Victory
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Narrated by:
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George Guidall
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By:
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Joseph Conrad
About this listen
From one of the greatest modern writers in world literature comes a magnificent story of love, adventure, and rescue, played out against the shimmering South Seas. Alone on a tropical island, a Swedish baron and a beautiful violinist discover the long-lost joys of love. But when two treasure hunters arrive on the beach, the lovers know that evil has invaded their romantic paradise—an evil they are powerless to stop.
Victory is a timeless classic that showcases the probing psychological insight, the masterful drama, and the breathtaking atmosphere that have won Joseph Conrad generations of fans.
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Editorial reviews
Joseph Conrad had already cemented himself as one of the greatest English novelists with books like Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, but it wasn't until Victory that he achieved his peak fame. This tale of love, jealousy, and adventure is rife with all the tension and drama fans have come to expect from the great Conrad. Performed with a powerful dedication by award-winning actor George Guidall, Victory is the suspenseful tale of Axel Heyst and his misadventure on a small island in the South Seas.
Related to this topic
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The Shadow-Line
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-
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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-
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This book is why audio books were created
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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-
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Deep Realistic Story Masterfully Read
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Raffles is Sherlock Holmes' polar opposite, a foil for great detectives and a man with all the immoral charms of a hero-thief, plus a remarkable ability at cricket. Raffles is the godson of Robin Hood, the model for Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief," and the inspiration of Leslie Charteris' "The Saint." As the great reinvention of the trickster for the 20th century, Raffles convinces readers to throw away their scruples and follow along for wit, bold adventures, and thrilling suspense.
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Fairly good
- By Paul on 01-31-08
By: E.M. Hornung
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Lot No. 249
- By: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
- Length: 1 hr and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Unexplained events are happening at Oxford these days. Several students have been attacked at night by some strange form of wild animal. It can scale walls with cat-like agility. Its arms are as thin and as strong as steel bands. And there is one student who conducts midnight studies in his room with certain Egyptian artifacts. The most significant of which is a 6'7" tall mummy.
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YOUR AS WHITE AS A CHEESE
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 01-12-17
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The Scarlet Pimpernel
- By: Baroness Orczy
- Narrated by: David Thorn
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the French Revolution, where a dashing English aristocrat risks his life to enter France and save innocents from the guillotine.
The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a secret society of English aristocrats who are determined to rescue their French counterparts from execution. Their leader is the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, whose name comes from the drawing of a red flower he uses to sign his messages.
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Great Performance, Awful Production
- By John on 02-24-14
By: Baroness Orczy
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Ghosts: Edith Wharton's Gothic Tales
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Alison Larkin, Jonathan Epstein, Corinna May, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".
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Ghastly Shadows of the Feminine Condition
- By Diane on 10-16-12
By: Edith Wharton
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Beware of Pity
- By: Stefan Zweig
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a young cavalry officer is invited to a dance at the home of a rich landowner. There - with a small act of attempted charity - he commits a simple faux pas. But from this seemingly insignificant blunder comes a tale of catastrophe arising from kindness and of honour poisoned by self-regard. Beware of Pity has all the intensity and the formidable sense of torment and of character of the very best of Zweig's work. Definitive translation by the award-winning Anthea Bell.
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One of my favorite authors
- By Adeliese Baumann on 03-21-18
By: Stefan Zweig
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Dombey and Son
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 36 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey.
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Perfect pair
- By Philip on 03-25-08
By: Charles Dickens
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Sacred Hunger
- By: Barry Unsworth
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 22 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son, who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew, who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny.
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Wise, Perceptive, Heart-breaking
- By S. Coldsmith on 04-16-16
By: Barry Unsworth
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Doug Bradley's Spinechillers Audio Books, Volume 1
- Classic Horror Stories
- By: Charles Dickens, H. P. Lovecraft, Saki, and others
- Narrated by: Doug Bradley
- Length: 2 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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This volume features William F Harvey's original undead hand story "The Beast with Five Fingers" that sparked many movies including Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead". Poe's classic "The Tell Tale Heart" is joined by Lovecraft's creepy tale of alienation "The Outsider", and a chilling Dickens ghost story "The Signalman".
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Excellent stories and wonderful performance
- By Gavin Lees on 10-12-18
By: Charles Dickens, and others
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The exact description of the form of a cloud
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First published in 1906, The Mirror of the Sea was the first of Joseph Conrad’s two autobiographical memoirs. Discussing it, he called the book “a very intimate revelation...I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life"....
