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Books Like Under Western Eyes
What to read after Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes (1911) is the most politically complex of his major novels — Razumov's inadvertent betrayal in St. Petersburg, his forced career as a double agent in Geneva, and the weight of guilt that the narrator describes from the outside. Conrad's explicit response to Dostoevsky and the Russian political novel. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
The companion to Under Western Eyes in Conrad's political fiction — Mr. Verloc in London, instructed to bomb the Greenwich Observatory; where Under Western Eyes is tragic and set in Russia, The Secret Agent is satirical and set in London; the two together show the range of Conrad's engagement with political violence
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Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's most ambitious political novel — the fictional South American republic of Costaguana and the silver mine; written before both The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes; where Under Western Eyes is about individual guilt and betrayal in a Russian revolutionary context, Nostromo is about political corruption and material interests on a continental scale
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Raskolnikov's murder of the pawnbroker and his guilt — the novel Conrad was explicitly rewriting in Under Western Eyes; where Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov commits an ideological murder and works through guilt to redemption via Sonya, Conrad's Razumov has guilt imposed on him from outside and finds no redemption; the two novels are in direct dialogue about what guilt is and what it demands
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The Possessed
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russian revolutionaries in a provincial town — the other Dostoevsky novel most directly behind Under Western Eyes; where Conrad focuses on a single man's betrayal, Dostoevsky shows the entire anatomy of revolutionary nihilism; Conrad's deep hostility to 'the Slav spirit' makes his departures from Dostoevsky as interesting as his debts to him
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré
Alec Leamas in divided Berlin — le Carré is Conrad's heir in the spy/political thriller tradition; where Conrad's Razumov is forced into double agency by historical accident, le Carré's Leamas is sent into it by institutional calculation; both novels are about men destroyed by the political systems they served without fully understanding
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Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
Jim's jump from the Patna and his attempt at redemption in Patusan — the most personal of Conrad's major novels and the one that most directly anticipates Under Western Eyes in its examination of a single act of failure and its lifelong consequences; where Jim's failure is a physical cowardice, Razumov's is a moral one; both men spend the rest of their lives trying and failing to escape what they did
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow's journey up the Congo to find Kurtz — Conrad's most famous work and the one that established the terms of his moral imagination; where Under Western Eyes examines the betrayal of political idealism in a Russian context, Heart of Darkness examines the betrayal of humanistic idealism in an African colonial context; both are narrated by an observer who is only partially able to understand what he is seeing
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
Changez, a Pakistani man telling his story to an American stranger in Lahore — the most direct contemporary heir to Under Western Eyes in its narrative structure (a confession addressed to a Western listener) and its subject (a Third World man who engages with the West and is transformed by that engagement); where Conrad's narrator is literally Western, Hamid's interlocutor is implied to be
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