A novel that literary critics have been arguing over for decades, yet still can’t agree on whether the story of the tragic life and death of the English artist Strickland can be considered a kind of “unauthorized biography” of Paul Gauguin. Behind the relationships between the characters, the clashes of their aspirations, passions, and temperaments, Maugham’s work clearly reveals an artistic and philosophical analysis of the “eternal” themes of world literature: the meaning of life, love, death, the essence of beauty, and the purpose of art.