Den brokiga vävnaden or The Painted Veil by Sommerset Maugham

A strange coming of age story about Kitty who is married off with a bacteriologist named Walter Fane. In his forward to the book Somerset Maugham retells how he had to change the fictional name Lane to Fane and how later on he encountered difficulties because the story seemed too familiar to some Englishmen abroad in the Chinese colonies. The author says that he was inspired to write this story because of a medieval story that was retold to him on a writing trip to Italy. I wondered if I might find that story in the Decameron and throughout the read i frequently thought about Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait and Lucrecia much like Marguerite in Karolina Ramqvist, Björnkvinnan (both of witch I've read). These post-modern female writers wrote their mediaeval ladies as conquerors of death unlike their time portrays them, as did Maugham in his time with the story of the painted veil. That's ultimately what intrigued me to read this book; the survival of her, despite plague (cholera in the case of The Painted Veil) and despite men, both lovers and husbands. There is much that I like about this book but ultimately it deals with the mother wound and in the end, when Kitty is alone she envisions a different future for her daughter, rightly so. I really liked how he wrote the nuns and the life of the monastery and I was much intrigued by the funny character Waddington, it seemed that from a male perspective, he had life figured out. The story accentuates that in a man's world, a woman must come to terms with her own being through many sufferings which occur naturally to her in systems that prefer the other sex. A four out of five star review for the fact that Maugham's melancholy tune is perhaps not so much to my likening but the story floats, oh more than that, it comes safely to harbor and lives on.