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Books Like Victory
Best books to read after Victory by Joseph Conrad
Victory is Conrad's most romantic and most metaphysical novel — Axel Heyst's attempt to live in non-attachment on a remote Malay island, and the violence that follows when the world finds him. If the novel's philosophical depth and its portrait of a man destroyed by his own philosophy of detachment moved you, these books share its concern with what happens to people who try to opt out of the world, its remote setting as a moral laboratory, and its conviction that the world always finds the people who hide from it.
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Buy on AmazonHeart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
The essential Conrad — Marlow and Kurtz; the foundational text for Conrad's exploration of what happens to men who retreat from civilization into remote places, and the essential context for understanding Heyst's retreat to Samburan
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Buy on AmazonLord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
The most directly comparative Conrad — Jim's retreat to Patusan after his moral failure; the direct predecessor to Heyst on Samburan; both men retreat from the European world to a remote location and try to build a new life, and both are found by the world they retreated from
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Buy on AmazonNostromo
by Joseph Conrad
The companion in Conrad's major novels — the most ambitious and most pessimistic; where Victory is organized around one man's philosophical retreat from the world of material interests, Nostromo is organized around an entire society's surrender to those interests; both end in disaster
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
Maugham's novel about Larry Darrell's philosophical search for meaning — the direct American parallel in the tradition of the novel about a man who withdraws from the world of conventional ambition; where Conrad treats Heyst's non-attachment as a form of self-protection that ultimately fails, Maugham treats a similar detachment more sympathetically
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Buy on AmazonSiddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
Hesse's novel about the Buddha's journey to enlightenment through renunciation — the Eastern philosophical parallel to Victory's exploration of detachment as a life strategy; the contrast between Conrad's tragic conclusion and Hesse's transcendence shows the difference between Western and Eastern treatments of the same question
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Buy on AmazonThe Tempest
by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's play about Prospero's island retreat and the violence that breaks into it — the essential literary ancestor to Victory's portrait of a philosophical man who cannot keep the world from finding him on his island; the comparison shows Conrad deliberately working within the tradition that Shakespeare established
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Buy on AmazonThe Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
The companion in the tradition of the novel about people who have withdrawn from the world's expectations and are trying to build a life on their own terms — Jake Barnes and his circle in Paris and Pamplona; the most important American parallel to Victory's portrait of the man who has opted out
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Buy on AmazonAn Outcast of the Islands
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's second novel — Willems's exile in the Malay Archipelago after his betrayal of his employer; the direct predecessor to Victory in the same geographical and moral setting; essential for readers who want the full arc of Conrad's Malay fiction from the early novels through the late masterpiece
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