The Painted Veil

I started reading The Painted Veil a few weeks ago and almost immediately fell in love with the story and this wonderfully written language. I've just picked it back up after setting it down for a bit and keep getting enraptured by Kitty's relationship with her husband after her adulterous affair, the cholera epidemic in the land they've uprooted to, and author W. Somerset Maugham's beautiful ability to describe the smallest detail with such poignancy.

"But the river, though it flowed so slowly, had still a sense of movement and it gave one a melancholy feeling of the transitoriness of things. Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty that they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy."

Have you ever read it? I cannot wait to finish it so I can borrow the film and spend a quiet evening getting lost in it all over again.

Image: mmorrow.tumblr.com