Victory / The Secret Sharer

by Joseph Conrad

In VICTORY, drifting and searching for some meaning or value in his life, Axel Heyst retreats to a tropical island in the East Indies where he finds Lena. In this psychological romance between a man--honest, decent, disinterested in material gain--and a woman who was unused to such traits in men, a suspenseful drama is played out involving three bandits and their innocent victims.

THE SECRET SHARER, one of the great short stories in English, is the tale of a ship captain faced with the responsibility of command struggling to come to terms with self-doubt and anxiety. The first mate, Legatt, in the brig for committing a criminal act, fulfills the captain's need for someone who will empathize with his (the captain's) predicament, in effect a "secret sharer."

Audio Cassette

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable, and amoral world.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.