Rating: 
Summary: Pure Conrad
Review: Out of all that Conrad has ever written (and I have read nearly all that he has), Victory is my favorite of his works. The book is full of meaning and nuance. It is a love story, an examination of love itself, an adventure, a drama, an allegory, an examination of human nature, a look into the soul, and ultimately a truly heart-breaking tragedy.
The characters almost perfectly constructed and the story is driven by them. The main character, Axel Hyest, has to be one of Conrad's most complex heros. Lena, the female protagonist is a startling combination of innocence and power. A truly unique persona.
The settings are masterfully described, with typical Conrad depth. Perhaps only Nostromo is more full of vivid descriptions. Like all great books, you end up falling in love with the characters. I didn't want the story to end, and when it did I was in awe. Hands down, one of the greatest authors of all time.
Rating:
Summary: Read it for your own enjoyment-- it's too good for a class
Review: ÒVictoryÓ is one of those classics that you assume is a great book even if you donÕt know anything about it. We picked up our $1.25 paperback copy at Kyobo bookstore in Seoul, S. Korea.Like myself, I imagine that most people viewing this page have already read ÒVictoryÓ and have come here to read what others felt and thought about it. Nevertheless, I wonÕt give anything away. I just want to share my enthusiasm for ÒVictoryÓ and Joseph Conrad. You'll love it if you haven't read it. I read ÒVictoryÓ over 19 months ago and I still think about it. I have sweet, sweet memories of the book since I brought it on a 2 week vacation to one of FijiÕs small islands (Nananu-i-ra, off of Viti Levu, just north of Rakiraki). No radio or TV, electricity off at 10 pm, rainwater drained off the roof of our place into the cistern. Very simple and very romantic -- of course, it was in no way as rough as Samburan -- HeystÕs and LenaÕs island, but it was tropical, very small, and in some ways primitive. So in a sense, I could experience what it was like on Samburan and also how easily this blissful place could be ruined by a Ricardo and Mr. Jones. Heyst is the typical Swede -- unable to express his feelings for the life of him, let alone verbalizing his affectionate feelings for Lena (....The Swedish man loved his wife so much that he almost told her.....). Then there is Lena. Young, soft, and beautiful -- yet courageous. How did she end up in ÒZangiacomos LadiesÕ OrchestraÓ? What a mess! It was just a matter of time before something even worse happened to her if it werenÕt for Heyst. I love the idea of how Heyst escaped/eloped with Lena. ItÕs so romantic to think of them, with their troubled pasts, starting a new life by getting away from everything. Conrad has a terrific sense of humor. It is hilarious how he describes the characters: Mr. ZangiacomoÕs hooked nose and blue-black beard. Schomberg's foaming-at-the-mouth rages and Òextraordinarily expanded nostrilsÓ. The secretive Wang, the Chinaman, and his absurd wall that protects his house from foes in the middle of nowhere! Conrad is truly a great storyteller. I would have loved to sit with him and others of the Òhail fellow well metÓ crowd soaking in the tales and experiencing the camaraderie. Conrad had such a rough childhood, too. His parents dying at age 11 etc., and not even being a native English speaker. I doubt that he would have turned out to have been such a great writer if he had never had those painful times. I, as I am sure many others are, am grateful that he chose to write his thoughts and experiences down. I really really enjoyed reading ÒVictoryÓ. -- Douglas
Rating: 
Summary: an odd combination of genres, almost experimental
Review: this book kind of compresses in on itself. it starts out rather ironic and almost lighthearted in it's absurdity, but the closing chapters are chilling and heartbreaking. an odd mixture of humor, adventure, romance, study of reality and lots of other things, this is a fine work and amazingly modern. what made it all the more fine was the 1930's edition i found.... all the smell of old books and those lovely margin notes by previous owners!
Rating:
Summary: Learn while young to hope, to love...
Review: This is an exquisite novel. The bulk of the story takes place on the near-deserted Indonesian island of Samburan, where Axel Heyst, the reclusive Swede, has chosen to make his hermitage. In an important vignette about midway through the novel Conrad lets us in on the origin of Heyst's cynical and disillusioned attitude toward life. Here, as his father lies dying, Heyst asks for some final guidance, some final advice about life. His father tells him that all people are pitiful, and "you... if you are anything, are as pitiful as the rest." "What is one to do then?" asks Heyst. "Look on - make no sound" were his father's last words to him. This profoundly affected Heyst, and stayed with him, and a fortnight later he started on his travels - "to look on and never make a sound".
