Joseph Conrad

Victory (Penguin Classics)

Will Vunderink

Joseph Conrad's output as a novelist and short-story writer is enviable by any measure, especially considering the fact that he didn't learn the language that he wrote in until his twenties. His best novels -- Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim -- are windows onto the human spirit at its outer limit, where it comes face to face with its ultimate antagonist: the harsh, godless, largely unknowable world. (I say "world" rather than "universe" because Conrad's characters engage with their surroundings physically rather than metaphysically.) This central theme manifests itself in explorations of the consequences of civilization/society intruding upon the wild/the unknown -- or, as colonialists would have it, "savagery," colonialism being in Conrad's day the concrete example of that intrusion.

Conrad is not usually labeled an existentialist, but his novels depict a world devoid of a higher power and capital-m Meaning. None of his characters are heroic; they must simply react to the overwhelming, confounding world around them. (Conrad's narrators mediate this worldview, of course; it's worth remembering that his novels often contain several layers of narration.) Conrad consistently captures the particular hopelessness and absurdity of human existence. He also happens to write beautifully.

That being said, Victory completely misses the mark. The characters are two-dimensional and their motivations are not believable; the prose tries too hard to be lyrical and ends up stilted; the plot is silly. The theme of a man's detachment from life and humanity is compelling, and has been allegorized many ways in many novels. In Victory that theme is literalized to an absurd degree, and Conrad must introduce a plot that is simply not convincing to disrupt (inevitably; see my first paragraph) his protagonist's quest for that detachment. 

This is the only book by Conrad that did not compel me to read it nonstop. For a novelist as accomplished as he is, that's quite a feat.

Maurice FitzGerald

In some ways Joseph Conrad makes SInclair Lewis look like Theodore Drieser

Victory (Penguin Classics)

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