the last of the classic, the first modern

There novelists whose name alone is enough to evoke a whole universe. Pronounce that of Joseph Conrad and immediately it feels to hear the sails snapping and lapping waves. We imagine the bow of a spinning three-masted on the South Seas or on a "steamboat" up the river Congo between two walls of lianas. Ah, beautiful hours of reading I owe this wonderful storyteller!

As a teenager, I loved its exoticism, his prose to taste of sea spray, the richness of his imagination. Open one of his books, it was like going on a trip, embark on an adventure that I knew nothing, except that the escape and pleasure are waiting for you. And growing up, little by little, I am open to the complexity of this work which, in its entertaining outside, hides in fact a profound pessimism and a great ability to delve into the depths of the human soul.

If Conrad made the sea privileged scene of his stories, that's because it was a long time sailor, but he staged dramas and passions he describes go far beyond this particular framework. What really interested in is the inner adventure of his characters. That of Lord Jim, for example, that, following a moral fault, will not cease to be redeemed, regardless of the price of his redemption. Or that of Kurtz, Nietzschean anti-hero trapped in his own folly.

Conrad's universe is that of Dostoevsky, God less. At home, no salvation. Or not. This is the fate that governs the world and agitated son puppets we are. Despair or lucidity, each to judge, but any style, in any case, to say that darkness! Both post-classical and pre-modern, reminding Dickens and Faulkner announcing the conradienne prose is simply dazzling grace, intelligence, virtuosity. She does not read, she relishes. This page sometimes appears bushy, but remove it in one word, one comma, and the spell is broken. That's the magic of great writers!