THE SUMMING UP

Instead of leaving an autobiography, the wonderful but very private playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham decided near the end of his life to "sum up" what he had learned from a life of reading and writing. The result can be read with profit by any writer on the order of once a year, and with pleasure by any lover of books and good writing. The reader here, Charlton Griffin, has a stilted, plummy delivery, in which he seems to be playing a character he conceives to be Somerset Maugham, rather than presenting a text, and this leads to some hilarious juxtapositions, as of the cultured Oxbridge accent rendering Nietzsche as "Nyetske" and Rochefoucauld as "Roshefooso." But the book is a treasure. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC/ JAN 02]