He leads a wandering life and avoids contact with others. Intimacy is foreign to him, but he has a truly magnanimous, altruistic heart, and one day on the island of Timor, he impulsively pays the fines for the captain of a trading ship (Morrison) and bails him out of certain financial ruin. As a result, Heyst is offered employment in a coal company, and when Morrison dies, Heyst becomes the owner. The company goes bankrupt, but rather than leave for greener... islands, Heyst decides to stay there with his servant, the "Chinaman" Wang. On a neighboring island, a hotel keeper by the name of Schomburg begins to circulate rumors about "the Swede", rumors that include blaming Heyst for the untimely death of Morrison. Heyst, (completely unaware of Schomburg's malicious hatred) makes a rare visit to the hotel, and while staying there, he is again moved to action by his sensitivity and altruism. This time, he becomes involved in the troubled life of one of the showgirls, a violinist by the name of Alma (Heyst changes her name later to Lena). He rescues her from the loathsome Schomburg's amorous intentions, and carries her off to his island. This infuriates the already hateful hotel keeper, and soon a wandering trio of deperadoes provide the perfect means for murderous revenge. Under the unfounded pretense that Heyst has hidden vast stores of loot on his island, Schomburg convinces these three thugs to invade Samburan, capture their due reward, and return the girl to Schomburg. What follows is an intense psychological/physical battle of wits and bodies. The scoundrels are armed and accustomed to shedding blood, while Heyst and Lena are completely unarmed and defenceless. When Lena is alone and suddenly confronted by one of the villains, she feigns sympathy for their plan, and begins to work a duplicity that even Heyst is unaware of. She takes it upon herself to divest the villainous Ricardo of his weapon. She becomes the sacrificial heroine... working a very, VERY bittersweet "victory". To say more is to say too much... I'm sure Conrad would visibly cringe to find that modern readers knew about the last chapter before reading the first. In many ways Victory ends up being a love story. A story of a developing love... that was horribly infringed upon, invaded! Brutal as Romeo and Juliet. It is beautiful how the devotion, charm and innocence of Lena was slowly plowing up the fallow ground of Heyst's long-forgotten heart. The narrator Davidson tells us that one of the last things Heyst had ever said to him were... "Ah Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life!" This, from the man who had made it his life's mission to avoid all such feeling. I cannot imagine the sense of futility that would palpably descend upon anyone assigned to improve upon one of Conrad's sentences, or (horrors) tighten up a paragraph. Thankfully, my only self-inflicted assignment is to read more of him.
Rating:
Summary: A Victory
Review: This was Joe Conrad's favorite novel, and it's mine too. For a Victorian novel, it sure has a deep erotic undercurrent, with eerie near-sexual symbols, and delicious man-woman tension and man-man conflict-unto-death. Oh how you learn to love the vividly drawn characters, and oh how you care about what happens to them. Like a lot of Victorian novels, it's a book that can scare you. It has the magic hand of fate all through it. It's magic, majestic, magnificent - definitely Conrad's best.
Rating:
Summary: Paradis Refashioned
Review: Though I include Conrad in the league of "master novelists," Victory falls short of his best work. One problem involves the work's narrative form. Conrad, who had proven in 1904 with Nostromo that he could minuplate narrative masterfully, performs some sleight-of-hand trickery here that tends to disconcert, rather than amaze the reader. On the one hand the narrator is a first-person, frivolous quidnunc, listening in on and reporting on conversations he overhears on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. At other times, he is an omniscient narrator, privy to all the private diologue and thought that take place on Samburan and elsewhere. Only once do we see him refer to himself as a character in the story, during a brief conversation he has with Davidson about Mrs. Schomberg. The same narrative technique is used by Dostoevsky in The Possessed, but I didn't find it as obtrusive there. Aside from the narrative jumble, Conrad also fumbles with diologue here. Most of the diologue is between Heyst and Lena and is of so saccharine a variety, one half expects to hear MGM violins playing in the background. Purple, sentimental language is but one aspect of the melodramatic tone of the novel as a whole. The central plot, pitting the lover's happiness against Ricardo's and Jones' dastardly machinations is more characteristic of Victorian romance than Conrad at his best. Another of the shifts towards melodrama is exhibited in the work's one-dimensional charcters. Lena and Heyst clearly represent good. Ricardo and Jones clearly represent evil. Since Ricardo and Jones, and their ape-dog, Pedro, are so thinly dilineated, they appear comic, rather than operating as true dramatic foils to Heyst. Conrad attempts to counter the comic shallowness of his vilains by dressing them in Satan's clothing. The "Paradise Lost" motif is one of the most obvious in the book, yet, like most of Conrad's themes here, it leads nowhere, ultimately. Adam and Eve are represented by Lena and Heyst. Satan is a bit more ambiguous, only insofar as he is represented in composite by Jones and Ricardo. The Genesis and Miltonic backdrop really picks up steam in part 111, when Heyst announces "There must be a lot of the original Adam in me after all." While representations of Lena as Eve are slightly more subtle, they are abundant nevertheless. The repeated image of Lena standing before Heyst with her hair cascading down over her white shoulders vividly recalls Milton's depictions of the "mother of mankind." Lest we have any doubts about it, Heyst tells Lena "You are different. Woman is the tempter." Jones and Ricardo as a Satanic composite takes a slightly closer reading to get at: "Mr Jones's teeth were suddenly started chattering by another faint puff of wind, a mere sigh from the west, where Venus cast her rays on the dark edge of the horizon, like a bright lamp hung above the grave of the sun." One would have to have some familiarity with Milton and with the Old Testament to catch the Satanic reference here. In Isa. xiv, 12, the prophet refers to Venus as "Lucifer, son of the morning." Milton associates Satan with "the morning star" (PL V). More often than not, however, Conrad is not this subtle. Jones (Satan in rebellion) identifies himself as "He that is'" when talking to Heyst. This places Heyst in apposition to that other Supernatural Being who tells Moses "I am that I am." Elsewhere, Jones tells Heyst that he has been "ejected" from his proper sphere, "because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions...he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth." Ricardo, who represents Satan in activity, talks often of not having to crawl about on his belly anymore. When he attacks Lena, Conrad describes him as a serpent, with his arms pinned to his sides and his body sawying like a cobra's. Lest we should still be in the dark about Lena's Eve function, we learn (again from the omniscient narrator who can see into people's dreams)that Lena has had a dream of foreboding, which parallels Eve's precognitive dream in PL. As an even more convincing proof, we see Lena in a conquering pose, her foot above Ricardo's head, recalling The Angel's message in the final book of PL that Eve's descendent will vanquish Satan and hold his head underfoot. All that said, Conrad, even when operating at less than peak capacity, is still a more interesting novelist than 99% of all others. But for those who want to read a perfectly-crafted, controlled and masterfully written novel, I would suggest they turn to Nostromo. Then come back to this book and read it for enjoyment, for it's still a good read, just not as fulfilling as literature.
