mybookjournal

The Painted Veil is a story about love, betrayal, infidelity and realization! Each character portrayed in this book appeared very real as the story was. Walter a silent and shy person, falls head over heels in love with Kitty. Knowing all her bad qualities he still marries her, anticipating that may be one day she would change herself for him and love him back. But sadly that never happens and soon he finds about her infidelity towards him and forces her to go to a cholera infected place with him, where people are dying daily from that disease. Having no choice left Kitty agrees. While his intention was to take revenge on her, so that, one day she would die from cholera, but life had different plans for Kitty. In that lonely place Kitty learns about love , life, also about joy in serving people she also comes to know what a great man Walter was with whom she was never considerate or loving. The sudden death of Walter really disappointed me a lot, because I always expected this to be a happy ending with realization on both ends. But to my utter shock it was not! Since, I felt that if life would have given some more time to Kitty and Walter, then Kitty might have eventually fallen in love with him. But life has its own way of teaching things!! Finally I accepted this and moved on with the book because, Kitty’s journey towards peace and realization was not yet completed and when at last I read these words from her-

“I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan't make the mistakes I've made. When I look back upon the girl I was I hate myself. But I never had a chance. I'm going to bring up my daughter so that she's free and can stand on her own feet. I´m not going to bring a child into the world, and love her, and bring her up, just so that some man may want to sleep with her so much that he's willing to provide her with board and lodging for the rest of her life.”

I was satisfied that finally she did learn her lesson though in hardest way possible, yet she did! It’s really difficult to love and hate a character at the same time but really it was inevitable in the case of Kitty Fane. Her stupidity and her lack of maturity really got on my nerves, however I still could not hate her! I absolutely loved W. Somerset Maugham’s writing. It was so neat, to the point with no sluggish part.

After finishing the book I also happened to watch the movie and felt as if- Why did I ever had to watch this movie and just could not be satisfied with the book? No, the movie was definelty not awful, in fact it was like how I wanted this book to be, but still I was unable to like it as much as I loved the book because the movie did not do any justice to the character and their real feelings which was portrayed in this book. It just stole the essence of the book. :(