The novel, based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin, is a very absorbing and easy read. Maugham's style has such fluidity that you can read the entire book with great interest in a single day. The main character, Charles Strickland, gives up a comfortable life of a financier to pursue his passsion for painting. Strickland is a man possessed, who is willing to sacrifice his well being and that of his family to fulfill the call of his inner voice to paint his vision of the world.

I like the novel and highly recommend it, but I do have a few criticisms. First, Strickland is portrayed as too inhuman, which makes the character unrealistic. Many artists are driven and single-minded, but Maugham is so concerned in making his Strickland appear a hard and uncompromising creator that he makes him crude. Strickland is taciturn, though he occasionally spouts Nietzshean phrases and tries to project Nietzschean haughty indifference to everything except his art. Not surprisingly, Strickland is condescending toward women and does not hesitate to let us know about it in his rare but obnoxious commentary. If the real Gauguin, or any artitst of significance, were as incensitive as Strickland, he would not be able to feel and to paint what he did. And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with Maugham's novel. He started from a stereotype and ended with the main character who was not particularly compelling.

Obviously the book tells a story based on the life of the famous painter Paul Gauguin but it is also a projection of Maugham's thoughts and desires. In fact his main character, Charles Strickland, is exactly like Maugham would like to be because he sacrifies everyone and everything just to follow his inner vision, which is to paint. He doesn't care about society he doesn't care about material things, he just lives for ideas and is indifferent to everything else. That's according to some philosophers, the true and only way to be an artist and I think that it is also Maugham's opinion about it. Therefore he created a figure who is nothing but his ideal picture of himself, as he did not have the courage and the force to live it in reality, probably due to his constant fear of losing all social relations. It's a really good book which could give you, the reader, the force to realize yourself and to do only what you really like and give up everything else to reach your aim.

It has been noted many times that artists are usually not the most pleasant human beings to be around; Maugham's novel is, among other things, a compelling examination of why this is so. The obsessed artist who dominates this book, Charles Strickland (based on the notorious Paul Gauguin), walks away from his cushy middle-class existence in England to pursue his dream to paint, amid frightful poverty, in France. Strickland is an unforgettable character, an inarticulate, brutishly sensual creature, callously indifferent to his fellow man and even his own health, who lives only to record his private visions on canvas.

It would be a mistake to read this novel as an inspiring tale of the triumph of the spirit. Strickland is an appalling human being--but the world itself, Maugham seems to say, is a cruel, forbidding place. The author toys with the (strongly Nietzschean) idea that men like Charles Strickland may somehow be closer to the mad pulse of life, and cannot therefore be dismissed as mere egotists. The moralists among us, the book suggests, are simply shrinking violets if not outright hypocrites. It is not a very cheery conception of humanity (and arguably not an accurate one), but the questions Maugham raises are fascinating. Aside from that, he's a wonderful storyteller. This book is a real page turner.