Victory: An Island Tale (Penguin Classics)

The book is a bit wordy and took me a long time to grow a bit interested however I could have easily put this book down at any point in the story and never returned to it without a second thought. I did finish it though....it was a struggle but I did.It's set in a tropical location so the beachy vibes are nice enough but it wasn't enough to really keep me wanting to pick the book up again.I was completely indifferent to every character which made the story fairly boring. There wasn't even a character that inspired me to greatly dislike him/her enough for me to want to see some vengeance.3 stars is probably WAY too generous but I am in-between books in the Outlander series (I like having an unrelated buffer book to read between the books of a series) and the Outlander books are FAR more riveting so maybe the stark contrast is what has me being so hard on this book.Give this book a go if you have nothing better to do or read. It's not TERRIBLE but it's not great.

I did not finish reading yet but I am a fan of Conrad. He is a basic, a classic of the twentieth century, a soul reader, a narrator of human weaknesses and strengths. All these traits he deals with in a very interesting, rich, prose. His works can be read as simple tales, descriptions, and narrations but they truly give room to a deeper understanding of human souls.

The book came in new condition with no damage.

The plot moves way too slow. There is nothing really that profound either about this book which is supposed to be a classic. It's over-rated. The character development is lame also.

generally I didn't care for Conrads writing

Joseph Conrad writes long, boring sea stories where the word count is pushed up when nothing happens. This is not one of those. This one the writing is taught and the action is quick. This one will have you on the edge of your seat.The hero, and he is a hero because of what he does, is your typical Conrad protagonist. He is the detritus of a grand scheme which fails, and he lives on an island which had been the headquarters of the grand scheme. He goes to civilization once in a while for supplies and mail. And on his last visit he does something heroic.He stays at the one hotel, which is run by a monster. The Hero has in some weird way has offended the monster, who hates him. No good reason, he just does. Maybe he sees his nature, and compares it to his own and hates him for that reason'The monster, in order to drum up business, has hired a female orchestra. A bunch of women who go from place to place. The monster has decided he wants to seduce a violinist in the orchestra, who sees him for what he is, and wants nothing to do with him. He conspires with the orchestra leader to get her to his bed, but our hero has run off with the violinist.While the two of them make beautiful music together the monster hotel keeper seethes with frustration.A card sharp comes to the hotel, and the card sharp terrifies the monster hotel keeper. Who tells the card sharp that the hero has a ton of cash squirreled away. He convinces him to go to the island of beautiful music, and that is where the action begins.This book is A very fast read. A very good read. It is not a happy ending, but a logical one. Typical Conrad story, told in an untypical style.

I read this book in the 2015 Penguin Classics edition based on a glowing review in the TLS. I wanted to settle into a classic “literary” novel without any connection to my work. The edition is fine. The prosecraft is impressive. The book is just awful.Maybe it’s the strong influence of the canon of literature taught to English majors, with its dogma that Conrad is one of the greats, or maybe it’s just because English majors and lit professors don’t know much about Asia, but I’m surprised that there isn’t a larger percentage of reviews and academic comment pointing out this book’s bigotry. Most discussions of Conrad’s racial attitudes focus on “Heart of Darkness,” but there is plenty here. Wang, a Chinese servant with a face of “inscrutable immobility” (III.chap. 2), is the subject of innumerable generalizations of how Chinese behave — including not only an ability to find money in a house, but also an “instinct” to grow vegetables (III.chap. 1). He speaks in the same ludicrous pidgin as a white 1960s comedian playing the owner of a laundry. But at least he speaks: Pedro, a Colombian “alligator hunter” with fangs, is a hirsute subhuman, barely capable even of articulating Spanish. Ricardo, one of the main antagonists, is a cupidinous, uncouth, cat-like cutthroat from the British lower classes (and with a foot fetish, to boot). He is continually hatching schemes to take other peoples’ money. The Penguin editor’s notes remark that “Ricardo would be an unusual surname for an Englishman,” but omit to mention a rather famous 19th Century Ricardo from England, also rather interested in economics. Whether Conrad would have considered him an Englishman is a fine question, because that Ricardo, a hugely successful financial speculator and a leading philosopher of capitalistic international trade, was also a Jew — not exactly Mr Conrad’s favorite specimen of humanity. (In 1918, Conrad wrote a letter to The New Republic denying that he himself was a Jew, and providing a numbered list of documents that would prove this fact.)The other characters are white Europeans but it is the Englanders, especially the heroine, who are the most decisive and vigourous. The hero, Axel Heyst, is an indecisive Swedish nobleman. Conrad was himself of the minor Polish nobility, and it is tempting, with tongue only halfway in cheek, to see the antagonism between Heyst and “Ricardo” as being between the declining landed class and the class made wealthy by finance and capitalism, who see life “as a matter .. of a particularly active warfare” (III.chap. 10). (Heyst also is rather slow to decide if he even likes women, and there is a languid, sickly Lucifer-ish villain who shuns the presence of women the way Dracula avoids mirrors : white male homosexuality too comes off rather badly in this book.) The heroine, on the other hand, though she came from a poor background, is English through and through. Consequently she has the reflexes and muscle tone of a Hollywood action hero and the prudent resourcefulness of a secret agent, while getting warm and fuzzy at the prospect of sacrificing herself for her man. But since she has had sex outside of marriage, you can guess how she winds up.For those tempted to make excuses for Conrad, just read the conclusion of Alfred Russell Wallace’s  The Malay Archipelago , which compares modern Britain unfavorably to some of the societies of that region. It wasn’t automatic for Englishmen of Conrad’s era to share his biases. Not that Conrad’s book, which is set in the islands between Java and Timor (present-day Indonesia and Timor Leste), evokes anything of what Wallace described. Not for Conrad the over-the-top “exotic” atmosphere of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels, which at least can be read in a spirit of camp even as they run the gamut of racist stereotypes. Rather, the atmosphere in this novel is pared down. Aside from the vegetation that engulfs all vestiges of white society if not controlled, and a mention of a volcano visible on the horizon day and night, there isn’t much there there: this story doesn’t have a single Malay character in it, and the existence of villagers offstage is mentioned only once. (I’ve visited this beautiful part of the world a few times. Suffice it to say that it’s not a place where the local culture just fades into the background.)It’s a pity that someone with such a great talent at language should have spent his effort on such a dubious topic as the Decline of the White Race. For me this story died the moment I reached for my pencil, to mark the more outrageous passages. Yes, the story has echoes of French novels, Hamlet, The Tempest and Paradise Lost. It’s best read exactly by the folks for whom such “themes” are important: undergrads writing about “something-or-other in Conrad’s Victory,” and tenure-track faculty looking for grist to grind in their infernal critical mills.Readers looking to immerse themselves in the late Victorian South Pacific would be better off with Wallace or, for fiction, José Rizal’s “ Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) ” (1887), especially in Howard Augenbraum’s recent translation. Maybe less masterful prose than Conrad’s on average, but a ripping yarn, melodramatic characters one can care about, and a biting sense of satire, written by the most famous martyr for Philippine independence. The real thing.

