Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Kitty is a woman who married a doctor named Walter, even though she did not love him. She falls for another man, and Walter finds out. He gives her a hard choice: a big shame, or travel with him to a town in China where many people are sick with cholera, a dangerous disease spread by dirty water. Kitty goes with him. Among sick and dying people, she starts to see herself, and her husband, clearly for the first time.
Kitty Fane, pretty and bored, is married to Walter, a bacteriologist in Hong Kong who loves her deeply and whom she does not love. Her affair with Charlie Townsend is discovered, and Walter gives her a choice: a divorce in public scandal, or travelling with him to Mei Tan Fu, a city suffering a cholera epidemic, where he has volunteered to work. She goes, into a world of sickness, danger and silence between them.
The novel is built from very short chapters and scenes, in Maugham's clear, unadorned prose. The journey inland works like a slow stripping away: of Kitty's illusions about her lover, about herself, and finally about the husband she never bothered to know.
It works because nothing is softened and nobody is a simple villain. Readers watch understanding arrive the hard way, through endurance rather than speeches. The result is severe, moving and hard to shake off, which is why the book has been filmed three times and never left readers' hands.
Kitty Fane is pretty, restless and bored, married in haste in Hong Kong to Walter, a bacteriologist who adores her and whom she does not love. When her affair with the charming, shallow Charlie Townsend is discovered, Walter gives her a choice that is really a sentence: public scandal, or accompanying him inland to a city in the grip of a cholera epidemic, where he has volunteered to work. What follows is one of Maugham's finest novels.
Kitty Fane is pretty, restless and bored, married in haste in Hong Kong to Walter, a bacteriologist who adores her and whom she does not love. When her affair with the charming, shallow Charlie Townsend is discovered, Walter gives her a choice that is really a sentence: divorce in public scandal, or accompany him inland to Mei Tan Fu, a city in the grip of a cholera epidemic, where he has volunteered to work. The title comes from Shelley's sonnet beginning Lift not the painted veil, and the novel slowly lifts its own veil on both of them.
This is one of W. Somerset Maugham's finest novels, a story of punishment, endurance and slow, hard won understanding, told in his famously clear, unadorned prose. Filmed three times, it has never been out of readers' hands since 1925. Starvard carries it as a modern classic that earns the name: short, severe and impossible to shake off. It will suit readers who like moral drama without preaching and characters who change the hard way and pay for it, scene by quiet scene.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 64682.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1925. Author died 1965. Public domain in the US. Share this book: WhatsApp
Starvard