A selection of Maugham's short stories

[Britain] William Somerset Maugham; Yilin Publishing House

477 pages; 323,000 words; The reading is 9:16

A thin copy of The Blade sat on the shelf for many years.

The same is true of this collection of short stories, always on the waiting list, never daring to open it.

Too obscure, too old to read.

This turn is in the spirit of learning mentality, want to see how the masters construct short stories.

I was surprised at the first story. When I saw the last sentence at the end of the story, I thought about it for a while and remembered it clearly in my heart: "I go, handsome ~~"

And then went back and looked at it again, and then went back and looked at the other comments in the microread.

Second, still thinking "I go!"

I really love this story.

The description of people, scenes and things is accurate and vivid. It seems that there is no subjective evaluation of the author in the whole text, but it is just an objective description. But between the lines, it can always smack the naughty strength of what the author wants to say and didn't say directly.

The third chapter is very short. When I was watching the plot developing step by step in the direction I expected, I was amused by a sentence written lightly at the end of the chapter.

And it's the same with every one since.

Even after reading the story, there is a basic assumption that Maugham will not follow the formula, that he will bury all kinds of irony and human insight into the words, but after reading each story, it feels wonderful.

For my bad memory, usually there are more than 8 stories in a collection of short stories, and it will become forgotten while reading. If THE title of a short story is obscure again, WHEN I turn over the book and look at the table of contents, some of them can not remember what is said.

There are 23 stories in this book, and by the time I read the last one and turned back to the contents page, almost all of them were accurate in their synopses (the names of the characters, of course, were not).

It's amazing...

It took about 5 days and more than 9 hours to read more than 300,000 words, but I can still recall more than 90% of the synopsis of the story based on the subtitle.

I wonder, how did Maugham do it?

Of course I can't imagine why the author wrote this. So if you were in your normal mind, you'd say, what did the ant bring? As a landlord, or as a neighbor, or as someone around you, you have to take action, but it's not in the text. And if you think that way, and I think about it, it can lead to a loss of value. If the author writes this way, he covers a wider area than he says, and includes what should be in the whole world. This is the power of a writer, a lot of thinking is often beyond a normal person's thinking, people admire.

How do you write an impressive story in 10,000 to 20,000 words and then accurately recall it in three or five words with a title?

To this day, a few days later, I can still recall many of the characters and plot twists in the story when I look at the table of contents while writing notes.