This book surely accounts for a pleasant reading. The most alluring aspect of this novel is a truly simplistic yet sophisticated narration by Maugham. His ability to put thoughts into words is quite crude keeping the reader naturally involved right through the end. It’s not some intrigued plot that keeps you hooked but it’s a strange resemblance with ‘life’ that you want to go on reading. This book is primarily about a young man named ‘Larry’ & his quest for god. His spiritual odyssey takes him all over the world. His experience & encounters present the reader with poignant views on the very existence of being & soul, the aatma and it’s oneness with the Absolute. In the course of narrating Larry’s journey, Maugham gives a fascinating glimpse of love & passion via Isabel’s eternal longing for Larry and his love

In my top 10 best reads! Reread few books, but this is one I've enjoyed 3 times now! ( )

My father always raved about Somerset Maugham, and had quite a large collection of his books; the only one that I seem to have kept is a Penguin paperback of The Razor’s Edge. I do remember reading some of Maugham’s journals at one point, and my father was always promoting Maugham’s method of learning how to write by reading a paragraph of a great writer and then trying to reproduce it without looking at the original. It was a method I never tried, but one I can see Maugham might have benefitted from. Now that I have finally gotten around to reading The Razor’s Edge, I am more bewildered than ever as to what made my father admire his work so much. There were quite a few sentences that should have had a razor taken to them. I know there may have been different comma rules back in ’44, but really: he wasn’t trying to be Faulkner, so there’s no excuse really for some of the convolution. Judging from the date of publication, if my father fell for this author it was because he was at that vulnerable point in his life. He also developed his passion for Shakespeare around this time; that love cannot be faulted, even if he did never know quite how to tell the real wisdom from the spurious (i.e., Polonius). I can see that my father would have found that Maugham’s view of women—sexual yes, but their sexuality is life and truth denying—agreed with his own. I wonder he wasn’t concerned that he had so much in common with the views of a homosexual. I wasn’t sure I remembered Maugham’s sexuality correctly as I began reading, but it wasn’t hard to tell from the text. Larry, the central figure, is always described in terms of natural beauty and lightness. Isabel makes herself beautiful through dint of will and good taste, and though he (the Maugham in the text) enjoys looking at her, it is without desire. As one of the critics I read on the web after finishing the book said: the women are essentially rivals.
This was probably not one of my father’s favorites of Maugham: how could it be when the central character was on a religious quest? If he recommended it to me it would have been because he thought I would like it, or perhaps he thought it would show me the error of my ways. After all, Larry gets enlightenment and decides, in the end, to go back to America and drive trucks and taxis. One reader describes the book as being about how Larry affects the lives of those in this social circle, but I would disagree. If anything, it shows how his spiritual quest does not affect anyone’s lives. Of that this spiritual quest is as meaningful as the other pivotal character, Elliott Templeton’s, quest for social status. Yes, everyone does get what he or she wants, and that is essentially meaningless. As I was reading Larry’s adventures in India, I was reminded of Hesse as well as of Isherwood. Didn’t he bring the awareness of Sri Ramakrishna to the West? And he was gay. Others speculate that Isherwood was a model for Larry, but there are other contenders as well. In any case, this is an interesting study of some of the earlier stirrings of interest in Hinduism that blossomed more fully in the 1950s. Just as for TS Eliot, the Great War led to spiritual questing and a turn to Christianity, renewed spirituality in all directions seems to emerge from the horrors of that war.
I also found the book interesting, reading it in 2009, for the way it hinted that the Depression was coming, while the characters all talked blithely and optimistically about American industry and prosperity after WWI. Hindsight, of course, did not require much of Maugham in the way of foreshadowing. It was a bit disappointing, actually, to see the characters all go relatively unscathed by their financial losses, but perhaps the upper classes never really did suffer all that badly. ( )

As one of the most popular authors of the early 20th century, Somerset Maugham made his reputation as storyteller, and this particular story was an interesting departure for him. Being a young man interested in Vedanta (with appetite whetted by the novels of Hesse), I was drawn to this novel and the main character, Larry Darrell (in turn a rumoured portrait of young Christopher Isherwood, who denied the claim), who moves through Parisian expatriate society in the years following the First World War after a period of study in an Indian ashram. Darrell, having attained a degree of transcendence, is drawn into and influences the lives of those around him, a circle which has gathered around the social snob Elliot Templeton. Larry's effect on this group is the subject of the novel.

