This is the best Joseph Conrad book I've ever read. Okay, so I've only read four of his novels so far (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Almayer's Folly, and now this one) but seriously this thing is incredible.

It has a deeply relatable philosophical undertone, solid, well-developed male and female characters, and a plot that gradually builds to an ending rivaling the best of Shakespeare.

Oh, and aside from all that- an incredible setting conveyed perfectly to the reader. Conrad's prose is basically unrivaled. Beautiful, effervescent, and lush. It's really hard to believe that English was his second language. The dialogue is snappy and Conrad slowly builds tension through conversation in an organic, almost Tarantino-esque way.

I would recommend this book to basically anyone, with one caveat, and that is that this book is very much a product of it's time. The existentialist philosophy within its pages is timeless, yet there are portions that espouse early 20th century racist attitudes. Approaching a work like this with a critical eye is essential.

Interesting story of allegories and personality.

The only other Conrad I have read was Lord Jim at university...where I was pushed for time. Definitely not an author who suits speedreading. I took my time with this and found the plot really satsifying. The hilarious Ricardo and the obscure Heyst were especially great. Will look forward to going back to Lord Jim at some point now.

It's not that I don't like reading classics, but this one wasn't my favorite. The aspects that mark it as of-its-time, the racism and treatment of gender, were overly distracting to me. The characters seemed so distant at first, and then once the action picked up and the characters were more immediate, the story got soapy. Eh.

Excellent

This book could have benefited from a harsh editor. The POV makes a couple of major shifts- we start out with a second hand account being shared with the narrator, who disappears two chapters in, and NEVER COMES BACK. Then we move to omniscient narration.

I am pretty sure if I had read this back when it was originally written, all of the characters would have seemed like clever political commentary about ... something! But now, it just seems hackneyed.

This is okay, esp. the first two parts. When Heyst starts smooching & having stilted dialogues with his gal, things sag a little. But the villains are an interesting threesome, the evil genius Schomberg is a creation of genius, Heyst in himself is an interesting enough character, a kind of Humphrey Bogart avant la lettre, and the narration starts interestingly.

That's what struck me most, in the first part: that the narration has some of the same wry humour that I remember from hard-boiled novels. Guess it really is no coincidence that Chandler's main hero was called Marlowe, after Conrad's main narrator (although not in this novel) Marlow.

I think I sometimes forget how big a name Conrad must have been in the first half of the 20th Century. Nowadays he's "just" one of the classic authors, more read about than read, probably -- and read mainly within the confines of academia. But his narratives must have helped shape popular culture in a big way. Reading this, it certainly seemed to me this must have been a major source for hard-boiled detective fiction and films. The typical film noir hero is a lot like Heyst. Hemingway may often have been a direct source, but Conrad was behind it. Besides, those early script writers probably knew their Conrad.

In fact, I'm pretty sure they did. Conrad's work plays a major role, for instance, in a mainstream comedy like the Jean Harlow flick Platinum Blonde: the main character in that film is a journalist who wants nothing so much as to be like Conrad. (That, plus he wants to smooch Harlow, and you wonder why, since she's pretty horrible to look at and he has the much cuter Loretta Young right at hand all the way through. Oh well.)

Verdict: An enduring psychological thriller love story and one of the greatest things I’ve ever read.

I hate writing reviews for good book because it put into such relief how inadequate my own writing is. It if for this reason I’ve waited over a year to write a review of ‘Victory’. This may only be my second helping of Conrad, the first being the scholastically mandatory and fantastic ‘Heart of Darkness’, but I’m ready to crown him His Lord Highness Ultimate Wordsmith Bar None. How a man who purportedly learned English from sailors can write this way boggles the mind. There must be some sort of genie involvement that no one is mentioning. In ‘Victory’ he describes the shadow a rock casts with such perfect aptness I almost cried.

So yeah, Conrad is a genius wordmeister. ‘Heart of Darkness’ was brilliant but a little bleak, still I went into ‘Victory’ expecting more of the same; boys, boats and (British) empire. Instead I got something very different. First of all, I got girls, or rather a girl. These had been scare in HoD and neatly divided into archetypes (mother, crone, seductress, virgin) and I’ve read enough literature of the period to have come to terms with this treatment of my sex. In ‘Victory’, however, we had a real life girl. An actual nuanced women who got things done and made things happen. Then things got terrifying.

‘Victory’ is a really tough book to pin down and maybe that’s why it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. It begins with a sort of character study on this man Heyst who has ended on an island in Malaysia after a rather complicated chain of events involving a good deed, a failed business and the untimely death of a friend. On a trip to a larger more inhabited island he meets and girl he calls Lena who is part of some odd exploitative womens’ orchestra of the sort you got in Malaysia at the time (or so I assume).

They go together to his island. They don’t really have a step 2 to this plan but they are getting by until the Terrifying Men show up due to some maliciously spread and patently untrue rumours concerning Heyst’s secret wealth. There is the grinning and sadistic Ricardo and the skeletal Mr. Jones who reacts to women like Indiana Jones to snakes. From this point the story closes in and there is a distinct horror flavour as they realize the killer is inside the house. If Heyst and Lena’s love wasn’t doomed before, it certainly is now. Or maybe these slightly supernatural Terrifying Men are the embodiment of the doom. Like HoD there is something of the surreal in ‘Victory’ that makes the story stand out in slightly lurid colours.

I want to read this again. It is just a solid block of brilliance. Usually with a good book there is an element that lets the side down. Great writing but slow plot or page turner but weak characters. Even Dostoyvesky had trouble with endings. (Forgive me, master but it’s true) No such problems here. What can I say? ‘Victory’ is a book of spiritual and technical genius and utterly unique to boot.

It did make me cry and I don’t generally like that in a book. (It makes me feel played) I can’t say I even especially liked it in ‘Victory’ but I’ll forgive it for the reasons outlined above and bestow the hallowed 5 stars. This review was a bit vague and a lot doting but just take it as a good sign when a book leaves me without words.

Joseph Conrad's idiosyncratic style is in full flower for this enigmatic tale of intrigue. One is left with the sense that some subtle subtext was intended, perhaps in the manner of a morality play, which is hinted at by the characters of Jones and the inscrutable Lena. If "Victory" has a central flaw it is, perhaps, the inscrutability of its protagonists, whose psychology is expressed in language which is suggestive but, just the same, frequently opaque. In other words, the thoughts, feelings, and motives of both Heyst, Lena, and even Ricardo, are too often buried under Conrad's tendency toward florid language; he sometimes makes us work a little too hard at understanding his characters' positions. That having been said -- and without providing any spoilers -- I found "Victory" an otherwise lean, compelling, hard-to-put-down read with an ending which was anything but expected.