Luís's Reviews > Servidão Humana

This massive novel, published in 1915, is fascinating and terrible. It tells the story of the first 25 years of Philip Carey's life, who will become a doctor, like his father, whom he did not know. It will undoubtedly experience marital happiness after enduring a series of hardships.
After losing his mother at 8 (a point familiar with Maugham), he had entrusted to his uncle, an Anglican pastor, a model of selfishness, self-importance, and avarice. In a small religious public school, he will experience the cruelty of his classmates, especially since he has a club foot. He is so despised that he does not participate in sports in a school world entirely dedicated to him. He nevertheless shines in intellectual exercises.
But he brutally rejected the ecclesiastical and petty-bourgeois future that his teachers had drawn for him: he went to Heidelberg, then to Paris to develop, among the plunderers of Montparnasse, talent as a painter that was not very affirmed. He understands, however, that this life of a "rolling stone" leads nowhere; he began studying medicine, making do with living in slums in London, especially when poor financial speculation robbed him of his modest inheritance.
He is living a devastating love affair with Mildred, a girl who despises and hates him, but without whom he cannot live. The love-hate relationship between Philip and Mildred is perhaps the "black diamond" of this novel. We would also appreciate a description of a department store in London, which owes a great deal to the Zola of "Ladies' Happiness."