Whether this novel is any kind of great literature is debateable, but it is most assurably a compelling story in the Maugham mode, with its own share of pathos (poor Sophie! poor lonely forgotten Elliot!). Ultimately a story with eternal appeal for the young, who search for meaning and transcendence amidst the banal. I hope to revisit this story again some day, to see what effect age and experience has upon my enjoyment of it.

Reading Razor’s Edge in rural Japan reminded me of my college days. While reading it and hearing Larry, the supposed seer of that novel, talk about the wonderful clarity of Descartes, or how Kosti, his gruff mining companion, ramble about the mysticism of Plotinus, I let my mind revel in it for a while. After some classes in college, I felt urged on nearer to the truth; our small group of like-minded people would talk over beers about what the professors had said and enjoy it. I miss such conversation here, and this book was a retreat in that regard.

The disconnect between Larry, the seeker, and his gilded age bourgeois milieu is the main conflict in the larger sphere of this novel; however, the deeper conflict is in Larry’s mind. Larry witnessed the banality of death as a pilot in World War I. The following is a quotation that crystallizes what he saw: “the dead look awfully dead.” After, he wants to know God and in doing so find an answer to the problem of evil. However, Larry doesn't explain himself in this way.

His journey takes him mining in the north of France, backpacking through Europe, residing and studying Greek at a university in Bonn, and eventually India. In India, he lives in an ashram. During his time there, in the silence of a forest at sunrise, he gets what we think is enlightenment and asks to leave. This seems like a European version of Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha. However, unlike that book, Maugham who (for all intensive purposes) is the narrator of Razor’s Edge acknowledges implicitly (and rather painfully explicitly) his distance from Larry’s experience and Larry’s character, as a European probably should, but he also has tremendous sympathy for him.

Maugham doesn’t quite get women. His portrait of Isabel is overdone, but doesn’t hit the mark. His portrait of female lust is at times comical. The only love here is between Maugham (the narrator) and Larry. He adores his physical features, he loves talking with him, and his sympathy for him is matched by an understanding of his character. We, the readers, are in the same boat as him. We clamor for more information about Larry, bathe in it, and then wish we had more when Larry passes out of the narration.

This book is in a tradition of Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, The Great Gatsby, Hermann Hesse’s novels (i.e., Steppenwolf), and more recently Norwegian Wood. All these novels are about lonely individuals who try to escape from the torrent overcoming their mind, whether because of religion, lack of self-confidence, an unhappy consciousness, or the pangs of the effects of suicide and unrequited love, respectively. In Razor’s Edge, that torrent, that roadblock, is death. Larry and Maugham’s fudge Hinduism around the corners, but what Maugham and Maugham the author do get, or at least enough the describe it beautifully, is how a person acts once he is free from desire under the path of Karma Yoga.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna: “5.11. The Yogi works for the purification of the soul: he throws off selfish attachment, and thus it is only his body, or his senses, or his mind, or his reason that works. 5.12. The man of harmony surrenders the reward of his work and thus attains final peace: the man of disharmony urged by desire, is attached to his reward and remains in bondage.” Larry works in this way in a scene where he rescues a dying woman from destitution in Paris.

He brings her and her child to a small community in the south of France where he brings them all back to health. He plays with her child, takes them around the community, and animatedly reads Racine plays with the woman by the bank of a river, laughing when she cries at the pathetic parts. All this he does lovingly and with great attention. However, when his time comes to leave, he does so without making a fuss, but departs from their company after giving them money to start over.

She says to Maugham that he was the only person she has met that was completely disinterested. Maybe this is a wrong choice of words: his actions were done lovingly and executed remarkable well and in that regard he was more interested than most people we met, however, he doesn’t claim his work as his and he is not attached to his work. He lets it blossom and lets it pass from his sight.

He is disinterested in the reward and that is why his condition, as we may call it, is incomprehensible to Isabel and the bourgeoisie and while, again, engendering sympathy but just out of sight for Maugham. We may or may not be sympathetic, but educated and adequated by civil society we must honestly admit we don’t understand Larry.