I agree. Always loved Maugham too, in fact I have two big books of his short stories. It was a great discovery to find this channel and listen to riveting tales like "The Letter" and the famous "Rain".
@@glendabarton1914 I never realised how much Maugham's ASHENDEN influenced Graham Greene and John le Carre. WSM virtually invented the espionage genre with the cynical realities of wartime spying. Maugham worked for the nascent MI6 in Russia 1917. RUSSIAN ROULETTE by Giles Milton tells the story brilliantly, for anyone partial to non-fiction.
Perfection hearing them read aloud. My favorite Maugham stories resonate with a sort of twanging chord of emotions, usually in the final frame / reframe.
Thank you for posting this again with the missing conclusion included. I hope you'll take down the other video so viewers won't get the unpleasant surprise some of us got when we played it. This is a very good story, thanks again!
I would enjoy the story a whole lot more if you didn't keep breaking it up virtually in the middle of sentences with endless commercials. For god sakes what has happened to RU-vid
If you are able to afford RU-vid Premium, I HIGHLY recommend the paid subscription. YT would be unwatchable for me without it. It has a LOT of benefits, including the ability to download programs, movies, podcasts, etc to your phone and/or tablet without commercials. Granted, some shows have “sponsors” whereby the host narrates a commercial, but those can be fast forwarded through. Also included is access to 15 million songs on YT Music. I have the family plan for around $32.00 (US). All 5 of us (in 3 different homes) have our own profiles with different sign-ins. A single plan would be a good bit less.
You have to pay $13.99/month to get rid of the commercials, and I , for one, think it's worth every penny. This is the only subscription I have. All the classical music and literature read to me with no interruptions that I can stand for less than $15 a month!
I posted a reply to this video about the excessive commercials when it was posted. I explained all about Premium RU-vid and it being worth every penny (as did the other replier) to get rid of the commercials. My reply was deleted by someone . . . I’m assuming the channel owner.
He certainly did. His language is always beautiful and his observation of people and their behaviour is always pleasing. SM’s short stories offer an endless parade of relationships and situations - endless because, by the time you get to the end of the two volumes of his short stories you are ready to start at the beginning again! He travelled extensively and listened everywhere to the local gossip and tragic tales that were the basis of his stories. I’m so pleased to have been able to sit in the quiet bars and lounges of the grand hotels he stayed at and imagine him there, listening, while sipping a Singapore Sling in Raffles (it would more likely have been a gin and tonic!!), or cocktails in The Oriental in Bangkok, the Peninsula in Hong Kong or Aggie Grey’s in Apia. The fact these are obviously narrated with AI means the inflection is sometimes a little off, and sometimes the irony or other sentiment is lost, it is at least a nice clear voice that one can imagine might be SM’s own!
My very favourite author , it's such a delight to find your channel , and such a romantic and yet heartbreaking story , so beautifully narrated , thank you ♥️
In this story in particular, his sympathy for other human beings, and his willingness to make allowances for their shortcomings is to the fore. He tells you simple but key facts about his characters - without crudely steering you to a particular point of view, and the end result is that you can put yourself in their shoes, imagining whether you could have done anything different.
@@lshwadchuck5643 until he had to say „pa“ as in American father - he said p.a. As in personal assistant in one of the stories - dead give away and bubonay instead of dubonnet the drink of the English queen. An English person, his voice being English, would know this
Apparently the AI voice has been „borrowed“ from the great narrator Simon Stanhope, who has his own YT channel. Despite the questionable ethics of that, this is the best AI I‘ve ever listened to.
Oh! Maugham wrote often of alcoholics, with no judgement and great compassion. His portraits of alcoholics are all drawn from observation, not romanticism. Amazing writing, so wonderfully read. Thank you for posting.
Sounds like an AI narrator lol. Clickay? Clique. A casual death after a not so casual long affair. The only love that lasts forever is unrequited love.
Yes, AI . The little glitches can be disconcerting ! But if not for AI , we probably wouldn't have the pleasure of listening to Maugham's incomparable language read aloud to us.
@@stellaburnell7947 My imagination overrides the AI tone, and the words carry their own magic, and I let the storyline unfold. I am glad to listen to these audiobooks.
