Joseph Conrad

Hard work

Is Conrad truly the fucking best?

Up there with Melville

The Lagoon, he does in like 10 pages what some authors take entire novels to do.

> implying The Nigger of the Narcissus isn't a classic work by Joseph Conrad
> implying it's /pol/-tier

Go fuck yourself, you haven't even read it.

If anything it's probably the most sympathetic work towards blacks of the era.

I read it just to be edgy but the prose really is very impressive. That opening scene where they’re waiting in port the night before they ship out was just so evocative.

English was actually his fifth language. Perhaps we just call him a prodigy of language. But he is strong in everything he wrote, no matter the language, and lived an interesting life (much of it at sea).

No way, his fifth language? Time to reread HoD and read everything else by him for the first time. Did he ever write an autobiography?

I have never read him, but I have read others mentioning that his prose is poetic, almost as prose-poetry.

If that is the case, then why Nabokov didn't liked him (Nabokov himself being very found of metaphors and imagistic language)?

Cause he was full of shit?

I dont think that is the case. I dont agree with all of Nabokov's opinions, but I can see why he didn't like some particular writers. I know what was his sense of aesthetics in art and literature, so I really think that he was not lowly to the point of criticizing another writer because of envy. He was egocentric, yes, but not to this level: if he thought something was great art he would point it out.

He was mad at him because he didn't like Anna Karenina.

How could Conrad not like Anna Karenina? It's one of the greatest works of literature ever concieved (and Tolstoy probably the greatest of all novelists)

Ask Conrad.

>He was mad at him because he didn't like Anna Karenina.

It's real, lol:

Since Anna Kareninawas published in 1877, almost everyone who matters in the history of literature has put in his two cents (and a few who stand out in other realms--from Matthew Arnold, who wrote a cogent essay in 1887 about "Count Tolstoy's" novel, to Lenin, who, while acknowledging his "first class works of world literature," refers to him as "a worn out sniveller who beat his breast and boasted to the world that he now lived on rice patties").

Dostoyevsky, a contemporary, declared Anna Karenina perfect "as an artistic production." Proust calls Tolstoy "a serene god." Comparing his work to that of Balzac, he said, "In Tolstoi everything is great by nature--the droppings of an elephant beside those of a goat. Those great harvest scenes in Anna K., the hunting scenes, the skating scenes . . ." Flaubert just exclaims, "What an artist and what a psychologist!" Virginia Woolf declares him "greatest of all novelists. . . . He notices the blue or red of a child's frock . . . every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet."

A few cranks, of course, weigh in on the other side. Joseph Conrad wrote a complimentary letter to Constance Garnett's husband and mentioned, "of the thing itself I think but little," a crack Nabokov never forgave him. Turgenev said, "I don't like Anna Karenina, although there are some truly great pages in it (the races, the mowing, the hunting). But it's all sour, it reeks of Moscow, incense, old maids, Slavophilism, the nobility, etc. . . . The second part is trivial and boring." But Turgenev was by then an ex-friend and Tolstoy had once challenged him to a duel.

E. M. Forster said, "Great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story. . . . They do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia. . . . Many novelists have the feeling for place . . . very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy's divine equipment."

After finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy himself said (to himself, in his journal), "Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers of the world--and what of it?"

randomhouse.com/highschool/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679783305&view=excerpt

Couldn't finish HoD. Truly the most boring writer I've ever read.

Why is Proust talking about elephant shit, seriously what was wrong with him

Heart of Darkness was short and had great prose on virtually every page

>After finishing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy himself said (to himself, in his journal), "Very well, you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers of the world--and what of it?"

He was good and he knew he was good

>muh great prose
Convoluted over-descriptions that don't add anything thematically is what I got. It's pretty clear to me that English wasn't his first language.

Let me guess, you think The Stranger is the best book ever written?

Just not a very good opinion no matter how you phrase it

Nope, wasn't that good either (better than HoD tho).

>imagistic language
There's imagistic language and imagistic language, and Nabokov thought, loosely paraphrased, that Conrad borrowed his images from an antique shop.

Maybe, in the end it just comes down to his writing not making me feel anything at all.

Conrad's sentences can be awkward at times (especially in his early works). It's best to power through and re-read them once you have a better grasp of the whole chapter. I found every subsequent book of his an easier read than the first (started with HoD as well) and strongly recommend persevering because his stories are great.

Also, dismissing his descriptions as convoluted is unfair and shallow, they're an essential part of what makes his work so immersive.

ITT: nobody posting quotes

it's so dense, every single image has so many things going on