Recommendations
Books Like Chance
Best books to read after Chance by Joseph Conrad
Chance is Conrad's most elaborate narrative experiment and his first popular success — Flora de Barral's story reconstructed by Marlow through multiple layers of secondhand testimony. If the novel's formal complexity and its portrait of a damaged young woman's recovery moved you, these books share its interest in how we piece together the truth about another person's life, its concern with women's vulnerability to economic and social forces, and its conviction that love is the only thing that can restore a person destroyed by the world's cruelty.
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
The essential Conrad — the foundational Marlow narrative; Chance develops Marlow's method of reconstructing a story from fragments to its most complex extreme, and Heart of Darkness is the essential context for understanding what Marlow is and what Conrad can do with him as a narrative device
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Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
The companion in Conrad's Marlow novels — the most extended and complex earlier Marlow narrative; Lord Jim develops Marlow's method of reconstructing a person from fragments in a more sustained way than Heart of Darkness; reading Lord Jim before Chance gives the fullest understanding of what Marlow can do
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's masterpiece about Lily Bart's destruction by the social and economic forces of Gilded Age New York — the essential American parallel to Chance's portrait of Flora de Barral; both are organized around a young woman whose social vulnerability makes her the victim of forces she cannot control
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The essential American parallel in the tradition of the first-person narrator who reconstructs another person's story — Nick Carraway's reconstruction of Gatsby; the comparison with Marlow's multi-layered reconstruction of Flora's story shows how two very different narrative methods serve the same basic purpose
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's portrait of Tess's destruction by Victorian sexual hypocrisy — the Victorian predecessor in the tradition of the novel about a young woman whose vulnerability makes her the victim of forces she cannot control; the direct literary ancestor of Chance's portrait of Flora de Barral
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's novel about Stevens the butler reconstructing his past — organized around the same narrative method as Chance: a story assembled from retrospect, from what a narrator can barely admit to themselves, from the gap between what is said and what is meant
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Victory
by Joseph Conrad
The companion in Conrad's late romantic period — Heyst and Lena on Samburan; published the year after Chance, Victory shows where the romantic concern with rescuing a damaged woman leads when pursued to its tragic conclusion; the essential Conrad companion to Chance
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The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
James's novel about Milly Theale, the dying American heiress, and the people who construct elaborate plans around her — the essential companion in the tradition of fiction about the gap between what people appear to intend and what they actually want; both James and Conrad are organized around the reconstruction of a woman's inner life through the testimony of those around her
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