The metastasizing absurdities of life hit him like a ton of bricks and accelerate the spinning circle of depression and aloofness. Painting for Strickland becomes some sort of a zahir, an objective, a kind of madness, but the road to achieving it is paved with difficulties and innumerable odds. The novel remains a testament to the human spirit. Published in 1919, this novel continues to resonate with bibliophiles even today for its compassionate and sensitive study of the psyche of a genius for whom creativity takes precedence over everything in life. Somerset Maugham’s famous novel, The Moon and Sixpence, the central protagonist, forty-year-old Charles Strickland, who is a stockbroker by profession, refuses to embrace the seduction of certainty that his boring and unexciting job affords him he tries to snap out of an existential vacuum that eats him up from within in the end, the painter, stricken with leprosy, dies a tragic death, but not before painting his magnum opus. What happens when a happily married middle-aged man decides to abandon his family and pursue his passion to become a painter? In W.
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