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A review by kurtwombat
Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River by Joseph Conrad
4.0
I love Joseph Conrad. Everything is so vivid. His words are like painting before photography. Detailed as if under a spotlight with an array of colors and shades that make each image extraordinary. I think back to different scenes from his books as if they were paintings I once saw. The first time this happened was at the beginning of HEART OF DARKNESS when the narrator describes the descent of dusk over London and the Thames—that vanishing light is forever fixed in my mind. I think reading Conrad as a youngster formed just how I read—I tend to read slowly—inspiring a love for cerebral cinematography that can absorb time versus quick TV images that don’t last. Each story is a journey through someone’s personal struggles representing great big themes: colonization, alienation, isolation. Set against giant landscapes, the sea or mysterious lands or both, that dwarf our struggles. His characters are clear and sharp and strongly driven by a tangled crosshatch of motivations. English not his native language, Conrad takes to it like a religious convert. I hold an extra appreciation for that. His sentences can sometimes be very long but they submerge you into the story and I never feel there is anything that should be cut. What I don’t like is that he can come off as racist. The great Chinua Echebe famously took Joseph Conrad to task for this. With Conrad’s mind formed in the 19th century, difficult to escape the limitations of his era. His view of non-white cultures is often dismissive and diminishing—at the same time he doesn’t speak very well of anybody. There are great forces that pit us against each other. We are all flailing helplessly beneath a limitless sky—fighting over the stones at our feet.
That long-windedness aside—I enjoyed reading Conrad’s first book Allmayer’s Folly as a template for the rest of his writing. It stands on its own—creating a vivid backwater world of corrupt traders and broken dreams. Vivid in my memory—the story takes place entirely on a river until near the end when some seek escape by following the river to the sea and stand upon a triangle slip of coast facing the unknown. Solid Conrad.
That long-windedness aside—I enjoyed reading Conrad’s first book Allmayer’s Folly as a template for the rest of his writing. It stands on its own—creating a vivid backwater world of corrupt traders and broken dreams. Vivid in my memory—the story takes place entirely on a river until near the end when some seek escape by following the river to the sea and stand upon a triangle slip of coast facing the unknown. Solid Conrad.