Rating: 
Summary: A bit turgid but not without depth.
Review: Unlike many here, I found this one to be overwritten and ponderous. The story was predictable and took rather too long to unfold. The characters, too, were less deep than I'd have liked and the tale, of a loner adrift in the Pacific Islands who is the object of rumour and jealousy and yet who blindly finds love, is not particularly fresh. For much of the time I was reading the book, I had in mind those old films from the thirties and forties with Bogart and Peter Lorre, et al. And yet, I suppose that is a compliment in itself since Conrad's work came first and set the tone which these films clearly set out to emulate thereafter. So cliche or no, the book, in its time, was fresher than it manifestly is now. Still, I found the slow and ponderous way Conrad "grows" his tale dated and less efficient than more modern narrative forms. And, in this case, the depth of the tale did not suffice to offset the lumbering explication. Allusions to Milton's Paradise Lost are clever but they are only that, not the tools needed to advance the tale. And the bad guys are clearly, as others have noted here, more symbolic than real. Heyst, the honourable loner, never comes clear to us, in his miserable isolation from others, and Lena, the fleeing maiden in distress, never grows into anything more. Yes, Conrad has a good name as an author, but not, I suspect, for this book.
Rating:
Summary: Sweeping Narrative
Review: Victory is in many ways more fluid and readable than Conrad's more dense works (for comparison sake I'd previously read Heart of Darkness and Conrad's collection of short stories Tales of Unrest.) In Victory we have Conrad's standard fare of tragedy and man's isolation, but in this case wrapped in a tale of adventure and swept along by an uncharacteristically eventful plot. Conrad's works have, of course, been reviewed to exhaustion; the only thing that I could hope to add would be my emotional response to the novel as a reader. Personally through the majority of the novel I found Heyst to be the only truly well defined character. Much of what we learn of him is revealed indirectly through the observations of others, but somehow Conrad manages to use this method to flesh out a complex and intriguing figure in Heyst. The remanding characters, while interesting, serve mostly as scenery. The villains Jones and Ricardo, while interesting, struck me not so much as human characters but as forces of impending doom; they could have as easily been an approaching storm or a plague or any other brand of natural disaster. The girl Lena in the end is the one exception; perhaps the one thing that I found most gratifying is the way in which her character developed as the novel neared its climax. The Penguin Classics version is well footnoted for those of you (like me) that would have missed some of the more obscure Biblical references and allusions to Paradise Lost. The notes also comment on the narrator's shifting viewpoint, and on revisions Conrad made to subsequent editions. For those readers interested in an insight into Conrad's thinking I'd recommend this version.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite Conrad novel!
Review: Victory is the best of the handful of Conrad novels I have read (for reference sake, the others are Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo). For one thing, the other novels were much heavier in their narrative and descriptive content. As a result, I often suffered from mental imagery overload when plodding through a page-long paragraph. Victory has more dialogue, making it an easier read. Conrad's characters are always great, and the ones in this book are no exception. I also really liked the correlation between these characters and their environment. Heyst living in a serene yet isolated island matched his aloofness perfectly. As the book reaches its climax and tensions reach a boiling point, Conrad adds to this tension in godlike fashion, as the storm evinces the internal and external struggles occurring in Heyst. Of course, Conrad don't write no happy tales (sic), but in the end, I think that the title Victory was still very appropriate. This was an excellent read and one of the best novels I have read in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: One of Conrad's best novels, if not one of his best known.
Review: Victory is the story of a man named Heyst who leads an isolated life in the South Pacific. However, he is drawn out of his isolation when he brings a woman to his island home. A chance encounter between a dishonest German who dislikes Heyst and two criminals sets up the dramatic ending. Conrad's style is as fluid as in his better known books, such as Lord Jim, and it is amazing that someone could write English so well who did not learn it until later in life and who always spoke it with a heavy Polish accent. Victory is similar to Conrad's other works in that the plot flirts with melodrama, but always is rooted in realism. Those who read the book will find the title apt.
|
