While I'm in my Somerset Maugham mood, allow me to introduce you to "Rain", arguably his best short story and a sardonic classic tale by a writer whom many critics chose to call a cynic.
He was rather unapologetic about it when he wrote, ‘But if to look truth in the face and not resent it when it is unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it is absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it is pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I am a Cynic. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to weep’.
Like the fabled Pied Piper or Queen Scheherazade from Arabian Nights, his stories draw you into a world that you never want to leave till the show is over, so go ahead and watch this movie or read the story and be taken away to the cloistered environment of the islands, reinforced by the relentless rain that pours throughout the day.
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P.S. Hooked? Read also German Harry, The Outstation, The Lotus Eater, and Red.
