W.S.Maugham "In a Strange Land”

W.S.Maugham "In a Strange Land”

Interpretation

Born in Paris, of Irish ancestry, Somerset Maugham was to lead a fascinating life and would become famous for his mastery of short evocative stories that were often set in the more obscure and remote areas of the British Empire. Suffering from a bad stammer, he received a classic public school education at King's school in Canterbury, Kent. Rather more unconventionally he studied at Heidelburg university where he read philosophy and literature. He then studied in London, eventually qualifying as a surgeon at St Thomas's hospital. He conducted his year's medical practice in the slums of the East End. It was here that he found material for his first, rather lurid, novel Liza of Lambeth in 1897 and much of the material for his critically acclaimed autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage although this wasn't to be published until 1915.

Continuing with more peacable travels, Maugham took to the South Seas, where he visited the island of Tahiti and on which he based his novel The Moon and Sixpence. Sickness would then force Maugham to return and remain in a Scottish tubercoulosis sanatorium. However, on recovery, he returned to the Far East and collected imperial information and experiences that would form the basis of many short stories, plays and novels: East of Suez in 1922, Our Betters in 1923 and The Letter in 1927, are amongst the better known of these.

I think the title has only direct meaning, dealing with a foreign country which is unfamiliar and odd to you. The main character observed the behavior of old English who leave their native land.

The story touches upon many problems, but the major one, in my opinion, is love without borders.

The narrator  stood at the hotel in Turkey where he met Signore Niccolini - an  English woman. She was a house-keeper in service in a noble English family, and her husband Signor Niccolini was a chef. Later the couple bought a hotel and after many years she continued living there but without the husband. Signor Niccolini had died and his wife adopted his sons and she never returned back to England. This story shocked the narrator because it was strange for him to get accustomed to a place and lost the contact with the relatives.

The main idea of the story is connected with the fact that one should know one's roots. It is impossible to grow into the foreign culture fully. Origin would give oneself away.

I would like to tell about Signora Niccolini; she was an Englishwoman, living in Turkey for many years. She described directly. She looked exactly like a house-keeper in a great English house. She looked upon everyone who wasn’t English as a foreigner and therefore as someone, almost imbecile, for whom allowances must be made. She ruled her staff despotically, and everything about the hotel was clean and neat. Signora Niccolini speak Turkish very well but her cockney accent made her quite recognized for the narrator.

The story seems to me very interesting, because of the way it is organized and the number of the themes that are mentioned there.

When you are in love with someone who belongs to your usual environment, you somehow know them and things are easier. However, when you fall in love with a stranger—who may even be a foreigner—things are quite different. People that have a mentality influenced by traditions are different from people that are dominated by modernism for example, and if you are in love with someone who belongs to a family with a mentality totally different to yours, things will be quite difficult between you two. What is really important in a relationship is the other person’s personality. If their personality fits with yours, you’ll be happy!

However, if you are in love with a foreigner, you’ll have more obstacles and difficulties in order to find out who they really are, because of all the problems we have already examined and many others. So, do your best in order to learn everything you can about the unknown person before getting too involved with them, without really understanding who you are with.