Read it in: two days, or thereabouts
So after reading my first Conrad in a couple of years, I thought I’d move straight on to another one, and what better than a collection of short stories? And I thought that one entitled ‘Tales of Unrest’ especially ought to be fascinating. And it was, really.
I always thought that what characterised Conrad was boat stories, novels set in the colonies, novels about sailing and trading and meeting with strange experiences. But actually, what seems to draw them together even more is the idea of the human mind pushed to its very limit. Many of the stories in this collection contain aspects of people being pushed to the boundary of what they can experience.
There is a man who leads a very, very, incredibly normal life, whose wife suddenly leaves him and he can’t understand why. There is a woman whose children cannot speak and, no matter how many she gives birth to, they all seem to be cursed with the same problem. There are two men at an outpost in Africa who are destroyed by boredom and isolation. Conrad is excellent at giving an insight into the minds of these individuals as they fall down the slippery slope that takes them from normality to madness in a few pages. His monologues are fantastic and very enlightening as to the human condition and the inner workings of the mind.
Many of his characters are haunting, fanatical, normal but driven to the brink by the circumstances they are placed in. And given that I love a good story about the degradation of the human mind, I lapped this stuff up.
A lot of these stories are also told in retrospect, a bit like Heart of Darkness, which gives a feeling that the story is being recounted by an old friend, a story within a story almost, that helps you to understand the narrator more. It gives an added depth to the writing.
These stories are Conrad at his best, and a good way of reading him without simply going to his most famous (and brilliant) works. He also considers some of these stories his best, especially “An Outpost of Progress”. Seriously, that story is like Lord of the Flies but with only two men.
Read it if you: like Joseph Conrad and have read all the famous ones, are interested in colonial history, like the degradation of the human mind (well, not ‘like’ it, but find it fascinating, I guess), like nice descriptions.
While reading, listen to: goodness, this is another one of those ones where modern music won’t suffice. Get something haunting and classical, like The Swan of Tuonela by Sibelius, because I like that one.
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