A treatise on Love I bought the gracefully printed hardcover, first edition of Graham Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy , printed by Reinhardt Books of London, in August, 2010. This was Green’s last novel which he published in 1988 three years before his death at the age of 87. A cryptic note that I wrote on the title page – I thought, then, that this gave a personal touch to my books, a practice I abandoned soon – tells me I bought it quite cheap from strandbookstall.com. Strand Book Stall, the iconic book shop, in Fort, Bombay, was started by T.N. Shanbhag in 1948 and closed down in 2018. In last few years, I read with horror, and sadness, as similar fate visited many such legendary bookshops in other cities: Lal Advani’s bookshop in Hazrat Ganj, Lucknow, T.S. Shanbaug’s Premier Bookshop on Church Street in Bangalore, V.G. Mani’s Manney’s bookstore in the camp area of Pune. These were in business for more than half a century, established before 1947, but, I believe, could ...

 'The Book Bag' & 'The Back of Beyond' First story in the collection, ‘The Book-Bag’, is being narrated by the writer. Its beginning is exceptionally fascinating. Maugham starts with some off-the-cuff remarks about his reading habits. ‘Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I’. He goes onto explain what a book-bag is. Once incarcerated in Java for three months because of an illness, he exhausted all the books he had with him. He was then ‘obliged to buy the schoolbooks from which intelligent Javanese…acquired knowledge of French and German’. Since then, he ‘made a point of travelling with the largest sack made for carrying soiled linen and filling it to the brim with books.’ Except for this bag, he informs us, ‘he should perhaps never have heard the singular history of Olive Hardy’. M...

The Story Behind the Stories Somerset Maugham was one of the most travelled authors of his generation. He was born in France and lived there in luxury – his father was solicitor at the British embassy in Paris – till he lost both his parents at the age of twelve. He came to live with a prudish, self-seeking Uncle, his father’s brother, vicar of Whitstable, and his German wife, who, though not unkind, didn’t know how to be affectionate to a sensitive child. Till then French was his language. He had to adopt a new country as home, new people as guardians – an unwilling elderly couple, stern, and inept with children, of whom they have had none, and learn a new language to communicate. He felt an alien in a foreign land. He stammered. This disability further withheld him from social communion.  A poignant anecdote about his childhood illustrates his fear of ridicule and rebuke from strangers when he was young – ‘Tell him I stammer, Uncle,’ young Willie, as he was known, said to ...

“When you come down to brass tacks the value of a work of art depends on the artist’s personality.” W. Somerset Maugham   A book is not an inert squiggle of ink on paper. Every book has a soul which, to varying extent, reflects the writer's personality. Thus, reading a book, especially fiction, is an interaction between two personalities – reader’s and that of the book. Reader's past, present, failings, triumphs, fears, dreams, all colour the world that the words of the story evoke in his mind. No person is a mirror-image of another. Perhaps, this is why a story elicits widely different reactions among various readers. Outer world incessantly impacts and shapes the inner world of an individual, writer and reader, alike. No story can be read sans its geographic, cultural, and temporal context. These worlds, the inner and the outer, of the writer and the reader, come together in the act of reading. If they share some features, a powerful resonance is born that oscillat...