Victory - Softcover

Conrad, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438288867 ISBN 13: 9781438288864

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009

View all copies of this ISBN edition

2 Used

From � 5.15

1 New

From � 9.29

Once regarded as comparatively minor amongst Conrad's works, Victory has grown in reputation. Its depiction of the central character, Axel Heyst, and his renunciation of the world, is influenced by Conrad's reading of Schopenhauer.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review

I am glad that I am alive, if, for no other reason, because of the joy of reading this book. --Jack London

From the Back Cover

In Victory (1915) Conrad returns to the Malay Archipelago, to the setting of his first mature novel, Lord Jim, and in Axel Heyst he creates a hero who is in many ways similar to Jim, a noble altruist destroyed by his ideals. Heyst is emotionally crippled by the influence of his dead father, a sceptical philosopher who has bequeathed to Heyst an attitude to life summed up in the father's dying words: 'Look on - make no sound.' Despite this injunction Heyst allows himself to become inextricably involved with an English Cockney girl whom he rescues from Giancomo's Travelling Ladies' Orchestra and carries off to his isolated retreat on the island of Samburan. His action incurs the fatal wrath of Schomberg, the island's innkeeper, who sends in pursuit of Heyst three demonic strangers whose invasion of his island paradise leads rapidly to the novel's violent and tragic close. Victory was the first of Conrad's novels to be completed after the commercial success of Chance (1914) had transformed Conrad's fortunes and made him internationally famous. It is a more complex example of the literary form which Conrad evolved for Lord Jim: a story of action and high adventure coexisting with an exhaustive study of the psychology of the central character.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.