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Languid & loquacious language
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Wow!
- By Amazon Customer on 07-11-03
By: Joseph Conrad
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Nostromo
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One of the greatest political novels in any language, Nostromo reenacts the establishment of modern capitalism in a remote South American province locked between the Andes and the Pacific. In Sulaco, a harbor town in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, a vivid cast of characters is caught up in a civil war to decide whether its fabulously wealthy silver can be preserved from the hands of venal politicians.
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Page-turning masterpiece garbled by narrator
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Typhoon
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Typhoon is the story of a steamship and her crew beset by a tempest and of the captain whose dogged courage is tested to the limit. Captain MacWhirr was an ordinary man. However, when his steamer Nan-Shan blunders into a hurricane, he and his crew must pull together to survive. The steadfast courage of an undemonstrative captain and the imaginative readiness of his young first mate becomes a partnership vital to human survival as they are challenged from without by the elements, and from within by human doubts and fears.
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A great classic, very well narrated
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Lord Jim
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The exact description of the form of a cloud
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The Mirror of the Sea
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Languid & loquacious language
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Nostromo
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- Narrated by: Frank Muller
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Overall
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Performance
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Wow!
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Page-turning masterpiece garbled by narrator
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Heart of Darkness: A Signature Performance by Kenneth Branagh
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A Signature Performance: Kenneth Branagh plays this like a campfire ghost story, told by a haunted, slightly insane Marlow.
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Disgusting Revision
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First published in 1897, The Nigger of the Narcissus is the story of a black West Indian, James Wait, who signs aboard the Narcissus, a merchant sailing ship on a journey from Bombay to London. Wait almost immediately becomes ill and bedridden for the remainder of the journey, splitting the crew into factions. It has long been considered one of Joseph Conrad's best and most important works.
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AKA Children of the Sea
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Set in Malaya, Almayer's Folly is Joseph Conrad's first novel. In it, he charts the decline of a Dutch merchant after a 25 year struggle against overwhelming odds. Though married to a bitter and hateful Malayan wife, Almayer refuses to accept the financial ruin which he has precipitated. Instead, he dreams of fantastic wealth and a return to the civilization of his youth, accompanied by his loving daughter, Nina.
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Obsession, alienation, failure and forgetting.
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Under Western Eyes
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Under Western Eyes, Conrad's novel of political treachery and oppression, begins with a bomb that kills a hated Russian minister of police along with innocent bystanders. A young student named Razumov hides the perpetrator, then betrays him and becomes a spy among his exiled comrades. He faces a moral dilemma from which there is no escape. This masterwork, published six years before the Russian Revolution, is a chillingly accurate prophecy of what was to come.
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Perfect narrator, great story
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By: Joseph Conrad
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Six Short Stories
- By: Joseph Conrad
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- Unabridged
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This wide-ranging collection comprises the following six short stories by Joseph Conrad: Youth: A Narrative (1902); Karain: A Memory (1898); An Outpost of Progress (1898); The Lagoon (1898); Amy Foster (1909); The Anarchist - A Desperate Tale (1903). 'Youth: A Narrative' is an epic tale of a perilous voyage under sail to Bangkok, with a cargo of coal, narrated by Charles Marlow.
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Charting the geography of the soul
- By Adeliese Baumann on 12-20-13
By: Joseph Conrad
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Lord Jim
- By: Joseph Conrad
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- Unabridged
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Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman---"as unflinching as a hero in a book"---who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life is ruined: an isolated scandal has assumed horrifying proportions. But then he is befriended by an older man named Marlow....
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John Lee: A voice like no other...
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By: Joseph Conrad
What listeners say about Victory
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 01-20-13
Beautiful, sad and powerful
"I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don't know. One gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul."
The more Conrad I read/listen to, the more I love Conrad. Victory is a not just your standard story about good v. evil, West v. East, innocence and savagery. It is about being an actor in life and love and not just an observer. It is beautiful, sad and powerful.
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22 people found this helpful
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- zimejin
- 06-30-24
If it wasn’t an audio book, this would be a boring read
Great performance by the narrator. Story was good and insightfully philosophical however the pacing was slow, the climax mild. But not a regrettable experience.
