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The Secret AgentIntroduction of the ebook: The Secret Agent
Đánh giá : 3.60 /5 (sao)
Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London’s Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be “a simple tale” proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and L Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London’s Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be “a simple tale” proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and London’s fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.
Based on the text which Conrad’s first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad’s great London novel as the realization of a “monstrous town,” a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and savage butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad’s narrative techniques. …more
Review ebook The Secret Agent
I have only run across a few writers who can adeptly and accurately plumb the depths of the human soul.
Joseph Conrad is one of those authors and he is on a short list of talented creators who seem to have two fingers on the pulse of primordial man as he still lives and breathes beneath the surface composure of his civilized evolution.
For Conrad, the ability to strip off the etiquette, culture, and social mores of western thought is as eventful as watching sun bathers lose their clothing on the I have only run across a few writers who can adeptly and accurately plumb the depths of the human soul.
Joseph Conrad is one of those authors and he is on a short list of talented creators who seem to have two fingers on the pulse of primordial man as he still lives and breathes beneath the surface composure of his civilized evolution.
For Conrad, the ability to strip off the etiquette, culture, and social mores of western thought is as eventful as watching sun bathers lose their clothing on the beach.
The Secret Agent, his 1907 publication, falls into the category of this his most accomplished canon, the exploration of our psychological depths and the unsettling discovery that to get there takes little delving.
A reader of Conrad’s cannot help but compare this work with his later book Under Western Eyes, and I cannot help but compare both to Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. As in the Russian’s novel, Conrad succeeds in capturing a sympathetic portrait of the monster. We eat with Verloc, despair with him, feel his rages and jealousies, his uncertainties, and we see the simple, fundamental love of his wife through his eyes.
This is a story of love, hate, betrayal, insanity, and a peculiar misanthropy that seems a ubiquitous theme to Conrad’s work.
…more
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