The Secret Agent

[Jenny, Makeing a world of books]

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

[Debra Diggs]

I downloaded the free copy from Amazon, but probably won't start until the middle of January.

[Rosemarie]

I will be reading this closer to the second week in January. I downloaded a free ecopy and then found out that my husband owned a lovely hardcover copy. I need to look at his shelves more often.

[Christopher]

I listen to an audio version last year, but I still want to read the Kindle version.

I think someone pointed this out in a trivia question. Hitchcock made a movie called "The Secret Agent," but the movie based on The Secret Agent is Sabotage.

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Liter...

[Jenny, Makeing a world of books]

I got the kindle version as well. I'm not sure if I'll get to it this month, as I can't take my e reader into work :(

[Emily]

Great to know there’s a free version! Just now joining the group, look forward to expanding on my classic repertoire with you all!

[Rosemarie]

Welcome to the group, Emily.

[Camille]

Welcome, Emily! :-)

[Tr1sha]

I just finished reading this, but really didn’t like it. A horrible depressing story, though it started well with some interesting & quite amusing descriptions. I wish I had read a different book instead of wasting my time on this one.

[Rosemarie]

I am about a third of the way through. The author explained in a preface how he came to write the book and explained that it would be sordid. I am planning on finishing it, but am reading other books at the same time.

[Tr1sha]

Rosemarie wrote: "I am about a third of the way through. The author explained in a preface how he came to write the book and explained that it would be sordid. I am planning on finishing it, but am reading other boo..."

That’s interesting, Rosemarie. I usually read one book at a time. I don’t think I would have gone back to finish this one if I had started reading something else.

[Rosemarie]

I am reading it a chapter or two a day. I have been reading Doctor Zhivago at the same time. I used to read one book at a time, but often I read them so fast I couldn't remember what I read, so now I take my time.

The best Conrad book that I have read so far is Heart of Darkness, which is completely different from this one.

[Christopher]

I was kind of prepared based on this quote:

Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the "immense indifference of things," the tragic vanity of the blind groping that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life—fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible forces that beset them.

A Book of Prefaces

That said, when I first read that, it put me off Conrad AND A Book of Prefaces for- years, actually.

[Rosemarie]

The second half of the book is better than the first, mainly due to the writing.
Mr. Verloc is a character with no redeeming qualites.