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- Douglas
- 03-24-14
Conrad's Masterful Storytelling...
shines through again in this intriguing and romantic Elizabethan style tale of love and revenge. We see some of the psychological elements again in this story for which Conrad is so well known, but more in the subtle Shakespearean sense rather than the more obvious symbolism used in Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. Conrad is always reliable and this stands as one of his great novels.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Lothar Hauth
- 08-13-17
Enthralling tale
Very witty description of setting and characters in the beginning. I found the middle section a bit long stretched, but in the end it is clear that it is setting up a quit interesting set of confrontations and communications.
The narrator is outstanding, clear and characterful.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Debra B
- 06-21-14
Uneven tale of good and evil
This book takes place in the tropics. Conrad is a wonderful writer, and he sailed the tropical seas in real life. Heart of Darkness is one of my favorite books.
So, I wish I liked this one more. It seemed like Conrad kept trying to beat home his points about his characters and about good vs. evil. Sometimes he would go on and on about something, and even though I thought I knew what he was trying to get at when he started, by the time he was done I'd be only confused. He kept bringing up what it means to be a gentleman, but I honestly am not sure what he was trying to say on that particular subject. But, it was still a good story, and it was uncanny how it kept pulling me back in. Also, I was glad I'd been alerted to the fact that the narrator point of view shifts through the story.
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- Jefferson
- 09-08-13
The World Will Send Envoys, Even to Your Island
In Part One of Joseph Conrad's Victory (1915) the narrator introduces Axel Heyst, a Swedish "baron" drifting about the Tropical Belt of Eastern Asian islands (Timor, Saigon, Manila, and many small ones). Heyst is a mystery because he doesn't do anything to make money, unlike the narrator and his peers who cruise around on their ships trading with the locals. Everyone calls him derisive nicknames: "Enchanted Heyst," "Hard Fact Heyst," and "Utopist Heyst." Everyone thinks he's a harmless eccentric except for Schomberg, a coarse and cowardly Teutonic hotel owner who hates him with a passion and spreads foul rumors about his perceived perfidies. Heyst is completely unaware of how people see him.
Heyst, it develops, was molded by his failed philosopher father to live life as a rootless and detached spectator, feeling contempt and pity for the follies and plights of human beings who, after all, have nothing to do with him. Will he discover that it may not be so easy to go through life untouched and unentangled? What will become of his father's philosophy when Heyst's aloof observer orbit collides with four Brits? There is Morrison, a pathetic trader who never calls in debts, Lena (AKA Alma or the Magdalen), a beautiful, laconic, audacious, and sad damsel in distress, and "plain Mr. Jones," a cadaverous and misogynistic "gentleman" who has fallen Lucifer-like from his proper class and country to languidly gamble, thieve, extort, and kill up and down the world with the help of Martin Ricardo, his faithful lower-class feline thug of a "secretary" henchman.
Victory is a character study, a tropical romance, a crime thriller, and a philosophical debate. It may also be, not unlike Lord Jim, a triumphant tragedy involving a Pyrrhic victory leading, perhaps, to a romantic redemption. Its themes concern gender, class, race, colonialism, civilization, fate, love, and life in the world and apart from it. The novel is often strangely funny, and of course (Conrad being Conrad) it is shot through with wonderfully evocative and vivid descriptions of sea, sun, and people and cool insights into human nature.
Here is some neat humor, description, and character:
"His nearest neighbour--I am speaking now of things showing some sort of animation--was an indolent volcano which smoked faintly all day with its head just above the northern horizon, and at night levelled at him, from amongst the clear stars, a dull red glow, expanding and collapsing spasmodically like the end of a gigantic cigar puffed at intermittently in the dark. Axel Heyst was also a smoker; and when he lounged out on his veranda with his cheroot, the last thing before going to bed, he made in the night the same sort of glow and of the same size as that other one so many miles away."
Here is some serene beauty:
"The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell."
Here is some ominous suspense:
"Behind his back the sun, touching the water, was like a disc of iron cooled to a dull red glow, ready to start rolling round the circular steel plate of the sea, which, under the darkening sky, looked more solid than the high ridge of Samburan."
And here are some wonderful lines:
"For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct..."
"The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy."
"The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance."
"Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation."
"That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like any writing to the illiterate."
"An insane bandit is a deadly combination."
"I find it easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its wickedness."
If there were an American I'd like to listen to reading a British novel, it would be George Guidall. Instead of affecting British accents he speaks a limpid international English, all the while enhancing the various emotions and agendas and personalities of the characters with his at times sardonic at times sympathetic and always savory voice. However, for the interplay between Mr. Jones and Martin I did long for greater differentiation between their high and low classes via accent than Guidall conveys.
