Sunday!

Chris in reply to aaron david says:

I believe it was in the comments to another Sunday! post, in which we were talking about Conrad. Conrad is likely my favorite English-language writer (to the extent that he can be said to have written in English), and I almost always recommend Victory to people who say they are reading something by Conrad (I believe in Aaron’s case it was The Secret Agent, which is also an excellent book). Everyone reads Heart of Darkness, and since the consensus is that Nostramo is his greatest work, people who like Conrad usually read that, along with Lord Jim (my personal favorite) and The Secret Agent (I believe I recmmended Under Western Eyes as a companion to The Secret Agent), but for some reason, they don’t often read Victory, which I think is a shame. It’s in the same vein as Nostramo and Lord Jim (and to a lesser extent Heart of Darkness and N_____ of the Narcissus): psychological novels on an epic scale about flawed heroes with (murky) pasts that have led them outside of the world (which is to say, Europe) and into situations from which we, and likely they, know they cannot escape, and which will ultimately lead to their destruction (if this is a spoiler, you’ve never read Conrad). Victory was written after Conrad’s most productive period, at a time when it was widely believed that his talent was on the wane. I think this may be why it tends to get less attention even today, but it is a masterpiece, a revival of his talent akin to a light bulb becoming brighter just before it burns out completely.

On the content of the book, it contains a love story, as suspenseful and action-packed a climax as you’ll find in a pre-movies novel, and a sort of allegory about modern Europe in the hero’s story, so that there are multiple ways to read it (which is common with Conrad). Like Lord Jim and Nostramo, it has passages so beautiful that you’ll be hard pressed to find their rival in the work of any other English-language novelist, but it has some cheesy dialogue and some messy stylistic elements as well (you’ll probably see some obvious structural parallels to a couple classic works, which at times can feel a little clumsy, though I won’t give them away). I love it flaws and all, and approach it like an ancient statue with pieces broken off: the flaws enhance the beauty of what remains (a metaphor I stole from Pat Barker). So like I said, I recommend it to anyone who likes Conrad.Report