Tony's Reviews > Moon and Sixpence

I may have read a Somerset Maugham short story in some school assignment many years ago, but I've no specific recollection that I did. I know I've never read one of his novels until just now. And I might never have done so if I hadn't just read a novel by a Korean author published just twelve years ago.

That novel, No One Writes Back, does not parallel this one; it's not a reworking. But in the Korean novel, the protagonist wanders with just an MP3 player and a novel in his backpack. The novel, of course, is "The Moon and Sixpence". It was the last novel the protagonist's brother ever read, throwing it at the protagonist when he was finished. And, during his wanderings, a girl he meets takes the protagonist to a motel named . . . The Moon and Sixpence. The rooms therein don't have numbers. Instead they're named for painters. The protagonist is assigned the Edward Hopper Room.

I was intrigued enough to convince myself that I probably needed to read "The Moon and Sixpence." One book does indeed lead to another.

All the book blurbs will tell you that "The Moon and Sixpence" is about a character named Charles Strickland who Maugham based not loosely on the artist Paul Gauguin. So, Maugham has Strickland leave his job in finance, leave his wife and children, and go off to paint. The fictional brilliance is creating Strickland as a character without regard for anyone who might be hurt by his actions. Or without regard for anyone, really. And Strickland's answer for those who ask is that, "I have to paint."

Still the connection to the Korean novel was not obvious. And maybe I forced the issue when I lingered over this passage by Maugham, trying to slide it over to the other book:

We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.