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The Razor's Edge (Paperback)
서머싯 몸 지음 / Vintage Books / 2003년 9월
평점 : 
나의 고등시절을 함께 했던 성문종합영어의 추억과 W. Somerset Maugham. 그가 천재라는 말이 어느 정도 이해된다. 훌륭한 문체를 통해 이야기를 풀어내는 재주가 일품이다.
소설의 시작은 이러하다:
I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don｀t know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. It is a sound instinct of the common people which persuades them that with this all that needs to be said is said. When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come.
But I leave my reader in the air. This book consists of my recollections of a man with whom I was thrown into close contact only at long intervals, and I have little knowledge of what happened to him in between. I suppose that by the exercise of invention I could fill the gaps plausibly enough and so make my narrative more coherent; but I have no wish to do that. I only want to set down what I know of my own knowledge.
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