This book surely accounts for a pleasant reading. The most alluring aspect of this novel is a truly simplistic yet sophisticated narration by Maugham. His ability to put thoughts into words is quite crude keeping the reader naturally involved right through the end. It’s not some intrigued plot that keeps you hooked but it’s a strange resemblance with ‘life’ that you want to go on reading. This book is primarily about a young man named ‘Larry’ & his quest for god. His spiritual odyssey takes him all over the world. His experience & encounters present the reader with poignant views on the very existence of being & soul, the aatma and it’s oneness with the Absolute. In the course of narrating Larry’s journey, Maugham gives a fascinating glimpse of love & passion via Isabel’s eternal longing for Larry and his love

In my top 10 best reads! Reread few books, but this is one I've enjoyed 3 times now! ( )

I have put off the writing of this for several days as I just quite do not know how to do a review on the stuff this book is made of. I love this book and I did not want it to end. I especially love the style Maugham used in the writing of it.
Immediately upon beginning the book, I was reminded of reading "Brideshead Revisited" and how much I disliked that book mainly because I could not understand nor care about the characters nor the way they lived their lives throughout the story. In "The Razor's Edge" Larry says he just "wants to loaf." And most of the characters within the book spend their days "loafing" of a sort. They spend them lunching with friends, having drinks, living in quite the same type of manner. But in this book I understood why the people lived as they did. I cared about the characters within this novel. I cared about what they did, what they ate, what they drank, what they said, with whom they spent their time, where they went. In other words I quickly came to care about every aspect of their lives. I became so drawn into the story that I forgot about my own world the whole time during which I was reading it.
I think most of us know the story of "The Razor's Edge" whether we have read it or not. I know I did. There are many reviews on this site that will share that information with you if you wish. I was prepared for the story. What I was not prepared for was the gamut of emotions I went through as I read this slim novel. Nor was I prepared to see the characters so fully fleshed out to the point that while I was reading the book, I actually knew these people. I was also not prepared for the brilliance of Somerset Maugham's writing. As in this quote from Larry:
"You can't imagine what a thrill it is to read the "Odyssey" in the original. It makes you feel as if you had only to get on tiptoe and stretch out your hands to touch the stars."
There is one point in the novel where the narrator, Maugham, and Larry accidentally run into each other at the theater and decide to meet for drinks afterward. They order a late night supper of eggs and bacon and talk. Maugham realizes that Larry wants to talk (usually he is quite private) and just sits back and lets him, responding when it is appropriate. He allows Larry to tell his story which runs until after breakfast the next morning and fully 41 pages of the book. At one point Larry is telling about living with a Benedictine monk and their conversations and he tells of the monk asking him: "Do you believe in God?" The narrative goes on: "Larry hesitated for a moment, and when he went on I knew he wasn't speaking to me but to the Benedictine monk. He had forgotten me. I don't know what there was in the time or the place that enabled him to speak, without my prompting, of what his natural reticence had so long concealed."
This is a beautiful story written in absolutely beautiful prose.
If you have not read it, you should. I highly recommend it. ( )

My father always raved about Somerset Maugham, and had quite a large collection of his books; the only one that I seem to have kept is a Penguin paperback of The Razor’s Edge. I do remember reading some of Maugham’s journals at one point, and my father was always promoting Maugham’s method of learning how to write by reading a paragraph of a great writer and then trying to reproduce it without looking at the original. It was a method I never tried, but one I can see Maugham might have benefitted from. Now that I have finally gotten around to reading The Razor’s Edge, I am more bewildered than ever as to what made my father admire his work so much. There were quite a few sentences that should have had a razor taken to them. I know there may have been different comma rules back in ’44, but really: he wasn’t trying to be Faulkner, so there’s no excuse really for some of the convolution. Judging from the date of publication, if my father fell for this author it was because he was at that vulnerable point in his life. He also developed his passion for Shakespeare around this time; that love cannot be faulted, even if he did never know quite how to tell the real wisdom from the spurious (i.e., Polonius). I can see that my father would have found that Maugham’s view of women—sexual yes, but their sexuality is life and truth denying—agreed with his own. I wonder he wasn’t concerned that he had so much in common with the views of a homosexual. I wasn’t sure I remembered Maugham’s sexuality correctly as I began reading, but it wasn’t hard to tell from the text. Larry, the central figure, is always described in terms of natural beauty and lightness. Isabel makes herself beautiful through dint of will and good taste, and though he (the Maugham in the text) enjoys looking at her, it is without desire. As one of the critics I read on the web after finishing the book said: the women are essentially rivals.
This was probably not one of my father’s favorites of Maugham: how could it be when the central character was on a religious quest? If he recommended it to me it would have been because he thought I would like it, or perhaps he thought it would show me the error of my ways. After all, Larry gets enlightenment and decides, in the end, to go back to America and drive trucks and taxis. One reader describes the book as being about how Larry affects the lives of those in this social circle, but I would disagree. If anything, it shows how his spiritual quest does not affect anyone’s lives. Of that this spiritual quest is as meaningful as the other pivotal character, Elliott Templeton’s, quest for social status. Yes, everyone does get what he or she wants, and that is essentially meaningless. As I was reading Larry’s adventures in India, I was reminded of Hesse as well as of Isherwood. Didn’t he bring the awareness of Sri Ramakrishna to the West? And he was gay. Others speculate that Isherwood was a model for Larry, but there are other contenders as well. In any case, this is an interesting study of some of the earlier stirrings of interest in Hinduism that blossomed more fully in the 1950s. Just as for TS Eliot, the Great War led to spiritual questing and a turn to Christianity, renewed spirituality in all directions seems to emerge from the horrors of that war.
I also found the book interesting, reading it in 2009, for the way it hinted that the Depression was coming, while the characters all talked blithely and optimistically about American industry and prosperity after WWI. Hindsight, of course, did not require much of Maugham in the way of foreshadowing. It was a bit disappointing, actually, to see the characters all go relatively unscathed by their financial losses, but perhaps the upper classes never really did suffer all that badly. ( )

As one of the most popular authors of the early 20th century, Somerset Maugham made his reputation as storyteller, and this particular story was an interesting departure for him. Being a young man interested in Vedanta (with appetite whetted by the novels of Hesse), I was drawn to this novel and the main character, Larry Darrell (in turn a rumoured portrait of young Christopher Isherwood, who denied the claim), who moves through Parisian expatriate society in the years following the First World War after a period of study in an Indian ashram. Darrell, having attained a degree of transcendence, is drawn into and influences the lives of those around him, a circle which has gathered around the social snob Elliot Templeton. Larry's effect on this group is the subject of the novel.

Whether this novel is any kind of great literature is debateable, but it is most assurably a compelling story in the Maugham mode, with its own share of pathos (poor Sophie! poor lonely forgotten Elliot!). Ultimately a story with eternal appeal for the young, who search for meaning and transcendence amidst the banal. I hope to revisit this story again some day, to see what effect age and experience has upon my enjoyment of it.