An Island Tale

I seem to have spent ages re-reading Joseph Conrad's Victory: An Island Tale in preparation for another study guide. It's one of his longer novels, and the experience was punctuated by hot sunshine and (brief) periods of swimming. The story has all the usual complexities of Conrad's fragmented time schemes and oblique manner of narration - but the story itself is a tense thriller. The Swedish recluse Axel Heyst rescues a beautiful young woman and takes her to a remote island. He's pursued by two criminals: one wants his money, and the other wants the girl. There's a gripping showdown when he faces them (unarmed) and all hell is let loose.

Henry James in Andalucia

Just enjoying another reading 'week' here in Mijas, and I have to report that my production quotient has been higher than normal because of unusually bad weather. Some days it's been impossible to move out of the house. But with my trusty book bag alongside, I've managed to get to grips with Daisy Miller (so to speak) plus her fictional sisters in his stories Pandora and The Patagonia. There've also been excursions into boys-stuff Joseph Conrad, with The Secret Sharer and The Shadow-Line. More to come too from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy - but that will depend on the weather.

Joseph Conrad and the novella

Joseph Conrad explored just about every genre of prose fiction. He wrote novels, long and short stories, travel books, memoirs, essays, and even experimented with collaborative writing. But the genre in which he seems to be most comfortable and in which he created some of his most carefully crafted works is the novella. This is a work which is longer than a story but shorter than a novel. But it's not just a matter of length. The novella usually has very few characters, the events of the narrative are concentrated on a single issue, and that issue itself is usually of universal rather than just local or temporary significance.

A short story may be based on no more than an anecdote, whereas a novella deals with large scale general themes. A novel can have a cast of dozens and feature multiple locations, whereas a novella can have just two or even one main character, and the setting is likely to remain focussed in one place.

We've just posted study guides to two of Conrad's best novellas, both of them based on his own experiences as a young sea captain. The Shadow-Line deals with the character-building drama of a ship which is becalmed with a sick crew, and The Secret Sharer explores notions of 'the double' and 'alternative selves' when a young captain allows a murderer to hide on board his ship.

More on the novella here

False Readings

Many years ago, in a search for direction with literary studies, I read a guide which recommended Madame Bovary as one of the greatest romantic love stories. I dashed out and bought a copy, and couldn't understand the disjunction between what I was looking for and what was being delivered. It was anything but romantic. I was reading the right novel - but with the wrong preconceptions. Flaubert wrote it as an anti-romantic novel. The same thing happened when I read Moby Dick, commended by the same guide as 'a gripping chase of the Great White Whale'. After six hundred pages, I was wondering when this chase would ever begin.

And now fifty years later, the same thing has just happened in reverse. I decided to re-read Joseph Conrad's famous novella The Secret Sharer, got my copy of a well-edited text from Amazon, and started making notes on 'the double', ambiguities of 'sharing', youthful maturing experiences, and so on. But I was puzzled by the amount of time it was taking the escaping swimmer Leggat to appear alongside. I was half way through the book, and the captain had only just boarded his new command. Then I realised I was reading not The Secret Sharer but The Shadow Line. Right approach - wrong book. Doh!

Joseph Conrad's 'Nostromo'

This is generally regarded by most Conrad commentators as his greatest novel. It embraces wide ranging themes of political struggle, international capitalism, the expansion of Europe and the United States into Latin America, various forms of personal heroism and sacrifice, and the dreams and obsessions which can lead people to self destruction. The location of the novel is Costaguana, a fictional country on the western seaboard of South America, and the focus of events is in its capital Sulaco, where a silver mine has been inherited by English-born Charles Gould but is controlled by American capitalists in San Francisco. Competing military factions plunge the country in a state of civil war, and Gould tries desperately to keep the mine working. Amidst political chaos, he dispatches a huge consignment of silver, putting it into the hands of the eponymous hero, the incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores, Nostromo... Read more >>

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Reading Week

I'm going back in time in my literary tastes this month - back to some texts I first encountered as an undergraduate.To begin with, I started re-reading Nostromo as part of a site update at Joseph Conrad. Then I ordered Literature and Revolution and The Unforgiving Years from Amazon to add to my pages on Victor Serge. And a biography of Peggy Guggenheim, Henry Petroski's Small Things Considered, and a collection of theoretical documents, The Tradition of Constructivism will fill in some gaps in my design pages.

I've been out into three public places today - a cafe, a solicitor's office, and a bank - and I have been warmly greeted by name in each one. Can you imagine that in the UK? I don't think so.

A Smile of Fortune - Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad is essentially a nineteenth century writer who anticipated and then lived into the modernist age of the early twentieth century, helping to shape its spirit of uncertainty, anxiety, and moral ambiguity. Even his own life and works share the contradictions of the era. He is best known as an author of mannish sea tales, yet he only achieved success with a novel set entirely on dry land which had a woman as its central character (Flora Barral in Chance). He is now regarded as a great figure in the tradition of the English novel, yet he was Polish, and English was his third language. He's also regarded as something of a conservative, yet his political views were scathingly radical (see The Secret Agent).

A Smile of Fortune comes from his mature period (1911) and features the familiar Conradian device of a young sea captain who is confronted by a puzzling ethical dilemma. The first person narrator is a confirmed bachelor given to a philosophic approach to life, but whom Conrad cleverly makes vulnerable to the duplicities of the more experienced people around him... Read more >>

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Guide to Joseph Conrad

This comes from a new series by Routledge which offers comprehensive but single-volume introductions to major English writers. They are aimed at students of literature, but are accessible to general readers who might like to deepen their literary understanding.The approach taken could not be more straightforward. Part one is a potted biography of Conrad, placing his life and work in its socio-historical context. Thus we get his early life in Poland, his career as a seaman, his influences and ambitions, and his (relatively slow) rise to fame as a novelist. One of the interesting features of Conrad's development as a writer is that his early novels were largely adult versions of boy's adventure stories, but as his work became richer he tackled themes of intense political complexity. Read Heart of Darkness today and you would swear it had been written quite recently... Read more >>

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