Up at the Villa
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780099478324 (0099478323)
Publish date: January 25th 2005
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Pages no: 128
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Novels,
Literature,
European Literature,
British Literature,
Cultural,
Italy,
Historical Fiction,
Classic Literature,
Literary Fiction,
20th Century,
Mystery
A short bonbon from Maugham. Maugham himself calls it a novelette, but it's really a novella, 30,364 words (I counted them). Anyway, a young and fabulously beautiful widow, Mary Panton, has gotten away from London and memories of a bad marriage and is living in the Italian villa of some friends, in ...
Wow, Maugham seems to have written this in a hurry - was it my bad edition or his hastiness that had Edgar brown-eyed at the beginning of the book and blue-eyed by the end of it? Anyway, a rather shallowish, yellowish sort of novel. I can't bring myself to give less than 3 stars, but this was not th...
A charming novella about a widowed socialite on holiday at her friend's villa in Florence, Italy. Not widowed for long Mary Panton has another potential husband on the horizon. Edgar Swift a life long friend of the family and quite the older man visits Mary at the villa to propose marriage before h...
If I needed to sum up this book in a phrase (I'm not sure what such an occasion might be) I would be torn between going with "It seemed like a good idea at the time" and (if I were in a meme-mood) a solid "Well that escalated quickly".
I remember being in a café with a friend once when a guy walked in who obviously had some kind of mild disability to do with his legs – he hobbled over to a table and sat down heavily, and then looked around him at the greasy spoon with an air of deep depression. Amy stared at him and sighed and sai...