A DJ acquaintance of mine recommended this book to me saying it better captured than anything else the artist's need to create art at any cost. Maybe there was something to it; said acquaintance has gone on to forge a successful DJ career.

Story is based on the life of painter Gauguin, but Maugham invents a lot of dramatic flourishes to make his artist character a bit more extreme than the real Gauguin was (not to say that Gauguin wasn't plenty extreme).

I always get suspicious when writers base things on truth only to conveniently depart from that from time to time in order to make some kind of a point. One can argue that such exaggeration makes the truth clearer, but one can also say that exaggeration is just specious argumentation--a method for driving square pegs of "insight" into round holes of reality. Short version: if you're makin' it up, how is it "True"?

Still, this is an enjoyable musing on art, and it's a brisk little read. Would likely make good beach reading next time you're in Tahiti.