Theatre – William Somerset Maugham

This was the first book by Somerset Maugham that I read. I’m not exactly rushing to read another one. Many would say that I should have picked one of his more seminal books, but this was the only one I had handy, and there are plenty of cases in which I loved minor novel(la)s of great writers. This just wasn’t one of those.

Having seen Eve Against Eve I think I had enough of the whims of glorious (or glorified?) actresses before even starting to read this. The book is undeniably well-written, nobody can say otherwise, and I understand why many people might find it a good read. I like theatre a fair bit, although not having been raised in Britain I’m not as crazy about it as many of the people around me are, and this is probably the reason why I ultimately saw very little point in this book.

Mephisto – Klaus Mann

For years, I thought that Mephisto was just a critically acclaimed movie (which I owned and never watched, clearly) – then a friend gave me this as a birthday present, because it was his father’s favourite book, and the rise of Nazism and all that. In one go I found out that the movie was taken from a book, and that Thomas Mann had a son who could also write, although not as well as him.

The book is a great and fairly quick read. It is fascinating, in particular when one thinks that it was published in 1936, at a time in which the rest of Europe hadn’t yet understood the full depravity of the Nazi regime. It’s a metaphor of the entire German society in the 20’s and 30’s, but I’m not excessively fond of ground-sweeping generalizations, so I prefer to read this book as a demonstration of the fickleness of over-ambitious people, ready to compromise on all their principles (which, probably, they often don’t have in the first place).