It may be that it is enough to say about Victory that it is lush prose that wraps around your mind and leaves you sated at the end of every chapter.Conrad’s style, I dare to say, is not for every modern taste. It is dialogue-rich. The action is spare. For me, the essential appeal of Victory is the reflective context of the characters’ state of mind: their imaginations, their aspirations, their candid self-assessments.In Victory, there is enough honesty, enough resignation, enough disappointment, enough yearning to make you feel like you want to claim that your life is good.At least, good enough. of my book reviews hererichardsubber.com Read more

Joseph Conrad’s masterful late novel has a vortex-like quality, wherein lightly sketched characters and situations are progressively coloured in more and more detail, the swirls of the vortex coming with hard slaps to our faces as Conrad wakes us up to his manichean vision of human experience.The prose is incredibly dense - sentence after sentence of profound psychological and philosophical insight are embedded among shifts in tone of thought and speech particular to each character, some solemn, beatific almost, others ironic, ridiculous, and others crazed, demonic. The vortex-like quality comes especially from the gradual, then at moments sudden and shocking intensification of these qualities, as what starts out as a light, somewhat quixotic ‘island tale’ turns into an incredibly tense and nerve-wracking encounter between light and darkness.Conrad’s ability to create intense, almost tangible portraits of his characters’ essential qualities through their thoughts and words is exhilarating. With the arrival of the English ‘gentlemen’ Mr. Jones and his 'secretary' Ricardo, the light eddying of the vortex begins to turn into an ominous centripetal pull which threatens to drown. Speeches and narratives that had hitherto been for what one might call ‘unrestricted’ release, part of a ‘normal’ tale, make way for the unfolding of a psychopathic drama that is distinctly ‘restricted’ only: two men attired in the costumes and manners of the highest ‘civility’, whose seething predatoriness crawls around the world mocking it as they seek to ply their conscience-less barbarities.Conrad’s tale is most simply a parable on the ever-recurring miracle of people finding the ability to love each other, and how this miracle can descend out of nowhere to light up otherwise disenchanted lives. Yet such tender and fragile possibilities are surrounded by reptilian dangers, the most ridiculous and banal of which can be as pernicious as the most amoral and premeditated. And beyond this, Conrad seems to show how self-questioning, doubt and existential perplexity are a path to a kind of virtue, leaving one open to be surprised and receptive to a beneficent miracle should it present itself. But, as Conrad writes in his own comment on the novel, “Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting himself”, a de-habituation from acting-in-the-world which was a dangerous imperfection. The reptilian characters are, by contrast, very sure and pleased with themselves, cocky with their achieved advantages and the not-so-petty power of their threats. Yet they glimpse the serenity of better lived lives than theirs, and sometimes reach out their hands to seek to imitate it, their lack of humility or self knowledge making them darkly comic, rapacious blunderers. The genius of Conrad’s pen portrays such evil fizzing like lit magnesium, a frightening flare whose destructive energy suddenly exhausts itself, leaving desiccated husks of all that it has touched.

It arrived in mint condition