Boring, meaningless post. Well done on memorising the list of Nabokov's personal likes and dislikes. But that kind of lit gossip is pure pseudery compared with actually reading Conrad's work and articulating your own response to it.
To be fair, starting a thread with just a picture of Conrad's face and the word "Underrated" is pretty low effort and honestly kinda deserves low effort replies.
Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed. But its cruelty was redeemed by the charm of its inscrutable mystery, by the immensity of its promise, by the supreme witchery of its possible favour. Strong men with childlike hearts were faithful to it, were content to live by its grace—to die by its will. That was the sea before the time when the French mind set the Egyptian muscle in motion and produced a dismal but profitable ditch. Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steam-boats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. The mystery was destroyed. Like all mysteries, it lived only in the hearts of its worshippers.
It's clear that Nabokov would hate this. It lacks concrete and precise visual details. It's a little rhetorical, relying more on syntax and rhythm than true imagery. It doesn't make you see any specific landscape. It works semantically, not visually.
Everyone says his pacing is bad, and that’s true, you can sometimes feel his impatience with a scene and he curtly ends it, and sometimes you can feel him languishing about trying to find something of interest. It’s clear he’s groping for something, but he can only go where the narrative winds take him. Forgive the nautical metaphor.
But goddamn, when he’s good, he is fricking good. The intro to Heart of Darkness, where he describes the names of the ships departing from the River Thames like israeliteels flashing in the night of time, that’s just interesting to me. It’s almost transdimensional. Erebus and Terror, Golden Hind, for him as a sailor, these were brilliant shimmering verities in amidst a sense of history as an obscure and mystifying thing. It’s not tactile, but it fills you with this wonder, this strange contemplative awe. I think that’s what really determines if you like Conrad or not. You either think “wow, this guy makes me feel like reality is a bizarre, half-semblanced dream,” or you think “this guy is alright, but half of it sounds like a guy who discovered metaphors.”
I don’t mean to be unkind, but I must disagree. You’re right there’s no clear physical image, but the language is so mystically loaded that it allows you something more akin to a tableau. A pall of smoke clouding the mirror of the Infinite… imagine the Infinite above, no longer seeing itself, no longer capable of knowing us, only a blanket of industrial haze where before it could see itself and what it wrought. Like a man blinded.
my friend is one of London’s connected literati and he figures this Pole is the best writer the island has produced
The Russian Empire was not an island.
his joke was that Britain’s greatest writer wasn’t even born there
tell them to go to this annika kuhlman thing @ apartment 2, 68 broadwick st if they want knocking out in front of both their mates
Nabokov disagrees.
Embarrassing post.
Excellent post.
Boring, meaningless post. Well done on memorising the list of Nabokov's personal likes and dislikes. But that kind of lit gossip is pure pseudery compared with actually reading Conrad's work and articulating your own response to it.
I have read Conrad. My personal opinion is that he is second rate, ephemeral, puffed-up. A favorite between the ages of 5-10, but no longer.
To be fair, starting a thread with just a picture of Conrad's face and the word "Underrated" is pretty low effort and honestly kinda deserves low effort replies.
he has terrible pacing but is great otherwise
His ESL prose is pretty good.
Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed. But its cruelty was redeemed by the charm of its inscrutable mystery, by the immensity of its promise, by the supreme witchery of its possible favour. Strong men with childlike hearts were faithful to it, were content to live by its grace—to die by its will. That was the sea before the time when the French mind set the Egyptian muscle in motion and produced a dismal but profitable ditch. Then a great pall of smoke sent out by countless steam-boats was spread over the restless mirror of the Infinite. The hand of the engineer tore down the veil of the terrible beauty in order that greedy and faithless landlubbers might pocket dividends. The mystery was destroyed. Like all mysteries, it lived only in the hearts of its worshippers.
It's clear that Nabokov would hate this. It lacks concrete and precise visual details. It's a little rhetorical, relying more on syntax and rhythm than true imagery. It doesn't make you see any specific landscape. It works semantically, not visually.
let's be honest here, nabokov would hate him because he's a ruski and conrad was a pole
Everyone says his pacing is bad, and that’s true, you can sometimes feel his impatience with a scene and he curtly ends it, and sometimes you can feel him languishing about trying to find something of interest. It’s clear he’s groping for something, but he can only go where the narrative winds take him. Forgive the nautical metaphor.
But goddamn, when he’s good, he is fricking good. The intro to Heart of Darkness, where he describes the names of the ships departing from the River Thames like israeliteels flashing in the night of time, that’s just interesting to me. It’s almost transdimensional. Erebus and Terror, Golden Hind, for him as a sailor, these were brilliant shimmering verities in amidst a sense of history as an obscure and mystifying thing. It’s not tactile, but it fills you with this wonder, this strange contemplative awe. I think that’s what really determines if you like Conrad or not. You either think “wow, this guy makes me feel like reality is a bizarre, half-semblanced dream,” or you think “this guy is alright, but half of it sounds like a guy who discovered metaphors.”
I don’t mean to be unkind, but I must disagree. You’re right there’s no clear physical image, but the language is so mystically loaded that it allows you something more akin to a tableau. A pall of smoke clouding the mirror of the Infinite… imagine the Infinite above, no longer seeing itself, no longer capable of knowing us, only a blanket of industrial haze where before it could see itself and what it wrought. Like a man blinded.
>Underrated.
He was regarded as one of the best of his time until decolonization started happening
Post itt because I thought that was Thorstein Veblen.