Customer Reviews

Rain and Other South Sea Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

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"...and the mystery of the sunset, the deep silence of the water, the lithe grace of the coconut trees, added to her beauty, giving it a profundity, a magic which stirred the heart to unknown emotions."--page 114

"His manner was not agreeable. It was sycophantic, and yet behind the cringing air of an old man who had been worsted in his struggle with fate was a shadow of old truculence."--page 115


W. Somerset Maugham, storyteller par excellence, is a master of the character flaw; crafting hauntingly beautiful and subtle portraits of distressingly, often fatally, flawed characters, all the while holding a mirror up to a horribly, rip-your-heart-out flawed humanity. The collection of short stories in `Rain and Other South Sea Stories,' teeming with characters you'll both love and hate almost simultaneously, lushly and entertainingly reaffirms Maugham's superior storytelling talent.

Recommendation: Like O'Henry, Damon Runyon, and Mark Twain; W. Somerset Maugham is one of my favorite go-to guys whenever I want to read something just for the pure pleasure of the reading. If you like a touch of profundity and magic with your beauty, he's the writer for you. As C. K. Chesterton aptly puts it, "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." For me, reading W. Somerset Maugham, from time to time, is a necessary luxury.


[A word about Dover Publications, Thrift Editions: Unless you have incredibly good, un-hobbled eyesight avoid at all cost. It seems that all the `Thrift' comes from substantially reducing the number of pages in a volume by printing it in the teeniest-tiniest type ever invented. For anyone whose eyesight has been spoiled by the luxury of 12-pt or better type, and especially by those of us who have been pampered with the larger type sizes available with an electronic reader, the type of a Dover Thrift Edition is very uncomfortable to read.]


Dover Publications Thrift Editions, Copyright 2005; 159 pages.

This collection of short stories is a very mixed bag. They all capture the essence and mood of the surroundings but the stories vary greatly in their readability.

"Rain" and "The Fall of Edward Barnard" are, as I read them, the best in the collection. The action moves along quickly, characters are well-developed and the reader is drawn into the mood immediately.

"Mackintosh" and "Honolulu" are very slow moving. Getting into these two is difficult and takes patience on the part of the reader.The paragraphs and sentences are very long (Faulkner-esque) and at times, tedious.

"Red" and "The Pool" fall somewhere in between the others. These stories are full of excellent descriptions while moving predictably along to the conclusions.

The stories here are not upbeat and the women characters are various shades of annoying, stupid or boring. Nevertheless, I would not hesitate to recommend this collection.

Nobody can tell a story of evil masquerading as good quite like W. Somerset Maugham. One of my favorite short stories about a fallen woman who tries to mend her ways only to be attacked by the very man of the cloth who's supposedly trying to save her soul.

The story Rain is extraordinarily memorable. I recommend this book, though it's definitely not upbeat!

Worth buying, Asia is still much like this under the glitz and glamour. The essence is captured!