A breathtaking story from beginning to end. The author, W. Somerset Maugham is a wonderful storyteller and does not disappoint the reader once during the novel. This is not a love story but a tale of one woman's journey on the road to redemption. The protagonist, Kitty Fane reminds me of a British version of Scarlett O'Hara. Kitty's journey is not a light hearted one. The reader's heart is constantly in a state of flux as the indecisive Kitty always leans towards the wrong choice. This is a timeless work that I believe will be in my top ten of beloved novels for the rest of my life. I highly suggest picking up a copy and enjoying the vivid world left behind by Maugham. ( )

Brief Review: I was captivated. I never read Maugham before and having read this I was hooked instantly. The writing, tone, story, and characters flowed perfectly and with such a depth that I wouldn't help but get reeled in. Highly recommended for all classic readers.

Good for book groups-discussion of nature of obsession. ( )

The Painted Veil, a short novel by Somerset Maugham ostensibly deals with the spiritual awakening in the life of Kitty Fane, a young English wife in a close-walled colonist society in HongKong. She is presented to us in the midst of an affair with the passionate and passion-worthy Charles Townsend, who offers a thorough contrast to the silently adoring husband, Walter, whom Kitty rather despises for his lack of colour and verve. She is all that a young woman of that age was generally brought up to be - pretty, thoughtless and to paraphrase her own latter estimation, a woman that a man would want to sleep with enough to bring himself to offer her security for life. She has landed that man, Walter, and is secure of her power over him – after all, an intelligent, scientific-minded man who sees clearly that his wife does not respect or love him, and continues to be enamoured of her is surely the most slavish of beings, and one's power over such a soul cannot be doubted. But Kitty miscalculates the extent of Walter's self-blinding devotion, and the discovery of her infidelity not only effectively crumbles the pedestal he places her upon, but also shatters the sense of self-worth he has. At this point, Walter's mental state is profoundly interesting to me, he hates himself for his blind adoration of a lowly object, he despises Kitty for her inferiority, and he is certain that Charles Townsend is not the passionate and devoted lover Kitty fancies but a pragmatic, self-serving, second-class human being who would only see the situation as something from which he himself ought to emerge with the least impact. He sends Kitty to Charles with a seemingly magnanimous offer, one where she and Charles would be left without any further hassles from Walter as long as Charles firmly commits to Kitty immediately. The flip side of this offer is that if Kitty cannot marry Charles she will have to acoompany Walter in his suicidal mission to Mei-Tan-Fu, a Chinese region with rampant Cholera. The masterly estimate of his fellows that Walter displays here is one that Kitty recognises too after she meets Charles and sees for herself his weakness and shallow insincerity. She returns to Walter with a stern resolve to accept his murderous choice, disllusionment and pride jostling with each other in her mind.

After this point in the story, Kitty's awakening proceeds swiftly as she meets with Waddington, a self-deprecating, sceptical English man whose cynical outlook sets off rather well his honesty, sense of humour and general good-will. He likes nothing better than his bottle of Whisky, and yet he is a favourite of the local French Catholic nuns who, in addition, disapprove of his chinese mistress but treat him with kindness and gratitude for his helpful nature. Though Kitty appears to have a worthy confidant in Waddington, and her initial steps towards a thoughtful outlook on the life within and without are taken in his company and sometimes with his help, she is more alone now than we have seen her so far. She starts helping out in the Catholic refectory with the children, teaching them sewing and caring for them, and also ponders often upon the hidden knowledge of life that the people around her seem to know and she doesn't yet. She learns that she is pregnant and in a rare instance of honest courage, declines the convenient answer of “It s yours” when Walter enquires about its conception. She often agonizes about it, especially since we have come to know along the way that Walter has a surprising but genuine love for children. Walter dies shortly after this, leaving some doubt as to whether he chanced to catch Cholera from his patients or actively set about testing something on himself which caused his death. His last words which were the last lines of Goldsmith's Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog are as ambiguous in their intent as anything we have seen of Walter along the course of this tale.

Kitty is advised by the Mother Superior at the convent to leave the place now that her husband has, since she would require to be confined soon and would require much medical attention. She returns to HongKong to settle her house and affairs there and for the short duration there is treated as a heroic woman who accompanied her brave husband on a dangerous mission for the good of the locals and is now suffering her bereavement with great courage and dignity. Charles Townsend's wife Dorothy insists upon her staying with them, and though Kitty still despises Charles's true nature, she succumbs once more to his attentions and then, with much self loathing, leaves precipitately to her parents' house. In a rather contrived blow, her mother, whom she blames for her shallow youth, dies suddenly even before she reaches home, and her father informs her of his intention to leave for Bermuda to take up a high post there. Kitty offers to accompany him, vowing to return atleast some part of her favour to a long ignored provider of the family, and also to bring up her child without all the mistakes that were a part of her mother's plans for her.

