This is one of those books that anybody who has been through high school should have been exposed to. I remember being assigned this book as a junior or senior and bluffing my way through without really reading it. I even got a literature degree without reading it. Finally, after many years, I felt that I should give the novel its due, and picked up a copy. <p> The novel is the story of Jim, an overly romantic seaman, who during a moment of crisis loses his courage. He is first mate on a...
Dark allegory describes the narrators journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, psychological penetration. Considered by many Conrads finest, most enigmatic story. <p> This is a high quality book of the original classic edition. <p> This is a freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now,...
Conrad is my favorite 20th century author, so I am biased. Compare him to Tolstoy and you are on the money. Both lived lives that gave them fodder for their fiction; Tolstoy as a soldier in the Crimean war, an aristocrat facing the turbulence of the political and social upheavals of fin-de-siecle Russia, and Conrad as a mariner and a Polish transplant who carved out a language and a career for himself in England. <p> Nostromo contains some of the most vividly realized characterization,...
Joseph Conrads 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, is a difficult little book. Its story is difficult and its characters are largely unpleasant. By difficult and unpleasant, I dont mean to say the novel isnt any good. Far from it. These terms I mean to denote the impenetrability of motive, of sense. The story of a group of anarchists, police, and a family caught in the middle in late Victorian England, The Secret Agent is far from Conrads subtitle, A Simple Tale. The novel, for me, is about hatred,...
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.‘They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic – to terror, too, perhaps.’Considered one of Conrad’s most political works, The Secret Agent is set against the dismal backdrop of a drab and alienating London, and tells the story of the bombing of Greenwich Observatory by a group of...