I finished Somerset Maugham's "Don Fernando," which was Maugham's personal favorite of all the books he wrote. Various musings from Maugham on Spain - its literature, food, religion, El Greco, and its way of life and people.

Swear words, sexual references, hate speech, discriminatory remarks, threats, or references to violence William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. This work is different from his others in that it is a travelogue with history thrown in. And how. Only he could be extremely serious but conversational. This book is all about Spain and it’s cultural and social history. A real deep dive into the daily lives of kings and queens and the folks in the villages. An exposition of how their daily lives were across areas such as food literature and relationships. This has a lot of his views on art expounded in great detail. I learnt about a new genre of ‘picaresque’ novels. Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.

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The section on El Greco and Cervantes were real eye openers. He speaks a lot about how art just for admiration means nothing unless the beholder’s emotion translates into doing great things ( .... probably for others I guess ).Now. I have had better tapas. And I have eaten in more modern and prettier restaurants. But this place has been here for ages. And will probably still be here for many more years. Tried and trusted. Somerset Maugham is my favourite author, but this is very untypical. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to someone new to Maugham, in fact, I wouldn’t recommend it at all! I found it to be Maugham's weakest book - in fact it's so all over the place as to be little more than an unfocused notebook.