Rating: 
Summary: Apparently you were not near enough for me.
Review: 'Apparently you were not near enough for me'. Is this the complaint of all men for women? The strange drawing together of the isolated man (so much as I once was) with the resourceful but unexpected woman so shocked the 'world', those who missed out, that evil had to come of it. But this novel is called 'Victory', Conrad saw it as upbeat. And it is in a strange sort of way. I was profoundly disappointed at the end, as indeed I am disappointed by the end of every life that is a part of my own. Considering the nature of this novel - the strength and support of man (ineffective, but well meaning) for woman, and the wisdom and courage of woman (committed, but perhaps foolish) for man, the end is still inevitable. But Conrad manages to craft an ending that is a victory - one in which neither party compromises their view of the world despite the threats it imposes on them.
In Heyst - the 'hero' I saw much of myself. In Lena, the heroine who fails to succeed where success was impossible, I see a particular courageous woman in my own world. Perhaps you too will be able to find one?
There are wonderful characters in this novel, but I do regret the lack of any native Indonesian flavour to the story - place is well portrayed, peripheral people less so. But, perhaps in Conrad's time - colonial times - this is just the way the Europeans were - blind to the people around them, not seeing them as truly human.
Rating: 
Summary: Trust in Life
Review: Axel Heyst, the protagonist in Conrad's novel, Victory, makes a final statement to Davidson, a fellow seaman, just before he dies: "...woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love--and to put its trust in life!" This statement coming from a man whose whole life has been lived in isolation is remarkable. His father taught him that life was a Great Joke, that it was an illusion; that the best way to survive was to drift oneself into oblivion. But he found love in the person of Lena and it changed his perspective on living and was responsible for his change of heart as represented in the above-quoted statement. It's too bad that the novel could not have had a happy ending, but Conrad's view of the world probably would not permit it. I found the novel engrossing, somewhat melodramatic, yet vintage Conrad in its depiction of good and evil battling each other on the island of Samburan.
Rating:
Summary: A Land of Ones Own
Review: Conrad tells Heyst's story in stages, not revealing all at once, and he is the most intriguing part of the book so it is a very clever technique for until the end our picture of him remains incomplete. That dimension of the novel is like a mystery and a good one. Heyst has chosen a life of solitude and it is slowly revealed that he has a very complex reason for doing so. The love story is a little weak though. You kind of have to look the other way when Heyst and his beloved Lena have their moments, other than that there is much to admire about this book and a very exciting finale. Conrad's own complex upbringing involved exile from his parents homeland Russia. He was raised in Poland but his father remained politically active even in exile and was eventually brought to ruin for it. The instability of being raised in such a home had a corrosive effect on the would be authors sense of his own identity. Many of Conrads books have biographical elements in them but this one is even closer to home than the earlier books were. Conrad combined in his person two distinct selves, a man of action(sea captain) and a man of inaction, or an observer(writer). In Victory one sees him trying to balance these two opposing tendencies in his own character. Heyst has chosen inaction but that choice it soon becomes clear is not his alone to make. The world and its other inhabitants also have a say in that. Heyst may not want to be involved in the world but just by existing he is already involved. He may be able to avoid the world for a time but eventually the world finds everyone. For Heyst the world finds him through the character of Lena. That is the Victory of the novel. Though that meeting puts Heyst in touch with the world for the first time it also puts him in contact with some of the worlds more unsavory aspects. This novel is not one of Conrads crowning achievements but it is the best one he wrote in his latter period. It was originally published in 1915 and he feared the title during a time of war may be misleading but he kept it anyway. It does seem appropriate. Be sure to get a copy with the 'authors note' in which Conrad tells of his glimpse of a girl in a cafe who suggested to his imagination the character of Lena.
Rating:
Summary: Great Story!
Review: Joseph Conrad has long been one of my favorite authors. His works can be difficult to understand, with all the shades of meanings and the complicated plots, but Conrad's novels have always been worth the effort. Victory was one of the more readable works; and one of the most spell-binding. A great story by a great author: I'm very glad I read this!
Rating:
Summary: A Conrad reader's favorite
Review: Joseph Conrad is my favorite author, and I'm close to having read everything he's written. This is my favorite novel. I've read the criticism, that it's too sentimental, that its characters aren't as rich as in other Conrad tales...bumpkis. Consider Schomberg, consider Heyst...well, unless you've read the novel of course you can't. I encourage you to. I've read that it was Conrad's favorite, and one can understand why, in Heyst we get a glimpse into the soul of the aloof author, and in the memorable final word of the novel we get an impression of what he saw in the world. No other Conrad novel with the possible exception of Lord Jim has so personally affected me, and if like him, and like Heyst, you have sloughed off sentimentality, abandoned your Romantic side, then maybe this novel has something to teach you. I certainly learned something.
Rating:
Summary: To Look On and Never Make a Sound
Review: Now and then, we must leave the literature of our day and delve deeper--in time and in literary style. Joseph Conrad has survived time as a classic, because his work is of classic quality. I submerged into Victory as into cool, deep water, to emerge refreshed and moved by the literary experience. Woe, yes, to the man whose heart has not learned to hope or love (and is love without hope possible?) or trust in life. Without hope, without love, without trust, life is but a living death. Axel Heyst, Conrad's hero of Victory, is a complex man we are deeply drawn to--for he has the heart and he has the high ideals, if not the hope or trust. In his vulnerable youth, Heyst's father stripped him of these tools without which living a meaningful life is a barren if not futile prospect. Yet a man's heart is a stubborn thing in its will to beat with red blood. Even in his willful isolation, a woman's love finds the hermit. Conrad indulges in a little formula damsel-in-distress rescue, and Heyst brings Lena to his solitary island of Samburan, where they slowly develop a kind of haven. Life has a way of being messy and intrusive, Conrad knows, and so he brings the conflict of the story to the island, undeservedly bad reputation following Heyst there in the often comic and villanous figures of Ricardo and Jones. This showcases the figures of Heyst and Lena. If Heyst's heart does indeed love, and passionately so, then Lena's heart has within it the unconditional devotion perhaps only a woman can fully express. And so woman gives life. The tragedy of Heyst is that he so rarely knows how to express his love. Perhaps the story ends, then, in the only way it can, in sacrifice. The true victory of this novel is the gift of Conrad's writing. Characters have depth and motion; plot is not overwhelming, but enough to hold suspense; dialogue is real and revealing. Conrad does plenty of tell, not show, which writers are today admonished not to do, but I loved every moment of the skillful telling. He is a master, taking on themes and characters that have lasting value. I plan to read and reread his other works.
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: 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 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.
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