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Summary: A grim portrait of domestic life
Review: This dark comedy about a botched bombing attempt is a nice read. Conrad spends a long time describing an extremely dysfunctional family, only to destroy it all. The degenerate Stevie is a funny character in a cynical way. My disbelief at the bizarre lives of the characters was replaced with disgust when I realized they were/are a reflection of our society's values. It blows my mind that Conrad is not a native speaker of English.
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Summary: A work of genius
Review: A book seething with intelligent satire and wonderful symbolism. A wonderful book, beautifully constructed by a great author.
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Summary: Unless you like your books long and exhausting....
Review: ....skip this one. Conrad takes perverse pleasure in his chapter-long descriptions and flowery phrases. The plot makes some guest appearances, but not many. Trust me, there's better use for your money elsewhere.
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Summary: A Parody of Dostoevsky
Review: Though the book is classified as being violent and Nihilistic, Dostoevsky fans are surely going to enjoy (or belittle) one particular passage: much reminiscent of Raskolnikov's dream in Crime and Punishment, Stevie, and "idiot" boy, proclaims "Bad bad!" in reference to how a man treats his emaciated horse. The only voice of humanity is that of a intellectually crippled boy. Not an easy book; but short and full of challenging philosophical concepts (HG Wells, Nietzsche)placed in a despairing but interesting light. Additionally, sort of topical insofar as the unibomber was supposedly inspired by the book.
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Summary: This book was complex, but good.
Review: Although this book illustrated the anarchist web surrounding late 19th century London in a very lucid manner, the book had a somewhat asinine and complex plot.
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Summary: An original
Review: A forerunner of the modern-day mystery novel, The Secret Agent is an important book and also a truly suspenseful story. Verloc is exceptionally well characterized, and Conrad's attempts to politicize a relatively unimportant event (the attempted bombing of the Greenwich observatory by a little-known anarchist) succeed exceedingly well. A good rainy-day book.
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Summary: Secret Agent
Review: Joseph Conrad penetrates bluntly question humanity and faith in God. Helpless idiot brother and his fragile protector struggle to carry burden of their destiny only to be murdered by two hatred-driven anarchist. Grand are souls who sacrifice the harmless for the altar of their worshipping greedy ideology. Miserable are innocents who wind up the killed. Conrad narrows down our uviversally common question:Does God play good or evil on us? An innocent idiot and her fragiles sister could not sustain their low-profile life despite their utmost, respectable perseverance. A piece of anarchist walked away with all the wealth of the victims. God's cruel demand on innocent blood from scapegoat and his reward for the unscruplous. No sense of justice is found. Just God's joke on human sense of morality.
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Summary: Do not read this book. Conrad fails in this genre.
Review: Who would have thought the author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim could write such a weak novel? Unless you have to read all of Conrad's work stick to his better known and far better works
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Summary: Dark humor and a bleak prescience
Review: For all the talk of the supposed "difficulty" of this novel, I found it to be one of the best construed and told that I have read lately. It goes well beyond a simple thriller or spy novel; it is an intense human drama in which the characters have real personalities. Verloc is a loser. He has been living, for the last eleven or so years, off the payments of a foreign embassy which employs him to spy and report on the activities of a terrorist cell, also composed of frustrated, useless, all-talk-no-action losers. Other reviewers have aptly described these characters.Verloc lives also off the meager profits of a news store, which serves as cover up for his clandestine activities, ignored even by his family. This consists of his younger wife, Winny, her mother and her retarded brother Stevie, a sympathetic but hopeless young man. As the novel opens, Verloc is in deep trouble. The new officers at the embassy are displeased at the results Verloc's work has achieved, and so one of them brutally warns him that the pay will stop if he doesn't produce at least one major act of terrorism, say, blow up the Greenwich observatory, an icon of modern faith in science. Verloc gets obviously dismayed at this order, for he is no terrorist at all, just a scumbag of an idler. I won't spoil the rest of the story up to the attack, but the resulting situation will show how coward these terrorists are (we hope none of them were as bold as other terrorists we know are) and how fragile Verloc's family relations are, especially in view of the terribly stupid action he commits. This is a very dark tale. None of the characters are attractive, but they are exteremely well developed, and that's what counts. The humor used by Conrad is without concessions: for all its cruelty, I found the bombing scene a very funny one. Conrad makes hard fun of all these types who talk and talk about anarchy, the "Revolution", ideology and their supposed love for humanity, a love conspicuously absent from their daily lives. How pertinent, in these times, to have a great and darkly funny novel to taka a look at, now that the types have, sadly, passed into action.
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Summary: This act of madness or despair.
Review: At the end of the novel Comrade Ossipon says, "An impenetrable mystery...this act of madness or despair." He is thinking about what Winnie has done. He cannot fathom it. The novel is unfathomable too; dense, twisting, sordid, ironic. There are some great scenes in this book. At the end, Verloc thinks Winnie truly loves him when in fact she doesn't, and never has; she had always loved the butcher. The horse scene where Stevie pets the old mistreated horse also comes to mind.
The only character Conrad has sympathy for is Stevie, and he gets blown to bits. Stevie is the only one who can truly show love. Ironically, he's mentally retarded. Everyone else is manipulative and calculating.
The book was published in 1906, some 50 or so years after Das Capital, The Communist Manifesto, etc. were published. Europe was swarming with "revolutionists" and "anarchists." Journalists were writing about "the people" and "the masses" and "social justice." Conrad was no dummy. He analyzed what was going on around him in England, France, Germany, etc., then he wrote this book as an "answer" to the socialists, anarchists. This is probably one of the most supremely ironical novels ever written. Stevie's demise is meaningless; there is absolutely no sense or purpose to it. The anarchist world in the novel is meaningless, peopled by sordid, parasitic rabble-rousers and journalists. Even Heat, the Assistant Commissioner, Sir Ethelred, the Assistant Commissioner's wife, the lady patroness, the "good side"--none of them without guilt. They too are schemers, calculating their social advancement. Like a coin, they are just the flip side of the socialits'. The whole society is corrupt, socialist and police alike. In repugnance, Conrad just blows up the whole damn mess. And how ironically does he do it! He blows up the only redeeming thing in that society, a retarded boy who loves without calculation, who goes into emotional fits when witnessing any gratuitous cruelty--cruelty even shown to animals. Dark novel. Great book!
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