know if others are like
myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long.” And then he writes
about Evelyn Waugh and the rejection of the first-person narrative
https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/decline-and-fall-by-evelyn-waugh-is-one.html when looking for advice, the
narrator says “I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry
James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr. E. M. Forster, from which
I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr. E. M. Forster; then I
read The Structure of the Novel by Mr. Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing
at all.”
The novelist
has to use his own experience, albeit the characters he creates most often have
features taken from real people, but they are also imaginary, they represent a
portrait of a few people, and then the writer is ‘God’, in Cakes and Ale, the
models were though to be Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/08/far-from-madding-crowd-by-thomas-hardy.html the latter being the author of Far
From The Madding Crowd
In
conclusion, I liked the short stories of Somerset Maugham best, for instance
The Three Fat Women of Antibes https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-three-fat-women-of-antibes-by.html poor ladies that try to lose weight,
suffer on a diet, when this new comer indulges in butter, all sorts of
forbidden delicacies…
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