The Razor's Edge
Last year while working at Clearwater, a music festival in New York, a coworker told me that this book changed her life. And this girl was not one for hyperbole. At least not books. Puppies, sure. Ice cream probably. But not books. So this was a recommendation to consider.
'The Razor's Edge' may not have shaken my rock-solid life, but it was pleasant (I'm searching for a word, because that one feels like faint praise, but I mean it) and thought-provoking book. Maugham was an old fashioned storyteller when compared to the modernists that surrounded him. Even the meta-fictional aspects of his work, using himself as a narrator, and the detailed faux biographical conceits of 'The Moon and Sixpence', are in line with Victorian writers like Stoker and Stevenson. His style is elegant and simple, and there is plenty of the humor and description here that made 'The Moon and Sixpence' so much fun to read. 'The Razor's Edge' gets an upper hand over that book, because of the substance of it. Strickland abandons his family on his quest of self-discovery and dissipation, Larry Darrell is the soul of kindness and somehow comes across as that impossible creature: the moralist without judgement. There are other characters, great ones, and a large number of events that have very little to do with him but they are ultimately window dressing.