Fans of Joseph Conrad, great prose, and bleak yet hopeful visions should give Victory a try--though Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness would be better Conrad works with which to begin an acquaintance with the twinkling-eyed master of existential exotic adventure.
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- Zara Altair
- 01-15-13
Classic told well.
Terrific reading highlighting the subtleties of Conrad's prose. Well done.An incredibly villainous villain and a naive hero.
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- Dan Harlow
- 03-21-14
The floating abyss of emptiness
Any additional comments?
This was a difficult book for me to read because of how personal it is. I felt myself identifying far too much to the main character, Axel, than I was comfortable with. Yet the very fact this book exists and was written a hundred years ago also tells me how I felt is not so uncommon - and in some ways that made it even more difficult.
The issue at heart here is isolation and insulation. Axel has nearly given up on the whole of humanity and has isolated himself from everyone believing himself to be safe that way. Yet this only made it easier for a man like Schomberg to spread lies and incite others against him. And so the very things Axel wanted to escape from causes greedy, vile men to come after him.
The entire book is filled with characters who have false impressions about everyone around them; nobody knows anyone in this book and all their troubles are caused by these misunderstandings. This is very much part of the human experience, however, it's even keener here since the book was written on the very eve of WW1 where whole nations, not just individuals, who all mistrusted each other, resented each other, and did not understand each other at all decided to kill each other in staggering quantities.
And so when I fully related to the isolation of Axel and began to feel a little depressed that I could identify such a trait in myself, I could also take at least a little comfort in knowing what I feel is not unique. Nobody really can know anyone else and we can either make up what we want about others (as Schomberg does and, to a different degree, Lena does), or we can try to hide away and hope nobody comes looking for some treasure we don't even possess.
Conrad goes even deeper by exploring the point of art itself as a means to bridge the gap between people when he shows the scene of Axel reading his father's book: "The son read, shrinking into himself, composing his face as if under the author's eye". Conrad is showing us that even art, even with the author himself staring over our shoulder, will not help us at all know one other person any better than we could if we stranded ourselves on a lonely, volcanic island in the South Pacific.
And there is nothing very optimistic here, either. The final word of the novel is "nothing", the absolute negation (and very unlike Ulysses whose final work is "yes", the ultimate affirmation in life). But the irony is that by writing this book, by telling and showing us how we can never know another person Conrad manages to soothe us somewhat by letting us know we all have this loneliness in common. He may be saying there is nothing to be done about this condition, but he shows us it's not uncommon and in a way this knowledge makes us feel a little less lonely.
Victory is a Möbius strip of the human condition, of sorts.
And what of the title, "Victory". Why that word when the last word of the novel is "nothing" and all the characters float about like shadows ready to evaporate into the heat of noon? What is the victory over? Lena for sure finds her strength and her purpose as her victory but on top of that the victory is in achieving an understanding of something we all share in common as human beings but can't do anything about. Just the fact that we know we are all alone is enough to bring us together.
Of course the other issue here is misunderstanding. In place of actually getting to know each other, how often do we just make assumptions about another person's behavior? How often do we look at a person who is distant and aloof and assume they are hiding something or that they disdain us or think they are better than us? Why do we make these assumptions instead of asking ourselves if there is something we can do for that person because they may have been hurt, or are shy, or have any number of issues that have nothing to do with us? Instead of always thinking the world is against us, maybe the problem is just that we don't see the world correctly because we are too wrapped up in ourselves? That seems to be very much the problem for all the characters in this book until Lena figures out what she wants - she is not guilty of not having loved.
This is a very complex book even if the story is incredibly simple. Very little happens over the course of the novel in terms of action but there is so much "going on" here. I feel you could spend a lifetime unfolding this novel (and I use the term unfold rather than the more typical term unpack because it feels more appropriate when dealing with Conrad). The novel also leaves me with a lot of competing emotions, so much so it took me nearly a week just to write this review because I had a hard time wrapping my brain around what I had just read.
If only every novel could be this good.
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19 people found this helpful
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- Israel j
- 10-08-24
Great story telling
This is such a well written story of how events can be dictated by someone to change the course of a life. There are many moral lessons in it. Worth reading
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-29-22
Dragged out. Endurance essential.
A struggle, even for someone that enjoys Conrad!
Two thirds of the way thru the story it entered the broken record syndrome. Boring ...and disappointing.
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