The plot being laid out in some detail, I'd like to gointo some of the impression the book delivers. Firstly, I found all of the characters impossible to care about. Maugham himself seems to have feelings ranging from indifference to thinly veiled dislike for his characters here, and is always content to leave all potentially positive aspects of their lives shrouded in a gray obscurity. Secondly, I had described this book as being “ostensibly” about Kitty's growth. I add that detractor there because the kind of growth we see in Kitty is trivial and self-deluded even , when viewed under a rational light. She ascribes her youthful shallowness to her mother's upbringing, and then her lack of respect for Walter to his blandess of demeanour and character though we see glimpses of his capacity for thought, passion and action along the book. These are still forgivable as immature, and one looks to her later self for real improvement. She is looking for acceptance from the French sisters, is intimidated by their hidden knowledge(which is entirely her own perception) and feels better about herself based on her work with them But I rather felt that the changes she is seeing are rather superficial and her quest for the hidden knowledge is no more than curiosity in a new land and one that she has not the capability to pursue seriously. She has undoubtedly gained the maturity to view her personal problems with some perspective amidst the suffering and dying masses, and her surprise at Walter's continued self-hatred over his mis-estimation of her is a valid one. The indelible words of Rick, “the problems of two little people dont amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. “ are about what she would tell him if she could. But what I see instead is a continued feeling of repressed guilt on her part and disrespect towards Walter that she never attempts to analyse or overcome.

Maugham avoided the cliché of their reconciliation or renewal of loving vows, but in doing so he needed to leave her half-awakened and Walter gently ironic to the very end. His last words seem to simply anchor his character as being nought but a large cloud of ironic self-loathing. Kitty's turn to acquire some self-loathing was another master stroke on Maughams part, one that somewhat reconciled me to her character. I had thought her smugly self-satisfied with her changes and her growth and it made for excellent exposition to witness her realisation that in her ardour for truth she had over-vilified Charles' physical and sartorial imperfections, and then to see her give into his advances while being entirely conscious of her own fall from grace again. She however retains that disarming ability to throw away these marks of self-degradation from her without any seeming effort, as though she is so sure that she is growing up to be a better person tha any imperfections she may exhibit are to be immediately forgotten. But that excuse doesnt sit well with a reader who has not taken kindly to her at any point in the tale.

From the moment I read Walter's reference to the Elegy of the death of a Mad Dog in the book, I have retained a firm feeling that Maugham wrote this whole tale as a mocking take on books about the wakening of spirituality in their protagonists. Such books normally rely on the slow gaining of understanding and clarity in the protagonist, especially of the superior qualities of some previously despised or disregarded personage in their lives. Here, Walter obviously fits the bill for that character.He is shown to be caring and passionate about Kitty, a good judge of character in all but his beloved wife, a man of high intentions regarding his career as a bacteriologist, a gentle kind administering angel to the children and locals suffering from Cholera. And yet, we are clearly shown through Kitty's eyes that he does not work for the sake of the people but rather for some impersonal reason, which is not even the glorious cause of Scientific advancement, but something less definable, tinged with a death-wish possibly. He is not the reward that a self aware Kitty could be proud of in the end. Charles Townsend is pushed from grace right at the beginning as a self-involved, uncaring, philandering man with naught but the most superficial advantages attributable to him. However, when Kitty meets him again at the end of the book, she reveals her own immaturity in painting him as being viler than he was, and also her own susceptibility to an immoral impulse. He is not the despicable villain that a newly gained spiritual awareness could look down upon with superior condescension. The sisters in the convent and Waddington are the tools or aids in the evoking of awareness in Kitty, once she was forced into the knowledge of her own prior immaturity. But, the sisters are seen to the end by Kitty as beings of a different mould and order, and Waddington's idea of the path to nowhere does not sufficiently satisfy Kitty's quest for a more concrete destination.

The return of Kitty to HongKong after her husband's death and her image there as a heroic woman are obviously meant as a satire on the perception that can be put upon any set of events when the inner life is so clouded, but her acceptance of it and her efforts to leave it undisturbed seem a mockery of her own growth over the course of the tale. The ending of the book is so rushed and contrived that I thought Maugham grew tired after that point of even tolerating his own characters and rushed off Kitty to another land where she could live without any old associations to trouble her, with her role as a loving daughter and adoring mother ensuring that her own self-estimate of her maturity were reinforced easily. Such facilely acquired self worth cannot be my cup of tea, im afraid. However, the ultimate trick that Maugham has pulled off in this book is probably to avoid all the facile routes to self awareness and reconciliation and instead subject the reader to all these ambiguous feelings about the characters and their actions. The initial chapters are rather unremarkable and so is the last portion about Kitty's return. But the entire middle section of the tale is written with impeccable balance so as to give one doubt and pause at any interval one chooses to sit back and reflect on it. I might balk at befriending any of the characters in the book, but the writer undoubtedly possesses some mastery of his craft as he presents a book where the characters insiduously lodge themselves into the readers' mind, and demand some estimate of their selves and their actions

This book sounded intriguing when I discovered it on the library shelf right around the time the movie came out: a scientist is ticked off at his cheating wife and decides to force her to go with him to China, basically in the hopes that she’ll catch cholera and die. I really enjoyed the transformation of the main character, Kitty, throughout the book. When the book opened, she was really selfish, totally in love with the man she was having an affair with, and full of hostility toward her husband, Walter. After traveling with him to China so he could do research and treat people infected with cholera, Kitty begins helping out at a local convent, ultimately returning to England a changed woman. When Walter falls ills, she’s forced to deal with her feelings for him, as well as consider her future without her husband and with only her father left as a companion. ( )