This one is somehow similar to his other work, The Letter, love chinese woman, death, detectives that are also too human etecetera. I somewhat understand how I am easily persuaded to feel certain ways by dancing with the language used to lay down plots.
I've read that Maugham used to travel around those exotic places in tramp steamers with his partner Gerald Haxton . He (Gerald) was a very outgoing person, much more so than Maugham, and he would socialise with anybody and everybody on board , soaking up all the interesting stories. He'd later tell Maugham all the juicy tales, and Maugham would then turn them into his short stories. I also found "The Letter" very much like "A Casual Affair" - maybe they were both inspired by the same story heard by Gerald, all those years ago.
@@stellaburnell7947 Great stuff. That is another way of giving humans a point to view from how we have a lot in common than the stuff that segments humanity and creates disorder. Live well from here,I keep saying to myself after a good read that stirs the me. Suffering to man can be caused by love and most of us are all here looking for it ignoring other aspects of life that can create love, which is not in the word. Thanks for your response.
*Spoilers** It can be hard to parse out the meaning of SM's short stories for Americans. We don't live in a monarchy that was coming out of Victorian morality after a thousand years of feudalism. That's something we read about in history books. We don't appreciate how powerful the aristocracy was in 1939 when, A Casual Affair, was written. Nevertheless, we have read the history books and Maugham's message is somewhat straight forward. Nations make laws and then there are eternal natural laws. The way that people live within that framework becomes the accepted Norm against which people should be judged. When two people achieve a lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers, but because they are people who can fit their love into the norms of the society they live in. Other people may not be a part of their relationship, but other people will judge whether the two lovers were fair-minded and self-possessed enough to show a proper respect for the opinions of others around them. But now we have to view this in regard to the story. There are few human emotions that make the kind of bold claims on us as the euphoria that accompanies falling in love. Romeo said that 'with love's light wings do I o'erperch these walls.' A person in love believes that they, like Romeo, can o'erperch the foundational walls on which society is built. Jack thought that if he worked to establish even a modest livelihood, Lady K would chuck everything in her world to "live thirty miles from nowhere." Therefore, he left his promising career for the back-and-beyond and worked joyfully for five years because Jack was delusional. All who knew Jack understood this. They were not going to sacrifice their careers to support making a peer of the realm look foolish. Lord K had massive power and influence and would have struck back at any 'Jack supporters' like an enraged tiger. They all marveled that Jack hadn't figured this out "when it was fresh." To others, those five years were an inexplicable gap. During Jack's six month visit to England this was made crystal clear. When Jack tried to play on the Polo team, he was shocked to find that he wasn't welcomed. Lady K swapped her love letters for his and gave Jack a gold cigarette case -- the traditional gift when saying goodbye to your gigolo. At last, the scales fell from his eyes, he saw himself through the eyes of others. And he judged himself by the mores of English society, he was a lothario. To die in a squalled dump was a just and proper end. Two further points remain. First any society that lessens the life-long bond of marriage by tolerating infidelity and promoting sexual promiscuity under the guise of equality, is a society that must always be, in the long run, a society adverse to women. Women, whatever a few male songs and satires may say to the contrary, are more naturally monogamous than men. It is a biological necessity. Where promiscuity prevails, they will always be more often the victims than the culprits. Secondly, domestic happiness is more necessary to women than to men. The quality by which they most easily hold a man, their beauty, decreases every year after they have come to maturity. Qualities of personality endure, beauty does not. Thus, in the ruthless war of promiscuity women are at a double disadvantage they play for higher stakes and are also more likely to lose. This may sound like splitting hairs, but if people establish a right to sexual happiness which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behavior, they do so not because of what their passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes to be while we are in the grip of it. Hence, while the bad behavior is real and works miseries and degradations. The happiness which was the object of the behavior turns out again and again to be illusory.
The more I listen to these stories, The more the narrator sounds like a robot. Great narrating by all means. Also some of the language use referring to others are deeply disturbing.
Funny thing is that under all S. M. stories I've listened to so far here, there are comments about the strory. This one the only one without such a story discussion. Nothing to discuss or something else?
