October's Reading Group: Victory by Joseph Conrad

Over the coming month, we’ll be poring over the great modernist’s challenging yet compelling novel – 100 years after it was first published; and we have five copies to give away … so get posting in the comments below

This month on the Reading Group, we’re looking at Joseph Conrad’s Victory, 100 years after the great modernist’s novel was first published.

The final word of the book, Conrad said in an author’s note that appeared with the first edition, was written on 29 May 1914. “And that last word was the single word of the title.” By the time the book came to be published, that word had taken on an unexpected resonance. “Those were the times of peace,” wrote Conrad of the period when he was finishing the book. By the time it was published in 1915, Europe was at war. Conrad said that he agonised over his title as a result, worrying that Victory might fall “under the suspicion of commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book had something to do with the war”. Conrad also worried that his chief villain, a thuggish hotelier named Schomberg, had “the psychology of a Teuton”. He pointed out that he too came from the time of peace, as “an old member of my company” who first appeared in Lord Jim, back in 1899.

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