This pictured Penguin edition of W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence seems to be from 1979, with a colorfully collaged but maybe vaguely racist cover. Maugham's 1919 novel focuses on Charles Strickland, a British stockbroker who leaves his comfortable, business-oriented lifestyle to pursue a passion for painting. The story parallels the true quest of Paul Gauguin, though Strickland doesn't really have the same charisma that Gauguin did -- or at least not for me. Like many of Maugham's tales it involves the amiable and neutrally observing Maugham-narrator, who usually happens to stroll into an unfolding major drama and then becomes everyone's confidant. Such as how Mrs. Strickland (Amy) asks our narrator to go find her husband in Paris after he suddenly abandons his family. Our narrator protests, as he often does:
"But I've not spoken ten words to your husband. He doesn't know me. He'll probably just tell me to go to the Devil."
Still, Mrs. Strickland persists even though she doesn't know our narrator too well either, and of course he goes to Paris and beyond and that's how we get our story.
