Description de l’éditeur
Axel Heyst has made a philosophy of standing apart. Raised by an embittered father to distrust all action and all attachment, he drifts through the islands of the Malay Archipelago as a detached spectator, wanting nothing — until two impulses of pity draw him, against his own creed, into the lives of others. The second is decisive: he rescues Lena, a frightened young Englishwoman trapped in a travelling orchestra, and carries her off to live with him on the all-but-deserted island of Samburan, where an abandoned coal company has left him alone with a single servant.
Into that fragile solitude comes evil. Summoned by a jealous hotel-keeper’s lie about a hidden hoard of money, three men arrive by boat: the spectral, languid “plain Mr Jones,” who loathes women and life alike; his knife-quick henchman Ricardo; and their brutish servant Pedro. The wide tropical world narrows to a bungalow, a jetty, and a forest clearing as the intruders tighten their siege in courtesies and feints — and Lena resolves, in secret, to save the man whose lifelong detachment has left him unfit to defend what he has at last come to love.
A meditation on detachment and engagement, on the cost of skepticism and the redeeming power of love, Victory is one of the late successes of Conrad’s career — and its title hangs over the story as an open question. Whose victory, and over what?
This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1915 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition and lasting power, a biographical note on Joseph Conrad, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.
